Black Litigiousness and White Accountability: Free Blacks and the Rhetoric of Reputation in the Antebellum Natchez District

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 372-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Welch
Keyword(s):  
Free Blacks ◽  
Natchez District

The Beams Family: Free Blacks in Indian Territory

1976 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel F. Littlefield, ◽  
Mary Ann Littlefield
Keyword(s):  
Free Blacks ◽  
Indian Territory

People of Color and Equal Rights

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Brown
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Professional Standards ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Dred Scott ◽  
The U.S

In New England, if anywhere, equal rights might have included people of color. Free blacks comprised a small fraction of the population, and slave uprisings posed no threat. Yet in this region, as in others, racism prevailed. Discrimination in public business, including voting and education, was commonplace. But in criminal trials procedural safeguards and professional standards limited the effects of prejudice. Public opinion was not so restrained. And in rural New England vigilantes shut down New Hampshire’s racially integrated Noyes Academy and Prudence Crandall’s school for black girls in Connecticut. Connecticut banned schools like Crandall’s, she was jailed briefly, and the state’s supreme court denied equal rights for blacks, setting a precedent for the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott ruling.

Migration to Haiti in the Context of Other Contemporary Migrations

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Fanning
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
New Nation ◽  
The U.S

This chapter examines the migration to Haiti in the context of other contemporary migrations. Although organizations and sponsors called the migrants from the U.S. to Haiti “emigrants,” in some senses they were colonists and in other senses exiles. The African American migrants differed from most European colonists in that they were attracted to their destination by its independence from their home nation. But they were not forced to leave; leaving was an act of conscience. To a greater extent than any Europeans since the Puritan “Pilgrims,” they sought refuge from exclusion in the home nation in the actively sympathetic philosophy of the new nation. Even as they retained American customs, the free blacks embraced Haiti's constitution, tacitly rejecting that of the United States. Ultimately, the African American emigrants were political pilgrims, and this is what distinguishes their experience from that of contemporary migrants and colonial adventurers.

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