Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence by Kellie Carter Jackson

What happened after slavery in the first slave society of the Americas? How did the abolition process shape post-abolition Brazilian society? On September 28, 1871 the Lei do Ventre Livre (Free Womb Law) signaled the end for slavery in Brazil. It created, for the effects of the compensation of slave owners, a general registration of the last slaves, which shows that Brazil officially recognized around a million and a half of them in 1872. How did these last enslaved workers live and politically influence the legal process that resulted in their freedom? Certainly they did so, since between flights, negotiations, and conflicts, the number of slaves fell by half over the following years. In this process, conditional manumission letters became almost like labor contracts, the results of negotiations between slaves and slave owners which gave expectations of freedom to some and prolonged the exploitation of the labor of others. In 1887, abolition seemed inescapable. En masse flights of the last slaves made it a fact, recognized by law on May 13, 1888. How could social relations be reinvented after the collapse of the institution which had structured the country, in all its aspects, since colonization? This dismantling would have consequences that were not only economic but would also redesign the logic of power and the architecture of a society willing to maintain distinct types of citizenship. Old experiences of racism and citizenship were redefined in the process. Former slave owners fought for compensation for their lost property until Rui Barbosa, an old abolitionist and minister of finance of the first republican government, decided to burn the registration documentation in 1889, thereby preventing any compensation proposal for around seven hundred thirty thousand slaves freed by the abolition law. With the Republic (1889), a new racialized rhetoric narrated abolition as the product of the republican action of the “emancipating race,” which guaranteed freedom without conflict to the “emancipated race.” It thus made invisible not only the fundamental action of the last slaves, but also the demographically majoritarian status of the free Afro-descendants in the Brazilian population, evident in the action of numerous black abolitionists. For Afro-Brazilians, the struggle remained to define their place and rights in society. More recently, the political action of the Brazilian black movement in the commemorations of the centenary of abolition (1988) established the idea of incomplete abolition, defining May 13 as the date of the struggle against racial inequality in the country and consolidating the post-abolition period as a field of historiographic research.

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The Emancipation of Black Abolitionists

Reviews in American History ◽

10.2307/2702553 ◽

1984 ◽

Vol 12 (1) ◽

pp. 45

Author(s):

Jayme A. Sokolow ◽

R.J.M. Blackett

Keyword(s):

Black Abolitionists

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The Black Abolitionists Papers. Volume I: The British Isles, 1830-1865

Phylon (1960-) ◽

10.2307/274544 ◽

1986 ◽

Vol 47 (2) ◽

pp. 168

Author(s):

Alexa Benson Henderson ◽

C. Peter Ripley

Keyword(s):

British Isles ◽

Black Abolitionists

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Notes on American Negro Reformers in Victorian Britain

Bulletin of the British Association for American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0524500100000334 ◽

1961 ◽

Vol 2 ◽

pp. 40-51 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Clare Taylor

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Reform Movements ◽

Middle Years ◽

Victorian Britain ◽

Almost Everywhere ◽

Black Abolitionists

During the middle years of the nineteenth century a significant number of American Negro reformers visited Britain. Their visits have not passed unnoticed. As J. H. Franklin has remarked, “More than a score of black abolitionists went to England, Scotland, France and Germany… Almost everywhere they were received with enthusiasm and were instrumental in linking up the humanitarian movement with various reform movements on both sides of the Atlantic.” Benjamin Quarles, furthermore, has commented on some of their work in Britain.

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Black Abolitionists

American Quarterly ◽

10.2307/2712168 ◽

1970 ◽

Vol 22 (2) ◽

pp. 306

Author(s):

George E. Carter ◽

Benjamin Quarles

Keyword(s):

Black Abolitionists

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Black Abolitionists.

The Journal of Southern History ◽

10.2307/2206857 ◽

1969 ◽

Vol 35 (4) ◽

pp. 576

Author(s):

August Meier ◽

Benjamin Quarles

Keyword(s):

Black Abolitionists

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The Atlantic Voyage and Black Radicalism

Colored Travelers ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469628578.003.0006 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Nineteenth Century ◽

Great Britain ◽

African Americans ◽

Jim Crow ◽

The United States ◽

Black Radicalism ◽

Early Nineteenth Century ◽

Black Abolitionists ◽

American Racism

Chapter 5 looks at the Atlantic crossing from the United States to Great Britain, where colored travelers shifted their protest strategies at sea. Black abolitionists made this journey between the 1830s and the 1860s, and they found that even British-owned steamship companies practiced segregation. Interestingly, however, black activists did not take on Atlantic captains and ship proprietors with the same ferocity that they had conductors back home. In part, this was because the ocean voyage, which lasted between nine and fourteen days, was too confining and dangerous to defy white vigilantes. Yet, more importantly, colored travelers also knew that desegregating Atlantic steamships was hardly the endgame. Rather, colored travelers relaxed their protest strategies while on board and remained focused on the significance of the trip itself. They wanted to reach foreign shores, connect with British abolitionists, and most of all see if the promises were true that abroad African Americans could experience true freedom of mobility, a right that eluded them at home. This is not to suggest that activists did not protest segregation on British steamships. They did, but without the physical assertiveness they adopted in the fight against the Jim Crow car. The story of Frederick Douglass’s harrowing transatlantic voyage in 1845 shows this. An analysis of early nineteenth- century shipboard culture and the British-owned Cunard steamship line illustrates how, for colored travelers, the transatlantic voyage emerged as a liminal phase between American racism and their perceptions of British and European egalitarianism.

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