1854–1859: Dred Scott
“a point of illumination”: Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 7.
1859–1864: Frederick Douglass
The formerly enslaved: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston, 1845).
he fled to Britain: David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 305.
“was about to rivet”: Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, CT: 1892), 390.
“I knew if my enemies”: Ibid., 396.
Douglass had quietly: Blight, Douglass, 319.
“shall not brand”: Frederick Douglass, “The Mission of the War,” address delivered at Cooper Institute, New York City, January 13, 1864, in New York Tribune, January 14, 1864.
“The republic was”: Blight, Douglass, 388.
severely restricted: Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), Kindle loc. 6882.
Abolitionists faced murder: Ibid., Kindle loc. 5184.
“We stand in our place”: Douglass, “Mission of the War.”
“The recruitment of black”: James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 621.
“It came to be”: Douglass, Life and Times, 405.
“as to giving the”: Frederick Douglass, “The Reasons for Our Troubles,” speech delivered in National Hall, Philadelphia, January 14, 1862, in Douglass’ Monthly, February 1862.
“abolition, though now”: Douglass, “Mission of the War.”
“a mightier work”: “Our Work Is Not Done,” speech delivered at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Philadelphia, December 3–4, 1863.
“They dreaded the clamor”: Douglass, Life and Times, 471–72.
“Patrick, Sambo”: Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 169.
so-called Redeemers: Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), Kindle loc. 11087.
useless to the emancipated: Lawrence Goldstone, Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Civil Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865–1903 (New York: Walker & Co., 2011), Kindle loc. 239.
“The Reconstruction amendments”: Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), xxi.
“Men talk of”: Quoted in Blight, Douglass, 737.
1864–1869: The Civil War
won themselves freedom: Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 82.
U.S. Colored Troops: www.afroamcivilwar.org/about-us/usct-history.html.
“300 reliable colored”: William A. Doback, Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2011), 6.
tried to organize: James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 563.
Emancipation Proclamation: Doback, Freedom by the Sword, 9. It is significant that the Emancipation Proclamation did not extend to enslaved people in border states (Kentucky, Missouri, Delaware, and Maryland).
thousands of Black Americans: Doback, Freedom by the Sword, 10.
“Once let the black”: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 620.
“If they stake”: Ibid.
“apostles of black”: Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), 71.
“old army uniforms”: Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 174.
“protect, strengthen”: Ibid., 177.
Union Leagues: Ibid., 186.
“several republican clubs”: Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 241.
“double victory”: Matthew Delmont, “Why African-American Soldiers Saw World War II as a Two-Front Battle,” Smithsonian, August 24, 2017, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-african-american-soldiers-saw-world-war-ii-two-front-battle-180964616/.
1869–1874: Reconstruction
could possibly outweigh: David J. Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57, no. 4 (2011): 307–48.
more than 700,000 Black people: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Political Participation (1968), www2.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr/documents/cr12p753.pdf.
“there is no existing”: White v. Clements, 39 Ga. 232 (1869).
“waited upon”: Ku-Klux-Klan, The Ku-Klux Reign of Terror. Synopsis of a Portion of the Testimony Taken by the Congressional Investigating Committee (broadside), no. 5., n.p. (1872), Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/rbpe.23700800.
A military report: Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), 265–66.
McEnery and Penn: Dorothea Lange, “Battle of Liberty Place Monument” (photograph), Washington, DC, c.1936, Library of Congress, hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print.
1874–1879: Atlanta
writing an article for Harper’s: Ernest Ingersoll, “The City of Atlanta,” Harper’s Magazine 60 (December 1879): 30–43.
“feature of the city”: Ibid., 42.
“random collection”: Ibid., 43.
“drainage is therefore”: Ibid., 40. On African American life and labor in Shermantown, see Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
“There are certain features”: Ingersoll, “City of Atlanta,” 33–34.
1879–1884: John Wayne Niles
Callie House’s National Ex-Slave: Mary Frances Berry, My Face Is True Is Black: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations (New York: Random House, 2006).
“a burly and muscular”: “Niles Nailed: The Chief of the ‘Indemnity Party,’ A Colored Rogue and Swindler, Placed in the Penitentiary,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, June 3, 1882; “The Seat of Government: Agitating the Establishment of a Colored Man’s Territory,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 3, 1883; “Negro Niles: A Further Account of the Man Who Is Raising the Indemnity Party,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 6, 1882.
“more illiterate of his own race”: “Negro Niles: A Further Account,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
In 1869, in Tennessee: Charlotte Hinger, “John Wayne Niles (1842–?),” Black Past, July 29, 2014, www.blackpast.org/vignette_aahw/niles-john-wayne-1842.
the Exodusters movement: Nell Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction (1976; New York: W. W. Norton, 1986).
Nicodemus, Kansas, colony project: Kevin Marvin Hamilton, “The Settlement of Nicodemus: Its Origins and Early Promotion,” Promised Land on the Solomon: Black Settlement at Nicodemus, Kansas, National Park Service of the U.S. Department of the Interior (Kansas State Historical Society, Entourage Inc., 1984).
“The judge who criticized”: Ibid., 10.
W. H. Smith, president: “The Fraudulent Niles,” Daily Rocky Mountain (Denver), April 11, 1878.
Indemnity Party: “Negro Niles: A Further Account,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
he was convicted again: “Niles Nailed,” Daily Arkansas Gazette.
It would constitute: “The Seat of Government,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat; “Niles of Arkansas: The Colored Fomenter of Discord,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, October
17, 1883; “Republicanism and the Negroes,” Fayetteville Observer (North Carolina), October 4, 1883; “Mr. J. W. Niles of Arkansas Thinks That the Colored People of the South Should Take Themselves Up Bag and Baggage and Flee to Some Community Where There Are No White Men,” New York Globe, October 27, 1883; “Negro Colonies: Proposed Separation of the Blacks from the Whites,” Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), November 9, 1883.
“declare war against”: “Republicanism and the Negroes,” Fayetteville Observer.
Respectable voices in the Black community: “Mr. J. W. Niles of Arkansas,” New York Globe.
it was America’s officialdom: “On Motion by Mr. Ingalls,” Journal of the Senate of the United States, Serial Set, vol. 2260 (1885), 178.
deflected the Indemnity Party’s: “Niles of Arkansas: That Colored Fomenter of Discord,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, October 20, 1883.
1884–1889: Philadelphia
“lead the masses”: V. P. Franklin, “ ‘Voice of the Black Community’: The Philadelphia Tribune, 1921–1941,” in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 51, no. 4 (1984): 261, 262. The earliest archived issues of the Tribune begin in 1912.
country’s first penitentiary: Patrolman’s Manual: Bureau of Police, City of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Department of Public Safety, 1913), 62; Leslie Patrick-Stamp, “Numbers That Are Not New: African Americans in the Country’s First Prison, 1790–1835,” in Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography 119, no. 1–2 (1995): 96, 98–100.
arrested for murder: Kali Nicole Gross, Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 30–31.
followed him from Newport: “A Woman to Hang: Annie E. Cutler Sentenced to Death for Murder,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 17, 1885. For Mettler Bros., see Gopsill’s Philadelphia City Directory for 1884; Eastern State Penitentiary, Convict Description Docket, #A3013, October 16, 1885.
in front of several witnesses: “Murdered in the Street,” New York Times, April 22, 1885.
“He did not look at me”: “Annie Cutler Committed,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 25, 1885.
to her mother: Kali N. Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 90–93.
sentence be postponed: “Annie E. Cutler Pleads Not Guilty,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 8, 1885; “Murder in the First Degree,” New York Times, May 23, 1885; and “The First Degree: Annie Cutler Declared a Deliberate Murderess,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 23, 1885.
“The sentence of the law”: “The First Degree,” Philadelphia Inquirer; “A Woman to Hang,” Philadelphia Inquirer.
board of pardons: “Annie Cutler to Be Hanged,” New York Times, October 17, 1885; and “She Must Be Saved,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 19, 1885.
signed petitions: “Local Summary,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 29, 1885. Also “George D. McCreary, James S. Wright, Drs. Morton and Caspar Wister and Others, Are Interesting Themselves to Save the Poor Girl’s Life, and It Is Likely That They Will Succeed,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 31, 1885; “About Town,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 7, 1885. Clergy from Newport, Rhode Island, signed and sent a petition for commutation for Annie; see “Case of Annie Cutler,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 17, 1885.
“directly connected”: “Woman’s Rights: A Member of the Citizens’ Suffrage Association Resigns on Account of a Discussion,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 3, 1885.
seemed like a win: “Annie Cutler,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 8, 1885; “Annie Cutler’s Defense,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 17, 1885; Gross, Colored Amazons, 141.
1889–1894: Lynching
“I found that in order”: Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 71.
“that most frightful crime”: Philip Alexander Bruce, The Plantation Negro as a Freeman (1889; Nabu Press, 2012), 83, 84.
“nobody in this section”: Free Speech (May 21, 1892).
In exile from Memphis: Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors (1892), A Red Record (1895), and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900), published in On Lynchings (New Hampshire: Ayer, 1991). For other Wells publications, see “How Enfranchisement Stops Lynchings,” Original Rights Magazine (June 1910); “Lynch Law in America,” Arena (January 1900); “Lynching and the Excuse for It,” Independent (May 16, 1901); and “Our Country’s Lynching Record,” Survey (February 1, 1913).
“To justify their own barbarism”: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The Red Record (1895), www.gutenberg.org/files/14977/14977-h/14977-h.htm.
“Suspected, Innocent and Lynched”: Ibid.
white men’s sexual assault: Wells recounted the rape of black women in Southern Horrors under the heading “The Black and White of It,” 16–27. When she described the brutal lynching of Eph. Grizzard, who was accused of raping a white woman in Tennessee, she pointed out that a white man who raped an eight-year-old Black girl was in the same cell with Grizzard when the mob took him. Wells once again highlighted the double standard in the rape-lynch discourse when she declared, “The outrage upon helpless childhood needed no avenging in this case; she was black.”
“Color Line Justice”: Wells, Red Record, 148. A similar quote, in which she identified the young woman as Mrs. Camphor, appeared in Southern Horrors, 25.
1894–1899: Plessy v. Ferguson
Citizens’ Committee: “Report of the Proceedings of the Citizens’ Committee” contained names of all that had donated to support the case, listing local and South-wide support for their efforts. Plessy v. Ferguson Records, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University.
had portraits: For more on the roots of Black photography and portraiture, see Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds., Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
“the Committee engaged”: Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, Our People and Our History: Fifty Creole Portraits, trans. and ed. Dorothea Olga McCants (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 144; Albion W. Tourgée Papers, 1801–1924, Kent State University.
purchase her freedom: The family discovery of the story of Agnes Mathieu is detailed in Michael Nolden Henderson, Got Proof!: My Genealogical Journey (Suwanee, GA: Right Image, 2013).
legacy of activism: For more on Victor Dupart’s role in Homer Plessy’s upbringing, see Keith Weldon Medley, We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 2012), 27.
French side of Canal Street: Arthe A. Anthony, “The Negro Creole Community in New Orleans, 1880–1920: An Oral History” (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 1978); Keith Weldon Medley, “The Sad Story of How ‘Separate but Equal’ Was Born,” Smithsonian 24, no. 11 (1994): 106–7; Soard’s City Directory, New Orleans, 1900, Williams Research Center, New Orleans; Keith Weldon Medley, “The Life and Times of Homer Plessy and John Ferguson,” Times-Picayune, May 18, 1996.
New Orleans schools: Medley, We as Freemen, 31–32.
Highway 10: Laine Kaplan-Levenson, “ ‘The Monster’: Claiborne Avenue before and after the Interstate,” WWNO, New Orleans Public Radio, May 5, 2016, www.wwno.org/post/monster-claiborne-avenue-and-after-interstate.
1899–1904: Booker T. Washington
“Negro problem”: Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1996), 1:1xxvii–xci; and George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debates of Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). For an example of a racist assessment, see N. S. Shaler, “The Negro Problem,” Atlantic, November 1884, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1884/11/the-negro-problem/531366/.
“at the top instead”: Booker T. Washington, “The Atlanta Exposition Address, 1895,” in Afro-American Primary Sources, ed. Thomas R. Frazier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 216–20.
“ ‘Cast down your bucket’ ”: Ibid.
“agriculture, mechanics”: Ibid., 218.
“The wisest among”: Ibid., 219.
541 African Americans: “Lynchings: By Year and Race,” Archives at Tuskegee Institute, University of Missouri, Kansas City, law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html.
the story is even more: Ishmael Reed, “Introduction: Booker vs. Negro Saxons,” in Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901; New York Signet Classics, 2010), xxii.
“would be about”: Washington, Up from Slavery, 5.
valuable lessons: Ibid., 33, 37–39.
chastised Black people: Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 283–84; Washington, Up from Slavery, 84–85, 120–23.
“Within the last fortnight”: Booker T. Washington, in Birmingham Age-Herald, February 29, 1904.
a distinction: Fitzhugh Brundage, “Reconsidering Booker T. Washington and Up from Slavery,” in Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: Up from Slavery 100 Years Later, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 1.
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