Between Slavery and Freedom (29 page)

It seemed very strange to those colored people from the south who went north the first time. They were grinned and hooted at. Some hoodlum would holler “black cloud rising.” Often thrown at, or jumped on and roughly handled, unless the col[ore]d [man] ran for his life. No where south such things ever occurred, that I saw, which was easy enough to understand. In clubbing or abusing the Negro they would find they had abused a piece of property that had a protector.

Source: Loren Schweninger, ed.,
From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Ent
reprene
ur: The Autobiography of James Thomas
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), 123–24.

Tribute to a Civic Leader in California (1848)

A successful merchant, shipowner, land speculator, and diplomat,
William
Alexander
Leidesdorff (1810–1848) was one of the leading citizens of San Fr
ancisc
o in the 1840s. Although he was a naturalized Mexican citizen, Le
idesdorf
f supported the movement to break California away from Mexico and annex it to the United States. This account of Leidesdorff's short but remarkable life, reprinted in New York from a California newspaper, identifies him as being “of Danish
parentage
.” That is accurate—to a point. While his father was Danish, his mother was a woman of color. Had Leidesdorff lived longer, he might well have emerged as a major power broker in California politics. He died without heirs, and claimants fought for decades over his vast fortune.

Died, at his own residence, in this place, at 1 o'clock, a.m. on the 18th inst. after an illness of seven days . . .
william a. leidesdorff
, Esq., late U.S. Vice
Consul for this port. Having received the consolations of the Catholic religion during his illness, he was buried yesterday . . . in the Mission Church of Dolores, near San Francisco. One of the largest and most respectable assemblages ever witnessed in this place followed the deceased from his late residence to the place of interment, and every thing was done on the part of the community to evince its deep feeling for the loss it has sustained. All places of business and public entertainment were closed—the flags of the garrison and the shipping were flying at half mast, and minute guns were discharged from the barracks and the shipping as the procession moved from town . . .

Captain Leidesdorff was of Danish parentage, but was a native of the West Indies . . . He was formerly well known as a merchant captain in the ports of New Orleans and New York but for the last seven years he has been in business on this coast, where he has gained a high character for integrity, enterprise and activity. In private life he was social[,] liberal and hospitable to an eminent degree . . . As a merchant and a citizen, he was generous, enterprising and public spirited and his name is intimately identified with the growth and prosperity of San Francisco. It is no injustice . . . to say that the town has lost its most valuable resident . . . His energy of character and business enterprises have so blended his history with that of San Francisco that all classes deplore his death as a great public calamity. While many mourn for his various social virtues, in Capt. Leidesdorff the laboring classes of the community and the poor have lost a munificent patron and a generous friend.

Source:
New York Herald
, September 27, 1848

Martin R. Delany on African-American Emigration (1852)

Born in Virginia, the son of a free woman and a slave, Martin Robison Delany
(1812–1885)
moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when he was in his teens and embarked on a remarkable career
as a physician, a newspaper editor, and a c
hampion
for civil rights. He
was very forthright in his 1852 book
The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States
. It was time for the free black community to reconsider the whole question of emigration, he insisted. As Delany saw it, African Americans had no alternative but to leave the United States because whites had no intention of treating them as equals. While he was not sure where they should go, he believed they must go. “We are a nation within a nation,” he declared. “We must go from our oppressors.” Freedom for black people was a sham, Delany maintained, and they needed to realize that.

[T]he bondman is disfranchised, and for the most part so are we. He is denied all civil, religious, and social privileges . . . and so are we. They [the slaves] have no part . . . in the government of the country, neither have we. They are ruled and governed without representation, existing as mere nonentities among the citizens, and excrescences on the body politic . . . and so are we. Where then is our political superiority to the enslaved? None, neither are we superior in any other relation to society, except that we are de facto masters of ourselves and joint rulers of our own domestic household, while the bondman's self is claimed by another, and his relation to his family denied him . . .

In . . . the United States, there are
three million, five hundred thousand slaves
; and we, the nominally free, are
six hundred thousand
in
number; estimating one-sixth to be men, we have
one hundred thousand
able-bodied freemen, which will make a powerful auxiliary in any country to which we may become adopted—an ally not to be despised by any power on earth. We love our country, dearly love her, but she don't love us—she despises us, and bids us begone, driving us from her embraces; but we shall not go where she desires us; but when we do go, whatever love we have for her, we shall love the country none the less that receives us as her adopted children.

Source: Martin R. Delany,
The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States
(Philadelphia: The Author, 1852; reprint Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1993), 14–15, 203.

Segregation on Public Transportation (1854)

Generations before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in M
ontgomer
y, Alabama, African Americans in many communities were protesting the discriminatory treatment they routinely received on trains, steamboats, and omnibuses. They paid their fare and were refused passage. They purchased first-class tickets and were sent to the vastly inferior “colored car.” Elizabeth Jennings, a well-connected and genteel teacher in New York City, was on her way to church one Sunday when she and a friend tried to ride the street car. After being forcibly ejected from the all-white car, Jennings successfully sued the street car company. This is her account of the episode that led up to the lawsuit.

Sarah E. Adams and myself walked down to the corner of Pearl and Chatham Sts. to take the Third Ave. cars. We got on the platform when the conductor told us to wait for the next car. I told him I could not wait, as I was in a hurry to go to church.

He then told me that the other car had my people in it, that it was appropriated for “my people.” I told him . . . I wished to go to church and I did not wish to be detained . . . I told him I was a respectable person, born and raised in New York, did not know where he was born, and that he was a good-for-nothing impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church. He then said he would put me out. I told him not to lay hands on me. He took hold of me and I took hold of the window sash. He pulled me until he broke my grasp . . . He then ordered the driver to . . . come and help him . . . Both seized hold of me by the arms and pulled and dragged me down on the bottom of the platform.

Source:
Frederick Douglass' Paper
, July 28, 1854

Black Life in Charleston (1857)

George E. Stephens (1832–1888), a Northern-born craftsman, was unprepared for what he experienced when he spent a few days in Charleston, South Carolina in 1857. In accordance with South Carolina's Negro Seamen's Act, he was arrested and jailed when the ship he was serving on arrived in port. The captain interceded with the authorities and Stephens was eventually set free. Once he was released, he had the chance to “see the sights,” as he recounted in a letter to a friend back home. What he saw and heard disgusted him. Ironically, during the Civil War Stephens returned to Charleston, this time as a soldier in a black Union regiment.

A few days after my perambulation about the streets of Charleston I met a young man . . . with whom I had become acquainted in Phil[adelphia]. I wished him to take a cigar with me . . . He informed me that it was against the law for a Colored man to smoke a cigar or walk with a cane in the streets of Charleston. And if the streets (sidewalk) are crowded the negro must take the middle of the street. I met several white men, they did not pretend to move an inch—so I had always to give way to them. I have been informed since if I had run against one of them, they would have had me flogged. Poor wretches. Little do they accomplish by such trivial proscriptions. [S]uch miserable oppression serves not one single degree to curb the spirit of even a crushed and injured African.

Source: George E. Stephens to Jacob C. White Jr., 8 January 1858, in C. Peter Ripley et al., eds.,
The Black Abolitionist Papers
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), vol. 4, pp. 371–73.