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Article

Accommodationism  

Rob Fink

Article

Publication History:

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

As African Americans fought racial prejudice in the United States following the Civil War, some black leaders proposed a strategy of accommodation. The idea of accommodation called for African Americans to work with whites and accept some discrimination in an effort to achieve economic success and physical security. The idea proved controversial: many black leaders opposed accommodation as counterproductive.

Booker T. Washington served as the champion of accommodation. Born a slave in 1856 Washington received a degree from the Hampton Institute before being invited to head up the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama At Tuskegee Washington used industrial education to promote accommodation by African Americans Because of his background Washington recognized the difficulties faced by southern blacks in their quest for civil rights He knew firsthand that during the 1860s and 1870s whites in the South found it hard to accept African Americans as free No one argued against the ...

Article

Add, “Nigger”  

Kenneth Wiggins Porter

Article

Publication History:

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

According to biographer J. Evetts Haley, Add had “drifted up from the Guadalupe bottoms” of southeast Texas to the high plains; other accounts say that he had been “raised” by cattleman George W. Littlefield, with whom he had been “since Emancipation days.” In any case, he apparently worked almost his entire active life for various Littlefield outfits—particularly the LFD brand, used to mark Littlefield's 40,000 head of cattle—first in the Texas Panhandle and later in eastern New Mexico.

While some top hands white and black were noted as riders or bronco busters Add was almost equally distinguished in both roles Stocky and strongly built Add had such powerful hands that he could practically twist the hide off a horse He would walk into a corral of bad broncos get any one of them by the ear and nose smother it down lead it out of the bunch and ...

Article

African American Food in New York  

Scott Alves Barton

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
15 May 2020

Evidence of African, African American influence in food and foodways begins in the seventeenth century in the New York colony’s Dutch and British “Meal Market” that operated from 1655 to 1762 on Wall Street and the East River where enslaved Africans were also sold. Men, women, and children worked as market vendors of prepared foods like hot corn, fresh produce, oysters, fish, livestock, and as dairymen and -women selling cheeses, butter, and milk in local markets. In addition, the African Burial Ground’s archaeology of colonial privies identifies products such as Brazil nuts, coconut, and watermelon that were not native to New York or Europe. Colonizers may have imported some these goods, but the enslaved would have known how to process or raise them (Cheek and Roberts, 2009; Berlin 1996; Burrows and Wallace 1999 At the same time West African women cooking in elite white colonial and ...

Article

Alamayahu, Dajazmach  

David Killingray

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Son of Téwodros II, Emperor of Ethiopia. Alamayahu was orphaned when his father committed suicide during the British assault on Magdala in the war of 1868. He was brought to Britain in the care of Captain Tristram Speedy as a ward of the government. At Osborne, in the Isle of Wight, Alamayahu was introduced to Queen Victoria, who from then on took a distant interest in the young boy's welfare. While on the Isle of Wight, Alamayahu caused something of a sensation among the islanders, and he was photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron her pictures show a listless and sad looking boy Speed took the young Ethiopian prince with him to India but at the age of 10 and against his wishes and the advice of Queen Victoria he was sent to boarding school in Britain At the age of 17 Alamayahu entered the Royal Military ...

Article

Assing, Ottilie  

Kelly Boyer Sagert

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
02 December 2004
Published online:
01 December 2006

Born in Hamburg, Germany, Ottilie Assing was the eldest daughter of David and Rosa Maria (Varnhagen) Assing. Her mother was an energetic teacher with a flair for singing and storytelling; her father was a well-known doctor who penned poetry and was prone to depression. David, born with the surname of Assur, was raised as an Orthodox Jew but associated with Christians. He and Rosa, who was not Jewish, raised Ottilie and her younger sister, Ludmilla, as "freethinking atheists, as true daughters of the Enlightenment, who saw themselves as members of a universal human race of thought and reason." They saw education as a "secular form of individual salvation."

Assing's life was not always easy; she witnessed savage anti-Jewish riots, and by the age of twenty-three she had lost both parents. In 1842 she and her sister moved from their hometown to live with an uncle Ludmilla adapted ...

Article

Averett, Rebecca  

Charles Rosenberg

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 September 2016

known as “one of the best educated colored ladies of Oakland,” California (Beasley, p. 236), was born Rebecca Crews in or near Halifax or Pittsylvania counties, Virginia, the youngest child of Richard and Sylvia Crews. In 1870, when Rebecca Crews was five years old, her father was a blacksmith, her mother did washing and ironing, her older sister Martha Ann (who later took the married name of Ford) was hired out as a domestic servant, and her older sister Susan, like Rebecca, remained at home. She and Susan appear to have been the first in the family who learned to read and write.

Her parents and older siblings had been enslaved and an older brother George born in Halifax County Virginia was sold away from his parents at the age of two into Richmond Virginia He acquired the surname Mitchel It was by no means universal that formerly enslaved ...

Article

Bailey Family  

Kelly Boyer Sagert

Article

Publication History:

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

Frederick Douglass was given the name of Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey at birth. His mother, Harriet Bailey, was a slave; his father was an unidentified white man—possibly Aaron Anthony—who was sometimes referred to as his master. As a young child Douglass was raised by his grandmother, Betsey Bailey. Although Betsey was legally a slave, she earned her own money and was married to a free black man named Isaac.

Bailey roots ran deep on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, with slaves of that name appearing in plantation ledgers as far back as June 1746. At that time Douglass's great-grandmother Jenny (or Jeney) was only six months old; Jenny's mother was either Sue or Selah, and her father was named Baly (born around 1701 It seems likely that Baly either was a descendant of slaves who had inhabited Talbot County since the 1660s or was brought ...

Article

Baker, Ruth Baytop  

Lois Bellamy

Article

Publication History:

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

voice teacher, mezzo-soprano, pianist, educator, was one of four children born to Dr. Thomas Nelson Baker and Elizabeth Baytop Baker in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Her father's parents were slaves. Dr. Thomas Nelson Baker was born a slave on 11 August 1860 and worked on the farm until he was twenty-one years old. He was one of five children and was the first African American to earn and receive a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1906. In 1890 he received a B.A. from Boston University and a Bachelor's in Divinity from Yale University and studied psychology and philosophy from 1896 to 1900 at Yale Graduate School. He was minister of the Dixwell Congregational Church in New Haven, Connecticut, from 1896 to 1900. He was listed in Who's Who in New England, 1908–1909 and his writings paved the way for the Harlem Renaissance era ...

Article

Beckwourth, Jim  

Lisa E. Rivo

Article

Publication History:

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

mountain man, fur trapper and trader, scout, translator, and explorer, was born James Pierson Beckwith in Frederick County, Virginia, the son of Sir Jennings Beckwith, a white Revolutionary War veteran and the descendant of minor Irish aristocrats who became prominent Virginians. Little is known about Jim's mother, a mixed-race slave working in the Beckwith household. Although he was born into slavery, Jim was manumitted by his father in the 1820s. In the early 1800s, Beckwith moved his family, which reputedly included fourteen children, to Missouri, eventually settling in St. Louis. Some commentators suggest that Beckwith, an adventurous outdoorsman, was seeking an environment less hostile to his racially mixed family.

As a young teenager, after four years of schooling, Jim Beckwourth as his name came to be spelled was apprenticed to a blacksmith Unhappy as a tradesman he fled to the newly discovered lead mines in Illinois s Fever ...

Article

Black Cowboys  

Kate Tuttle

Article

Publication History:

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

Idealized in motion pictures, television, and books, the cowboy serves as the great American icon, representing courage, hardiness, and independence. Yet images of black cowboys have been scarce in popular culture, giving the false impression that African Americans were not among the men and women who settled the West. In fact, by the time the huge cattle drives of cowboy legend ended, at least 5,000 black men had worked as cowboys.

The word cowboy refers to men hired by cattle owners to tend and herd their livestock Often working from horseback cowboys performed a variety of tasks including keeping the cattle together guiding them to pasture protecting them from rustlers branding them and driving them to a shipping point This latter activity defined the heyday of the cowboy a period of about two decades in the late 1800s when herds of cattle from ranchland in Texas were driven hundreds ...

Article

Black Family  

Roland Barksdale-Hall and Diane L. Barnes

Article

Publication History:

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

The television adaptation of Alex Haley's Roots (1976), which traced the history of a black family beginning with its African progenitor, Kunta Kinte, aired to wide public acclaim in the 1970s. The family saga generated considerable attention, as evidenced by a rise in popular interest about the black family and genealogical organizations across the United States. The following decade Dorothy Spruill Redford organized a reunion of more than two thousand descendants of enslaved Africans—including herself—and their masters, then wrote Somerset Homecoming (1988). From the end of the twentieth century, Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family (1998) tells the story of the intertwined lives of slaves and their masters in antebellum South Carolina.

Firsthand slave narratives, while limited in number, are excellent primary sources. Narratives that give accounts of enslaved Africans' introduction to the Americas, such as the two-volume Interesting Narrative of the ...

Article

Black Towns  

Kathleen Thompson

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 May 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Black women have been the cultural, social, and economic support of black towns in America for centuries. There were Senegalese enclaves in Louisiana in the 1700s. In the late eighteenth century, Star Hill, Delaware, was created by free blacks on land they acquired from the Quaker community in Camden. Brooklyn, Illinois, was founded by free blacks and fugitive slaves in 1820. As early as 1830, Frank McWhorter, or “Free Frank,” had founded the town of New Philadelphia, Illinois. Sandy Ground, New York, was created by black oyster fishermen fleeing the restrictions on free blacks in Maryland.

In 1825Elijah Roberts and his wife Kessiah led a group of free African Americans, many of whom were part Cherokee, from North Carolina to Hamilton County, Indiana, to start a settlement. Many of the settlers were members of the Roberts family, which had been free since 1734 ...

Article

Black Uplift  

Graham Russell Hodges

Article

Publication History:

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

African American activists in the antebellum and post–Civil War eras invoked a language and political strategy of black uplift or elevation. Composed of ideas and actions about physical, mental, or intellectual and personal morality and the realm of the soul, black activists, through speech and literature, used uplift as a general program to improve the race. Uplift was also intended to refute white racism prevalent in the literature and public activities of the nineteenth century. Accordingly, two key components were respectability and self-help. Frederick Douglass for one noted that only racism kept the avenues of wealth and honor from being open to all who chose to enter them Respectability and wealth were not just accessories to wealth and fame but required individual action particularly virtuous assistance to the race or against slavery as well as a purer soul Blacks also shared the general anxiety over confidence men or tricksters ...

Article

Blakey, Theodore Robert  

Betti Carol VanEpps-Taylor

Article

Publication History:

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

historian of African Americans in South Dakota, civic leader, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, was born in Yankton, South Dakota, the youngest of eleven children of Henry and Mary (Fristoe) Blakey. The large, extended Blakey clan began migrating from Missouri to South Dakota in 1904, where they acquired land and built a profitable and respected truck gardening business. Young Blakey completed eighth grade in country school and worked in the family business. Beginning in the mid‐1960s Blakey returned to school at Springfield State College (which later closed), where he obtained his GED and completed advanced training in building maintenance and pest control. On 22 October 1948 he married Dorothy Edwards in Athabaska, Alberta, Canada; the couple had three children.

Blakey was an ambitious, self‐taught businessman with a keen interest in civic activities and public service. Of his three successful businesses, Blakey's Janitorial Services, established in 1956 provided jobs for both ...

Article

Brown Fellowship Society  

Marian Aguiar

Article

Publication History:

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

In 1790 a group of five free African Americans organized a social club in Charleston called the Brown Fellowship Society. With color restrictions and a fifty-dollar membership fee, the organization appealed to an elite group of mostly light-skinned biracial men who wished to establish a social position similar to that of the white aristocracy. The strength of this identification was such that, in the words of one nineteenth-century member, “If (the white elite) stood for slavery, so did our fathers to a certain extent.”

The Brown Fellowship Society provided services for its members, including education, medical care, and support for widows and orphans of the deceased. Renamed the Century Fellowship Society in 1890, it lasted into the twentieth century, generating a woman's auxiliary in 1907.

See also Free Blacks in the United States; Slavery in the United States.

Article

Bush, William Owen  

Kenneth Wiggins Porter

Article

Publication History:

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

William Owen Bush was born in Clay County, Missouri, on July 4, 1832. He was the oldest son of George Washington Bush and Isabella James, born in Tennessee of German ancestry. The Bush family left Missouri in 1844 for the Oregon Territory. In 1845 the family settled in what became known as Bush Prairie, a few miles south of present-day Olympia, Washington. George Bush won esteem there as a progressive, innovative, and generous farmer. William Bush married Mandana Smith Kimsey on May 26, 1859, in Marion County, Oregon. Mandana was the daughter of Dr. J. Smith and Nancy Scott Wisdom Smith, and the widow (1858) of Duff Kimsey, who had been born in Howard County, Missouri, on June 1, 1826. She had crossed to Oregon with her husband and parents in 1847 William and Mandana had three children George O ...

Article

Caribbean Influences On American Food  

Alice Ross and Mark H. Zanger

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
30 September 2004
Published online:
01 December 2006

The Caribbean influence on American food has been continual for hundreds of years, initially in coastal areas of similar climate, from Texas to the Carolinas. The early Spanish involvement in the Caribbean brought Caribbean foods to Europe and Africa, from whence they quickly returned to North America. Spanish gold shipments attracted other Europeans to the area and brought about the colonization of eastern North America. Cheap Caribbean sugar, coffee, cocoa, and spices have influenced the palates and tables of all Americans. The peoples of the Caribbean islands have developed multicultural cuisines that have been affecting American cooking at all levels since colonial times.

Influence of the Caribbean on contemporary American food may predate Columbus, because there is some possibility that Caribbean Indians reached Florida and introduced tropical tubers, or chilies. The chain of influence began in 1492 as the varieties of maize beans chilies squash peanuts and cassava collected ...

Article

Childhood  

Wilma King

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 May 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

A variable social construction, the concept of childhood barely existed in early America. In fact, this special period of growth and development experienced before accepting adult responsibilities was not an entrenched American institution until the twentieth century. The time at which this protected segment of the lifecycle ends is debatable. Some scholars and public officials have used twelve as the cutoff while others set it at age sixteen or eighteen. Still others claim childhood lasts until twenty-one years of age.

Age limits aside, other factors, including color, class, status, and the embracing shield of loved ones, are significant in determining if girls enjoy a protected period in their formative years. There are also concerns about their psychological well-being and freedom from emotional devastation, which may mature girls beyond their chronological years.

Article

Childhood  

Wilma King

Article

Publication History:

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

The reconstruction of childhood as experienced by black girls and boys in early America is vastly instructive. Much can be told about the lives of children who were kidnapped in Africa, transported across the Atlantic Ocean, and sold in the Americas, and who survived to join labor forces, marry shipmates, form families, and create a lasting culture.

Article

Class  

Melissa N. Stein

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 May 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

While class has been a driving force in American history it has been particularly central to the story of both racism and African American life Throughout its history America developed a racialized class system by which African Americans were often shut out of venues of political and economic power regardless of individual circumstances Race and class have been virtually inseparable in America from its inception Furthermore as the black middle and upper classes grew following Emancipation so too did tensions among African Americans across class lines Thus the story of class for African Americans is one of blacks as a racialized class and one of class divisions among blacks Undeniably there have been instances in American history when blacks and whites have come together to protest shared economic exploitation and African Americans of different classes have fought side by side against institutional or structural racism However these fleeting moments of ...