The Legacy of Anna E. Hall, African American Missionary to Liberia

This article, which tells the life story of Anna E. Hall, highlights the significant role that this African American missionary played in Liberia for the US Methodist Episcopal Church in the early twentieth century. The latter half of the nineteenth century saw increased migration of free African Americans as ministers . . . and missionaries overseas, especially to Africa. Standing as a paragon in missionary ventures, Anna E. Hall represents one of many who were responsible for the resurgence of Christianity in Africa and provides an exemplar for missionary service.

Theater and Performance in the 19th Century

Theater and performance of the long 19th century (1789–1914) is one of the most dynamic fields in African American studies today. Scholars have turned to these embodied practices to understand the achievements, hardships, and imaginaries of black life in this period because enslaved and free African Americans were often denied access to, or the wherewithal to use, the archivable materials we traditionally use for historical research. The field has devised innovative methodologies and reading practices to reimagine and theorize the aesthetics, affects, labor demands, and politics of African American theater and performance in this period. These critical strategies have helped to offset some of the challenges that hinder the study of all live performance. In spite of these limitations, generative observations of theatrical and performance cultures of the enslaved and free African Americans are available, albeit often beneath layers of condemnation, mockery, and scorn. This article focuses on primary works that document, and criticism that analyzes, the origins and evolution of African American theater culture from the late 18th century up to but not including the New Negro (or Harlem) Renaissance (c. 1920). It also offers representative studies of contemporaneous dance and music that help to contextualize black theatrical practice, but it leaves the bulk of that scholarship to other bibliographies. Major archival collections, canonical play texts, and a broad range of criticism clustered in major scholarly categories of African American theater and performance of the era are included here.

Creole Sketches

New Orleans in 1878 was the most exotic and cosmopolitan city in North America. An international port, with more than 200,000 inhabitants, it was open to French, Spanish, Mexican, South American, and West Indian cultural influences, and home to a thriving population descended from free African Americans. It was also a battleground in the fight against yellow fever (malaria) and in the political upheavals that followed the end of Reconstruction. The continued influx of Anglo-Americans and the renewed ascendancy of white supremacists threatened to overwhelm the local blend of languages, races, and cultures that enlivened the unique Creole character of the city. Writing for an English-language newspaper, Lafcadio Hearn presented the speech, charm, and humor of the Creolized natives on the other side of Canal Street, and illustrated his sketches with woodcut cartoons — the first of their kind in any Southern paper. These vignettes, published in the New Orleans Daily Item during 1878-1880, capture a traditionalist urban world and its colorful characters with a delicate and sympathetic understanding.

First African-American to hold a medical degree: brief history of James McCune Smith, abolitionist, educator, and physician

Dr. James McCune Smith, the first African-American to obtain a medical degree, has a remarkable legacy of historical proportions, yet his immense impact on society remains relatively unknown. He may be most celebrated for his effectiveness in abolitionist politics, however, his pioneering influence in medicine is equally remarkable. As examples, McCune Smith pioneered the use of medically based statistics to challenge the notion of African-American racial inferiority. He scientifically challenged the racial theories promoted in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson T., 1832), and he was a harsh critic of phrenology (study of the shape and size of the cranium as a supposed indication of character and mental abilities). Furthermore, notwithstanding being denied entry to America’s universities and medical societies because of his race, McCune Smith became a giving physician to orphans, an accomplished statistician, medical author, and social activist who worked to end slavery. His pioneering work debunked doubts about the ability of African-Americans to transition into free society. Specifically, he used his training in medicine and statistics to refute the arguments of slave owners and prominent thought leaders that African-Americans were inferior and that slaves were better off than free African-Americans or white urban laborers. Frederick Douglass, narrator of the Anti-Slavery Movement, cited Dr. James McCune Smith as the single most important influence on his life. Dr. McCune Smith, along with Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, John Brown and other intellectual pioneers of the time, were instrumental in making the elimination of slavery possible.

John Chavis

This essay on the life of John Chavis illustrates both the opportunities and the obstacles facing free African Americans in post-Revolutionary North Carolina. Details of his early life are uncertain. Reportedly a Revolutionary War veteran, Chavis studied at the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, and at Liberty Hall Academy, the forerunner of Washington and Lee University. Licensed in 1801 by the Presbyterian General Assembly as a missionary to enslaved African Americans, Chavis proved more popular with white audiences. His principal income for much of his life came from a school he operated in Raleigh, where he taught black and white students and became a confidant of North Carolina senator William P. Mangum. A conservative and an old-line Federalist, Chavis bemoaned the rise of Jacksonian Democracy and opposed the immediate abolition of slavery. Yet restrictions imposed on black teachers and ministers after Nat Turner’s rebellion made his last years difficult. He died in 1838 almost certainly of natural causes, not, as is sometimes reported, of mob violence.

Marronage and the Purchase of Freedom

This chapter explores the ways in which manumission and the purchase of freedom remained highly dependent on circumstances and geography. Despite the changes caused by wars and the independence of most territories on the American continent, in every state or region in which slavery had not been abolished, slaves, whether Africans or creoles, plantation or mine workers, artisans or servants, continued to use flight as a way to gain their freedom. In Brazil and Spain's former colonies, the opportunities to do so varied considerably. In the French colonies, authorities adapted to the presence of libres de savane and maroons who contributed to the informal economy without directly challenging the system of slavery. In the United States, more and more slaves escaped from Virginia and Maryland toward northern cities where they hoped to blend into small communities of free African Americans; farther south, however, the strengthening and expansion of racial slavery to the detriment of the establishment of free black populations rendered marronage nearly impossible.

American Honor

The American Revolution was not only a revolution for liberty and freedom, it was also a revolution of ethics, reshaping what colonial Americans understood as “honor” and “virtue.” As Craig Bruce Smith demonstrates, these concepts were crucial aspects of Revolutionary Americans’ ideological break from Europe and shared by all ranks of society. Focusing his study primarily on prominent Americans who came of age before and during the Revolution—notably John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington—Smith shows how a colonial ethical transformation caused and became inseparable from the American Revolution, creating an ethical ideology that still remains. By also interweaving individuals and groups that have historically been excluded from the discussion of honor—such as female thinkers, women patriots, slaves, and free African Americans—Smith makes a broad and significant argument about how the Revolutionary era witnessed a fundamental shift in ethical ideas. This thoughtful work sheds new light on a forgotten cause of the Revolution and on the ideological foundation of the United States.