Essential The Official African American Thread#2

[Rhapscallion Démone]

I wanted to post an article in the other thread but I discovered that it had been deleted and the breh who started it is no longer with us.

I guess we'll have to start over with NO DERAILMENTS, TURF WARS or DIVISIVENESS. This thread is for anybody who wants to post about the rich history and culture of African Americans. This includes our sisters and brothers from another motherland. I know this is the locker room but let's try to keep things respectful.

 

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It's almost black American history month

 

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@IllmaticDelta bless us again please

 

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let me post up

 

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[Rhapscallion Démone]

This the article I posted from the other thread

Two Black Classes of Antebellum NC | NCpedia

The Two Black Classes of Antebellum North Carolina
by Sydney Nathans
Reprinted with permission from the Tar Heel Junior Historian. Fall 1996.
Tar Heel Junior Historian Association, NC Museum of History

"I was born in Person County, North Carolina. My master’s name was Moses Chambers."

So begins the narrative of James Curry, who was born into slavery in 1815 and became a runaway to freedom in 1837. Curry was an exceptional bondsman. He learned how to read and write, he fled bondage successfully, and he told his life story to the world. During the antebellum years, central themes of his story were shared by thousands of enslaved North Carolinians, as well as their free black brethren.

Curry was the child of a distinctive North Carolina heritage of small-scale slavery and a strong free black presence. These two circumstances made the lives of antebellum blacks in North Carolina different from the lives of enslaved and free African Americans elsewhere in the South. First, North Carolina had a smaller number of large plantations than most other southern states. Second, North Carolina had a large number of free blacks.

Frailey, Zach. February 24, 2011. "Crocket-Miller Slave Quarters." James City, North Carolina. "The Crockett-Miller cottage is an 1845 one-story wooden structure, 24 feet by 17 feet, divided by a fireplace and interior wall. It has a small loft and once housed 22 people. There were three of us inside, and it felt cramped. I cannot begin to imagine what those who lived in this house endured back in the 1800's."

Life as a Slave on a Small Plantation
Curry and his family lived with Moses Chambers on a small plantation in the Piedmont. Conditions on a small plantation were sometimes more difficult than those on a larger plantation. For one thing, the chance of abuse by white owners was much greater on a small place. In addition, most slaves who wanted to marry (slaves could not legally marry in North Carolina) had to find their mates "abroad." These spouses then had to work and live apart, rearing their children together only on weekends.

Curry’s mother, Lucy, experienced the hardships of living on a small plantation. She "was the daughter of a white man and a slave woman." At the age of fifteen, Lucy ran away. Only fifteen miles away, she stopped her escape and tried to get word of her whereabouts to her mother. She was hidden for three weeks by a poor white woman but soon recaptured. Lucy later married an enslaved man from abroad and had children, which prevented her from attempting another escape. "Having young children . . . tied her to slavery." Lucy, like many women, could not bring herself to leave her children.

So she and her husband expected to endure a lifetime of endless, unpaid work. Lucy became the household cook for whites and blacks, the caretaker of her owner’s children, and the keeper and milker of fourteen cows. After work, "so tired that she could scarcely stand," she alternated sleep with hours of sewing patches on her family’s clothes. Her husband worked for his master from sunup to sundown and afterward worked on "little patches of ground, raising tobacco and food for hogs." The husband’s slaveholder, who provided no clothes or allowance, permitted the husband to sell these products and use the money "earned in the time allowed for sleep" to purchase clothing, coats, and hats for his family.

Oliver, Kevin. November 30, 2007, Orange Factory, North Carolina. "Horton Grove Slave Quarters6."

Lucy’s marriage to her abroad husband was broken when his master decided to move to the cotton country of the Deep South. He was among more than a hundred thousand black North Carolinians forcibly removed from their home state between 1815 and 1860. "The separation of the slaves in this way is little thought of," Curry remarked. "A few masters might regard [a slave] union as sacred, but where one does, a hundred care nothing about it."

After that, Lucy married a free black man named Peter Burnet, Curry’s father. But a white man hired Burnet as a servant for a trip to the southwestern part of the country. Once there, the employer sold him into bondage.

Life as a Free Black
Had Burnet remained in North Carolina from the time of his son’s birth in 1815 until the young man’s escape in 1837, he would have experienced drastic changes in his condition as a free black man.

In 1815 he could testify in court (for or against another black person, but not a white), vote in elections, preach and even organize churches, own and carry a gun, hunt with a dog, and sell food, liquor, or other goods to anyone. But by the mid-1830s, lawmakers had changed the state constitution to take away his right to vote, and county by county, whites enacted regulations called codes to curb many of the other rights of free black men. Many "freedoms" were taken away as a result of Nat Turner’s rebellion in a border county of Virginia in 1831. Fearful whites claimed that the "very existence" of free blacks—who hunted with their enslaved brethren, sold goods to or for them, accumulated property, and married enslaved partners—"caused slaves to be disobedient and turbulent."

In the 1840s, white mechanics in Fayetteville, Beaufort, and Raleigh tried to curb competition with free blacks who were their equals as skilled workers. However, the state did not adopt the extreme solution the whites proposed: to place a high tax on free blacks that would be used to transport them back to Africa.

Restrictions did become so severe, though, that by 1851 a dozen men petitioned for land to be set aside in America’s western territory for a separate colony for free blacks. A few years later, another free black North Carolinian became so “tired of being buffeted from place to place with no settled home” that he asked to be re-enslaved.

Hope for Change
For enslaved and free black North Carolinians, the decade of the 1850s was one of growing pressures. Scientific farming improved types of plants and found ways for landowners to renew their soil. In Edgecombeand other eastern counties, for example, where planters began using fertilizers, slaves could have been required to spread as much as 150 pounds of guano per acre. New technologies such as mechanical cotton seeders seemed to promise lightened workloads for slaves. But in reality, an increasing number of those in bondage found themselves pressed to work harder and to produce more, as higher costs (to pay for modernization) led planters to demand faster work and larger harvests.

Still, the 1850s also became a decade of mounting hopes. Undoubtedly, many bondsmen knew as the 1850s unfolded that momentous events were taking place in the North. They overheard whites trading reports. Some could read newspaper accounts. Many received stories on their own "grapevines." These stories, many about North Carolina exiles, contributed mightily to the swelling freedom movement.

Oliver, Kevin. November 30, 2007, Orange Factory, North Carolina. "Horton Grove Slave Quarters1."

Wilmington’s David Walker in the 1820s, Curry in the 1830s, Raleigh’s Lunsford Lane in the 1840s, and Edenton’s Harriet Jacobs in the 1850s each publicly revealed the pain of their lives. This stirred the consciences of northern men and women to act against slavery. Some who remained behind fought bondage by slowing their work down, breaking tools, and sometimes by outright defiance. And all resisted in the secret spaces of their hearts and minds. No enslaved person, "kept ever so ignorant," wrote Curry, "thought he was meant to be a slave." They knew: "it will not always be so. . . . "

References and Additional Resources:

Narrative of James Curry. UNC Libraries, Documenting the American South. Online atJames Curry, b. 1815? Narrative of James Curry, A Fugitive Slave.

David Walker's Appeal in Four Articles, UNC Libraries, Documenting the American South. Online atDavid Walker, 1785-1830 Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829.

Narrative of Lunsford Lane. UNC Libraries, Documenting the American South. Online atLunsford Lane, b. 1803 The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, Formerly of Raleigh, N.C. Embracing an Account of His Early Life, the Redemption by Purchase of Himself and Family from Slavery, and His Banishment from the Place of His Birth for the Crime of Wearing a Colored Skin. Published by Himself.

Harriet Jacobs. PBS, Africans in America. Online atHarriet Jacobs

Race and Classs in Antebellum North Carolina.North Carolina Museum of History.http://ncmuseumofhistory.org/workshops/Antebellum NC/session1.html


Image Credits:
Frailey, Zach. February 24, 2011. "Crocket-Miller Slave Quarters." James City, North Carolina. Located at. Accessed February 23, 2012.

Oliver, Kevin. November 30, 2007, Orange Factory, North Carolina. "Horton Grove Slave Quarters1.". Accessed February 23, 2012.

Oliver, Kevin. November 30, 2007, Orange Factory, North Carolina. "Horton Grove Slave Quarters6." Located at. Accessed February 23, 2012.

 

[Rhapscallion Démone]

This Article is about the often unsung hero Robert Smalls, leader of a slave uprising during the civil war.
Smalls, Robert (1839-1915) | The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed

Back to Online Encyclopedia Index

Image Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Robert Smalls was born in Beaufort, South Carolina, on April 5, 1839 and worked as a house slave until the age of 12. At that point his owner, John K. McKee, sent him to Charleston to work as a waiter, ship rigger, and sailor, with all earnings going to McKee. This arrangement continued until Smalls was 18 when he negotiated to keep all but $15 of his monthly pay, a deal which allowed Smalls to begin saving money. The savings that he accumulated were later used to purchase his wife and daughter from their owner for a sum of $800. Their son was born a few years later.

In 1861 Smalls was hired as a deckhand on the Confederate transport steamer Planter captained by General Roswell Ripley, the commander of the Second Military District of South Carolina. The Planter was assigned the job of delivering armaments to the Confederate forts. On May 13, 1862, the crew of the Planter went ashore for the evening, leaving Smalls to guard the ship and its contents. Smalls loaded the ship with his wife, children and 12 other slaves from the city and sailed it to the area of the harbor where Union ships had formed their blockade. This trip led the ship past five forts, all of which required the correct whistle signal to indicate they were a Confederate ship. Smalls eventually presented the Planter before Onward, a Union blockade ship and raised the white flag of surrender. He later turned over all charts, a Confederate naval code book, and armaments, as well as the Planter itself, over to the Union Navy.

Smalls’s feat is partly credited with persuading a reluctant President Abraham Lincoln to now consider allowing African Americans into the Union Army. Smalls went on a speaking tour across the North to describe the episode and to recruit black soldiers for the war effort. By late 1863 he returned to the war zone to pilot the Planter, now a Union war vessel. In December 1863 he was promoted to Captain of the vessel, becoming the first African American to hold that rank in the history of the United States Navy.

After the Civil War Smalls entered politics as a Republican. He was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives and later to the South Carolina Senate. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives first from South Carolina’s 5th Congressional District and later from South Carolina’s 7th Congressional District. Smalls served in Congress between 1868 and 1889.

When his last term ended Smalls moved back to Beaufort, South Carolina to become the United States Collector of Customs. He also purchased and resided in the house in which he had once been a slave. Robert Smalls died in Beaufort on February 22, 1915 and is buried there with his family. - See more at: Smalls, Robert (1839-1915) | The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed

 

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"AfroAmericans" the ethnicity

Use of ‘African-American’ Dates to Nation’s Early Days

The term African-American may seem to be a product of recent decades, exploding into common usage in the 1990s after a push from advocates like Jesse Jackson, and only enshrined in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2001.

The O.E.D.’s entry, revised in 2012, traces the first known occurrence to 1835, in an abolitionist newspaper. But now, a researcher has discovered a printed reference in an anti-British sermon from 1782 credited to an anonymous “African American,” pushing the origins of the term back to the earliest days of independence.

“We think of it as a neutral alternative to older terms, one that resembles Italian-American or Irish-American,” said Fred Shapiro, an associate director at the Yale Law School Library, who found the reference. “It’s a very striking usage to see back in 1782.”

Mr. Shapiro, a longtime contributor to the O.E.D. and the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, found the reference last month in one of his regular sweeps of various online databases that have transformed lexicographic research by gathering vast swaths of historical texts — once scattered across the collections of far-flung libraries and historical societies — in one easily searchable place.

One day, Mr. Shapiro typed “African American” into a database of historical newspapers. Up popped an advertisement that appeared in The Pennsylvania Journal on May 15, 1782, announcing: “Two Sermons, written by the African American; one on the Capture of Lord Cornwallis, to be SOLD.”

With the help of George Thompson, a retired librarian from New York University, Mr. Shapiro found one of the titles — “A Sermon on the Capture of Lord Cornwallis” — and located a copy of it, a 16-page pamphlet, at Houghton Library at Harvard University.

The sermon, which crows about the surrender of the British Army at Yorktown the previous year, was acquired by Harvard in 1845 and seems to have been all but uncited in scholarly literature. Its author — listed on the title page as “an African American” — is anonymous, identified only as “not having the benefit of a liberal education.”

“Was it a freeman?” Mr. Shapiro said. “A slave? We don’t know.”

Black people in the Colonial period, whatever their legal status, were most commonly referred to as “Negro” or “African.”

But in the years after the Revolution, various terms emphasizing their claim to being “American” — a label which was applied to people of European descent living in the colonies by the end of the 17th century — came into circulation.

“Afro-American” has been documented as early as 1831, with “black American” (1818) and “Africo-American” (1788) going back even further.

“We want dancing and raree-shows and ramadans to forget miseries and wretchedness as much as the Africo-americans want the Banjar” — banjo — “to digest with their Kuskus the hardships of their lives,” a correspondent wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1788. (“Kuskus” is a variant of “couscous.”)

Katherine C. Martin, the editor of United States dictionaries at Oxford University Press, said the O.E.D.’s researchers were in the process of confirming Mr. Shapiro’s discovery.

“It’s very exciting,” she said. “Once we have it nailed down, I would expect we’ll update our entry.”

The sermon, one of the earliest surviving ones by a black American, may also attract interest from historians.

In it, the speaker boasts about the capture of Cornwallis and decries the British assault on “the freedom of the free born sons of America” while nodding toward the fact of “my own complexion.”

“My beloved countrymen, if I may be permitted thus to call you, who am a descendant of the sable race,” one passage begins.

The speaker also addresses fellow “descendants of Africa” who feel loyalty to Britain, asking: “Tell me in plain and simple language, have ye not been disappointed? Have ye reaped what you labored for?”

The other sermon mentioned in the ad, Mr. Shapiro said, may be “A Sermon on the Present Situation of Affairs of America and Great-Britain,” which had been previously known to scholars. Both refer to “descendants of Africa,” he said, and have dedications invoking South Carolina, whose governor had been held in solitary confinement by the British for nearly a year.

But curiously, the title page of the other sermon attributes it to “a Black.”

“In other words, the bifurcation between the terms African-American and black, the two leading terms today, was present from the very beginning,” Mr. Shapiro said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/arts/use-of-african-american-dates-to-nations-early-days.html?_r=0