Negro Troops in Florida, 1898

The outbreak of the War with Spain in 1898 elicited a mixed reaction among Negro Americans. Enthusiastic pro-war advocates viewed the conflict in terms of its benefits to Negroes. Their argument maintained that the black man’s participation in the military effort would win respect from whites and therefore enhance his status at home. They also emphasized that the islands likely to come under American influence would open economic opportunities for black citizens. Opposing such views were the highly vocal anti-war, anti-imperialist elements within the Negro community. Though sympathetic with the plight of Cuba and especially with Negro Cubans, these black Americans argued that the Spaniards, for all their cruelty, at least had not fastened upon the island a system of racial discrimination comparable to that in the United States. Many contended that only when the American government guaranteed its own black citizens their full constitutional rights would it be in a position to undertake a crusade to free Cuba from Spanish tyranny. Confronted by lynching, disfranchisement, and segregation at home, Negroes had little difficulty in appreciating the attitude of the black Iowan who declared: “I will not go to war. I have no country to fight for. I have not been given my rights here.

Review Essay:An African Prince, Majestic in His Wrath : William S. McFeely\u27s Biography of Frederick Douglass

On the evening of August 16, 1841, a large crowd gathered in the port city of Nantucket, Massachusetts, to attend an important anti-slavery meeting. Those unable to find places on the floor of the spacious square building known as the Big Shop filled the lofts; some even sat on the rafters. Those stranded on the outside of the building observed the proceedings through its windows. Among the abolitionist luminaries in attendance were William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Parker Pillsbury, and assorted members of the famous Coffin family. Also present was a runaway slave from Maryland’s Eastern Shore whom William C. Coffin had invited to speak if, in the Quaker tradition, it seemed right to do so. Although the slave “felt strongly moved to speak,” as he later recalled, “the idea of speaking to white people weighed me down.

The Agrarians From the Perspective of Fifty Years: An Essay Review

In the fall of 1930 Harper and Brothers, an old and prestigious northern publishing house, brought out a collection of essays by “twelve Southerners,” entitled I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Described at the time as a Southern or Southern Agrarian manifesto, the collection came into existence, according to one of the contributors, as “a sort of happening”— “a coalescence of circumstances and people and conditions” unlikely to reoccur. The contributors, known as the Agrarians, were for the most part natives of the rural, small-town areas of the westernmost South, and most at some point had been affiliated with Vanderbilt University. Those primarily responsible for the book had been central figures in a remarkable literary group based at Vanderbilt and known as the Fugitives, Among these were John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren. In some respects the Agrarians were “a translation of the Fugitives into a new, and more public, form of activity.” Their manifesto, whatever else it was, was a “very Southern book.” Despite some sentiment to entitle it Tracts Against Communism, the title finally chosen was taken from the Confederate anthem

Frederick Douglass and the Building of a Wall of Anti-Slavery Fire, 1845-1846. An Essay Review

A small but enthusiastic crowd gathered in the Music Hall in Leeds, England, on December 23, 1846, to hear an address by a fugitive slave from the United States whose freedom had been purchased by British abolitionists a few days earlier. The local merchant who presided at the meeting promised the audience that the speaker would demonstrate how the United States could realize its dream of becoming an exemplary land of freedom. Loud and prolonged cheering erupted as the tall, broad-shouldered black man, known as Frederick Douglass, stepped to the platform. Although Douglass had not fully recovered from an illness which prevented him from speaking in Leeds the previous week, his address exhibited the “thrilling and natural eloquence” which audiences had come to expect of him since his arrival in Britain in August 1845. “I want the slave-holder surrounded as by a wall of anti-slavery fire,” he declared at one point in his speech, “so that he may see the condemnation of himself and his system glaring down in letters of light” (p. 481). For twenty months he hammered away at this theme in lectures throughout the British Isles in an attempt to rekindle the dormant anti-slavery spirit there and set in motion a “tide of moral indignation” which would ultimately lead to the abolition of slavery in the United States

Slave And Freeman: The Autobiography of George L. Knox

Born in Tennessee in 1841, George L. Knox survived slavery and service with both Confederate and Union armies during the Civil War and afterward made his way north to find a chilly reception in Indiana. His autobiography covers the first 44 years of his life and tells how he persevered against threats, harassment, and physical intimidation to become a leading citizen of Indianapolis and an important figure of the Republican Party. Willard B. Gatewood Jr. is Alumni Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. A significant contribution to a missing chapter in our American heritage. —Ohio History A valuable book. —North Carolina Historical Reviewhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_african_american_studies/1014/thumbnail.jp