Political Activism and Reform Movements

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  • Political Activism and Reform Movements x
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Article

ʿAbdallah, Jammaʿ  

Ahmed T. el-Geili

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

patriarch of the ʿAbdallab group and cofounder of the first Muslim state in Sudan, the Blue Sultanate, in the sixteenth century, was born ʿAbdallah bin Mohammed al-Baqir.

Shaykh ʿAbdallah Jammaʿ’s father, Mohammed al-Baqir, was a member of the elite Meccan Qawasma tribe, whose members claim to have descended from Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Mohammed al-Baqir is reported to have migrated from Mecca to Sawakin on the Red Sea, where he married Hosna, daughter of Abdallah al-Qareen of the Rufaʿa tribe and where their son ʿAbdallah was born. When the young ʿAbdallah turned seven, his father took him back to Mecca, where he studied the Qurʾan and other religious sciences until the age of twenty-three, when Shaykh ʿAbdallah returned to Sawakin in Sudan.

In Sawakin he married the daughter of the sharif of Sawakin Shaykh Abu Dhanana and began his efforts to unite the dispersed Arab tribes His ...

Article

Abner, David, Sr.  

Charles Rosenberg

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

landowner, businessman, and state legislator, was born enslaved in Dallas County Alabama, to parents named Sarah and Pete, who had been born in South Carolina. David, like his parents, was the property of a family named Abner. There is some dispute as to his birth date—some giving 1826 and others 1838—but the most reliable date appears to be December 1820, as suggested by a letter from his youngest daughter. It is not known when David took the Abner surname for himself, a common but by no means universal practice for formerly enslaved persons. He was sent to Texas in 1843, driving a covered wagon for the newly married daughter (Thelma) of the man who held title to him.

Her father considered his new son in law unreliable and entrusted David to get his daughter safely to her new home and manage ...

Article

Adams, Carolyn  

Karen Backstein

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

dancer and arts administrator, was born in New York City, the daughter of Julius J. Adams, a journalist who rose to managing editor of the New York Amsterdam News, and Olive A. Adams, an accomplished pianist. Her parents cultivated in her a deep appreciation of the arts, as well as a legacy of social activism that stayed with Adams throughout her life—both during her career as a dancer and after her retirement from the stage, when she helped found community-based arts centers for children in Harlem. The dance writer Muriel Topaz described the Adamses' home as a “center of social and political activity,” and noted that the Global News Syndicate, an organization of black newspapers, was founded in their small apartment (Topaz, 30).

When she was eight years old Adams entered New York s progressive Ethical Culture School an institution dedicated to the moral as well ...

Article

Adams, John Quincy, On African Americans  

Lynn Hudson Parsons

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

Toward the end of his long life, the congressman John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), son of John and Abigail Adams, was notorious for his militant stands against slavery and its expansion in the Republic that his parents had helped found. It is possible to argue that he absorbed many of his views from his mother, who told her husband that she had doubts about southerners and their commitment to liberty. On 31 March 1776 Abigail Adams wrote in a letter to her husband,

I have sometimes been ready to think that passion for liberty cannot be equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creatures of theirs. Of this I am certain, that it is not founded upon that generous and Christian principle of doing unto others as we would that others do unto us.

(Withey, p. 81)

In fact ...

Article

Allen, Sarah and Flora Allen  

Richard S. Newman

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

churchwomen and reformers, were, respectively, the second and first wives of Richard Allen, a bishop and founder of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Although little is known of Flora Allen, she had probably met Richard Allen while attending Methodist class meetings and services at St. George's Methodist Church in Philadelphia. Known as a pious and respectable woman, Flora Allen helped her husband purchase a home at 150 Spruce Street in 1791 (as well as other properties, including those used by Allen's new church) and inaugurate the Bethel AME church in July 1794. White as well as black preachers celebrated her dedication to charity and hospitality. She died in Philadelphia after a long illness but is remembered as an early advocate of the independent black church. Sarah Allen was born Sarah Bass a slave in Isle of Wight County Virginia She probably remained in bondage until ...

Article

Antislavery Movement in Great Britain  

Adam Hochschild

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Strangely, in a city where it seems that on every block a blue-and-white glazed plaque commemorates a famous event or resident, none marks this spot. All you can see today, after you leave the Bank station of the London underground, walk a block or two east, and then take a few steps into a courtyard, is a couple of low, nondescript office buildings, an ancient pub, and, on the site itself, 2 George Yard, a glass-and-steel high-rise. Nothing remains of the bookstore and printing shop that once stood here, or recalls the late afternoon in 1787 when a dozen people a somber looking crew one man in clerical black and most of the others not removing their high crowned blade hats filed through its doors and sat down to launch one of the most far reaching citizens movements of all time Cities build monuments to kings and generals not ...

Article

Arobe, Francisco de  

Charles Beatty Medina

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

leader of the Afro-Indian Maroon communities of Esmeraldas in early colonial Quito, was born around 1560 in the province of Esmeraldas, Ecuador. According to early reports, Arobe was the son of an African slave named Andrés Mangache and a native woman from Nicaragua, who escaped together from a ship that had anchored on the Esmeraldas coast to take on water and provisions. Arobe and his brother Juan Mangache were two of the “mulatto” leaders of Maroon communities begun by his father that dated back to the late 1550s and 1560s. By 1577, Francisco’s father had been killed in confrontations with other semi-sedentary native communities of the Esmeraldas region. In that year, the Maroon leader Alonso de Illescas attempted to place Francisco and Juan under his leadership, but even with Spanish assistance he failed to do so.

By the 1580s however the brothers were dealing directly with Spanish colonizers In ...

Article

Barule  

Yesenia Barragan

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

(fl. late seventeenth century/early eighteenth century), enslaved rebel leader in the province of Chocó in the viceroyalty of New Granada (modern-day Colombia) who organized and led the infamous slave rebellion of Tadó in 1728 According to trial records located in archives in Bogotá and Popayán Colombia Barule worked as a slave in the gold mines owned by Garzia Hurtado in Nóvita the colonial capital of Chocó and center of gold mining in the region Like many other slaves in Chocó in the early eighteenth century Barule was likely from Jamaica given that he reportedly spoke English and that many of the contraband and legal slaves brought to Chocó at the time were purchased from Jamaica and the Anglophone Caribbean via Cartagena As recounted by one of his co conspirators at the trial Barule famously proclaimed to his fellow rebels in English How good it is to kill the whites ...

Article

Berry, Lawrence S.  

Bertis English

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

political activist and journalist, was a slave who belonged to an influential antebellum lawyer from South Alabama. Little else is known about his life prior to the Civil War; however, it is known that during the early years of the Civil War, Berry was sent to toil in a hazardous saltworks that the Confederacy operated in Clarke County. Berry survived three years of intense labor there, and he emerged from the ordeal more experienced, as well as more militant, than many of the other African Americans he knew. After moving to the Gulf Coast city of Mobile, Berry became a member of the vanguard of black leaders who would help the state's black masses achieve legal and psychological freedom in the aftermath of the Civil War.

The Union victory and the federal effort to alter the legal status of black people deepened white Alabamians resistance to change State lawmakers were ...

Article

Black Nationalism  

Graham Russell Hodges and Thomas Adams Upchurch

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

[This entry contains two subentries dealing with black nationalism from the seventeenth century slave trade through the late nineteenth century The first article discusses the first formations of African national identities and the influence of various revolutions on black nationalism while the second focuses on the most significant figures ...

Article

Black Nationalism  

Jeffrey O. Ogbar and Jeffrey O. G.

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
09 February 2009
Published online:
01 December 2009

Black nationalism is the belief system that endorses the creation of a black nation state It also supports the establishment of black controlled institutions to meet the political social educational economic and spiritual needs of black people independent of nonblacks Celebration of African ancestry and territorial separatism are essential components of black nationalism Though not fully developed into a cogent system of beliefs the impulse of black nationalism finds its earliest expression in the resistance of enslaved Africans to the Atlantic slave trade from the sixteenth century Various groups of Africans who felt no particular organic connection as black people were forced into a new racialized identity in a brutal and dehumanizing process of enslavement The transportation and forced amalgamation of hundreds of different African nationalities resulted in Creolized communities in the Americas enslaved Africans revolted and established new societies which functioned autonomously on the outskirts of colonial towns and ...

Article

Blucke, Stephen  

Graham Russell Hodges

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

Born free in Barbados, Stephen Blucke moved to New York City sometime before 1770. There Blucke married Margaret Coventry, who was his elder by nine years. She claimed to have purchased her own freedom in 1769, from Mrs. Coventry's family in New York City, as well as that of a six-year-old girl, Isabel Gibbons, who was probably her daughter. Blucke joined the Church of England, which gave him some prominence in the black community of New York City and in rural New Jersey. He chose to remain loyal to the English cause at the outbreak of the American Revolution and gained a patron in Stephen Skinner, a wealthy Loyalist. Stephen Blucke became a commander of the Black Pioneers, an informal black military organization that provided logistical support to the British army.

On 31 July 1783 Stephen Blucke and his family left New York City on HMS Peggy ...

Article

Boukman  

Paulette Poujol-Oriol

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

The man known as Boukman was born a slave in Jamaica, at that time a British colony in the Caribbean. No one knows for certain whether Boukman was his real name. He apparently learned to read and write, and always carried a book with him. Thus he acquired the nickname “Boukman,” meaning the man with a book, or the one who knows. It is thought that this was a man of knowledge for his epoch—a n'gan (in Haitian Creole a hougan), that is, a priest of Haiti's African-derived Vodou religion. Giant in stature, with a Herculean vigor, he was sold to a certain Turpin, the owner of a plantation in French-controlled Saint-Domingue (later to become Haiti). Appreciating Boukman's strength, his master gave him authority over his fellow slaves as a field commander. Boukman was also appointed a cocher coachman to drive his master about in his fancy ...

Article

Brown, Morris  

Will Gravely

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

African Methodist Episcopal minister and bishop, was born of mixed parentage in Charleston, South Carolina, where he spent his early and middle years. Apparently self-educated, he worked as a boot maker and shoe repairman; he married Maria (maiden name unknown), with whom he had six children. Associated with the city's community of free people of color, Brown earned a reputation for assisting slaves in purchasing their freedom and for teaching and advising both free and enslaved African Americans in the region.

Soon after his religious conversion and his joining of the Methodist Episcopal (ME) Church, Brown was licensed to preach. In that role he had greater access to the slave population as well as to groups of free African Americans. As the number of blacks grew, both generally and within the African church in Charleston, Brown emerged as their leader. As a result of an 1816 dispute over a ...

Article

Browne, William Washington  

David M. Fahey

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

fraternal society leader and banker, was born in Habersham County, Georgia, the son of Joseph Browne and Mariah (maiden name unknown), field slaves. As a young child he was called Ben Browne and was chosen to be the companion of his owner's son. A subsequent owner who lived near Memphis trained Browne as a jockey for race circuits in Tennessee and Mississippi. During the Civil War he plotted an escape with fellow slaves. When his owner learned of the conspiracy, he transferred Browne to a plantation in Mississippi. Despite the difficulties of tramping fifty miles without a compass, Browne persuaded three other young slaves to join him in a successful escape to the Union army at Memphis. After learning that his owner could demand his return, Browne fled upriver as a stowaway.

Browne later worked as a saloon servant in Illinois where his barroom experiences made him a teetotaler and ...

Article

Burgaw, Israel  

Susan B. Iwanisziw

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

activist, listed in some records and Philadelphia city directories by the names of Burgoe, Berge, or Burgu, was evidently a free African American by the time his name appears in public records, when he was already over fifty years of age. No information about his precise date or place of birth, status at birth, parentage, marriage or children, or date of death has come to light. The 1790 census records show that he shared a house at 19 Cresson Alley, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with three other free African Americans, possibly his family. Over a decade later he is listed in the St. Thomas African Episcopal Church Birth and Baptismal Register as an adult of sixty-five years, who was baptized on 23 January 1803. No other persons named Burgaw appear in the records spanning the years 1796–1837 which suggests that his immediate family had already dispersed by this time or ...

Article

Burr, John P.  

Charlton W. Yingling

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
28 February 2013

abolitionist and black rights activist, was born to a woman of African descent, probably named Eugenie, who was from French Saint‐Domingue (later Haiti). He was allegedly the unrecognized son of Aaron Burr, U.S. Senator from New York and the third vice president of the United States, and he was likely not the only child of this relationship. John P. Burr was also known as Jean‐Pierre Burr, which was probably his birth name. His mother was, by all accounts, a governess for the Burr family who was hired to care for their children during their stay in Saint‐Domingue. The majority of sources indicate that Burr–s mother was Caribbean‐born and of African descent, though one later source says she was originally from Calcutta. John P. Burr may have been born in New Jersey, and he was described as being very fair‐skinned.

By 1818 Burr had made his home in Philadelphia ...

Article

Burton, Walter Moses  

Eric Gardner

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

politician and activist, was born into slavery in North Carolina. Both he and his mother, Susan, were owned by the wealthy Thomas Burke Burton, who moved to Fort Bend County, Texas, from Halifax County, North Carolina, in the 1850s. Most accounts claim that the slaveholder favored Burton, taught him to read and write, and, after the Civil War, sold land to him; some accounts claim that Burton supported his former owner's wife when she was widowed during Reconstruction.

On 28 September 1868 Burton married Abba Jones (sometimes listed as Abby and sometimes as Hattie). The couple had three children, Horace J., Hattie M., and an unnamed child who died in infancy. Susan Burton lived with the young family until her death c. 1890.

Propertied, literate, and articulate, Burton quickly became active in the local Republican Party, the local Union League, and larger Reconstruction efforts. In 1869 ...

Article

Bush, John Edward  

Carl Moneyhon

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

businessman and politician, was born a slave in Moscow, Tennessee. Nothing is known about his father. In 1862 his master moved him and his mother, whose name is unknown, to Arkansas to keep them from being freed when the Union army moved into western Tennessee. Bush's mother died when he was seven years old. He was educated in the freedmen's and public schools of Little Rock, Arkansas, and was considered a good student by his teachers. He paid his school tuition by molding bricks. In 1876 he graduated from high school with honors and was immediately appointed principal of Capital Hill School, a public institution for African Americans in Little Rock. In 1878 he moved to Hot Springs, where he was named to head that city's African American high school.

In 1879 Bush returned to Little Rock, where he married Cora Winfrey the daughter of a wealthy contractor Solomon ...

Article

Bustill, Charles Hicks  

Charles Rosenberg

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
28 February 2013

underground railroad conductor, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of David and Elizabeth Hicks Bustill (sometimes known as Mary). His grandfather, Cyrus Bustill, had been born enslaved, and married only after securing his freedom and opening his own bakery. Charles Hicks Bustill was born into the third generation of a growing family that was free, with a leading place in the “Old Philadelphia” elite among residents of African descent.

Like his father, David, and his brother, Bustill made his living as a plasterer while also active as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. His home was a frequent stopping place for self‐emancipated men and women on their way north. In 1849 he was one of the original incorporators of the Lebanon Cemetery of Philadelphia, authorized by an act of the Pennsylvania legislature that year.

Working with Ralph Smith a non black abolitionist who served as the first ...