Race-neutral individualism and resurgence of the color line: Massachusetts civil rights legislation, 1855-1895

Journal of American Ethnic History

Volumn 22, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 32-58

  Omori, Kazuteru ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34247441704     PISSN: 02785927     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (101)

1. "An Act in amendment of 'An Act concerning Public Schools,' passed March twenty-fifth, eighteen hundred and forty five," Acts and Resolves passed by the General Court of Massachusetts, in the year 1855 (Boston, 1855), Chap. 256, pp. 674-75.
2. John Daniels, In Freedom's Birthplace: A Study of the Boston Negroes (Boston, 1914), pp. 112-15;
3. Richard Alan Ballou "Even in 'Freedom's Birthplace'!: The Development of Boston's Black Ghetto, 1900-1940" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1984), Chap. 6.
4. "Boston as the Paradise of the Negro" Colored American Magazine, 7(May 1904);
5. Ballou, "Even in 'Freedom's Birthplace'!," p. 2.
6. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North, rev. ed. (New York, 1999), pp. 76-82;
7. Will Maslow and Joseph B. Robinson, "Civil Rights Legislation and the Fight for Equality, 1862-1952," University of Chicago Law Review, 20(Spring 1953);
8. Valeria W. Weaver, "The Failure of Civil Rights, 1875-1883, and Its Repercussions," Journal of Negro History, 54(Oct. 1969).
9. See also David McBride, "Fourteenth Amendment Idealism: The New York State Civil Rights Law, 1873-1918" New York History, 71 (April 1990).
10. George A. Levesque, Black Boston: African American Life and Culture in Urban America, 1750-1860 (New York, 1994), Chap. 9;
11. Scott Hancock, "The Elusive Boundaries of Blackness: Identity Formation in Antebellum Boston," Journal of Negro History, 84(Spring 1999). I will use the term "separatist" in quotation marks throughout this article because separation of the races was in no way a goal in itself for those so labeled but a stratagem to build a better life.
12. Horton and Horton, Black Bostonians, pp. xvi-xviii.
13. Donald M. Jacobs, "A History of the Boston Negro from the Revolution to the Civil War" (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1968), pp. 49-51.
14. William C. Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston, 1855), pp. 345-6;
15. Daniels, In Freedom's Birthplace, pp. 36-39.
16. For the relationship between Walker and Garrison, see, Donald M. Jacobs, "David Walker and William Lloyd Garrison: Racial Cooperation and the Shaping of Boston Abolition," in Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston, ed. Jacobs (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), pp. 1-20.
17. See also Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley, Calif., 1998), esp. Chap. 4, for a more general discussion of free black influences on the early Garrison.
18. Donald M. Jacobs, "William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator and Boston's Blacks, 1830-1865," New England Quarterly, 44(June 1971);
19. Adelaide M. Cromwell, "The Black Presence in the West End of Boston, 1800-1864," in Courage and Conscience, p. 159.
20. Remond was the first African American to speak before the state legislature. The railroad bill lost in the state Senate in 1842 and in the House in 1843, without recorded votes. Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Twelfth Annual Report (Boston, 1844), pp. 5-8;
21. Louis Ruchames, "Race, Marriage and Abolition in Massachusetts," Journal of Negro History, 40(Jan. 1955);
22. idem, "Jim Crow Railroads in Massachusetts," American Quarterly, 8(Sept. 1955);
23. Dorothy B. Porter, "Charles Lenox Remond," in Dictionary of American Negro Biography, ed. Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston (New York, 1982), pp. 520-22;
24. J. Morgan Kousser, "'The Supremacy of Equal Rights': The Struggle Against Racial Discrimination in Antebellum Massachusetts and the Foundations of the Fourteenth Amendment," Northwestern University Law Review, 82(Summer 1988);
25. Levesque, Black Boston, pp. 137-52. Remond's address was printed in the Liberator, 25 February 1842.
26. Nell, Colored Patriots, pp. 101-111;
27. Robert P. Smith, "William Cooper Nell: Crusading Black Abolitionist," Journal of Negro History, 55(July 1970), p. 189. This is not to suggest that black citizens in Massachusetts had all the rights they deserved; they were faced with de facto denial of such basic citizenship rights as the right to testify against whites in court, the right to sit on a jury, and the right to obtain a passport.
28. Before the Civil War, as many as five African Americans were admitted to the bar in Boston. Daniels, In Freedom's Birthplace, pp. 82-83, 450-51.
29. Triumph of Equal School Rights in Boston: Proceedings of the Presentation Meeting Held in Boston, December 17, 1855 (Boston, 1856), p. 10.
30. "Proceedings of the State Council of Colored People of Massachusetts, Convention, January 2, 1854," Liberator, 24 February 1854.
31. Dorothy Porter Wesley, "Integration versus Separatism: William Cooper Nell's Role in the Struggle for Equality," in Courage and Conscience, pp. 207-24.
32. "Petition of Samuel G Howe and others for a law prohibiting any distinction being made in the admission of persons to theatrical or other exhibitions and amusements on account of color or race," Ms. Legislative Package of "An Act forbidding unjust discrimination on account of color or race," Chap. 277, 1865, Massachusetts Archives. At the head of the petition was the name of Samuel G Howe, a famous white philanthropist who worked earnestly for the disabled. He was also a leading member of the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization established to resist the forcible return South of free Negroes and runaway slaves endorsed by the reinforced Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. During the Civil War he supported his friend, Charles Sumner, in his effort to secure blacks suffrage and education. Howe's strong faith in "color-blindness" is well expressed in his letter to Massachusetts governor John Andrew in 1863 turning down a place on a committee to inquire into the use of Negro troops. He said, "I want to sink the difference of race; & treat the blacks exactly as I would whites in their condition. I do not believe in black colonies, or black regiments." Quoted in Harold Schwartz, Samuel Gridley Howe: Social Reformer, 1801-1876 (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), p. 261.
33. Acts and Resolves of Massachusetts, 1865, Chap. 277, p. 650.
34. The bill had been introduced on February 12, only a few days after the petition. Journal of the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1865 (Boston, 1865), p. 113.
35. Franklin Johnson, The Development of State Legislation Concerning the Free Negro (New York, 1918), p. 28.
36. Journal of the House of Massachusetts, 1866, p. 337;
37. "An Act in relation to public places of amusement," Acts and Resolves of Massachusetts, 1866, Chap. 252, p. 242.
38. Johnson, The Development of State Legislation, pp. 28-29.
39. Henry L. Pierce, who presented the petition on behalf of William C. Nell to the state legislature in 1866, was also in the Congress when the federal civil rights bill was considered, and naturally supported it. Journal of the House of Massachusetts, 1866, pp. 337, 472;
40. Congressional Record, 43rd Congress, 2nd Session, pp. ix, 1011.
41. Massachusetts Black Legislative Caucus, "Blacks on Beacon Hill," (n.p., 1987).
42. see Kazuteru Omori, "Burden of Blackness: Quest for 'Equality' among Black 'Elites' in Late-Nineteenth-Century Boston" (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 2001), pp. 88-106.
43. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, The Journal of the Senate for the Year 1885 (Boston, 1885), pp. 472, 475, 480.
44. Boston Advocate, 5 September 1885.
45. Boston Daily Globe, 26 May 1893.
46. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Journal of the Senate, 1893, pp. 837, 862, 885, 926.
47. Documents of the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1895 (Boston, 1895), No. 762;
48. "Address of William H. Lewis, Assistant Attorney-General of the United States, before the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Feb. 12, 1913," in Carter G. Woodson, ed., Negro Orators and their Orations (Washington, D.C., 1925), pp. 562-72 (quotation at p. 565).
49. William H. Lewis, "The Legal Status of the American Negro," Colored American Magazine, 9(Oct. 1905), p. 549.
50. "Boston as the Paradise of the Negro," p. 311.
51. Samuel J. May, Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict (Boston, 1869), p. 29.
52. Samuel J. May to Andrew D. White, 11 March 1864, quoted in James M. Smith, "The 'Separate but Equal' Doctrine: An Abolitionist Discusses Racial Segregation and Educational Policy During the Civil War, A Document," Journal of Negro History, 41 (April 1956), p. 143.
53. Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in favor of that Class of Americans called Africans (New York, 1836), p. 132.
54. Charles Sumner, Argument of Charles Sumner, Esq. against the Constitutionality of Separate Colored Schools, in the Case of Sarah C Roberts vs. the City of Boston. Before the Supreme Court of Mass., Dec. 4, 1849 (Boston, 1849), p. 32;
55. James B. Stewart, Holly Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York, 1976), pp. 53-54.
56. American Anti-Slavery Society, "The Declaration of Sentiments"; Child, An Appeal, p. 132;
57. May, Some Recollections, p. 29.
58. Ann Marie Plane and Gregory Button, "The Massachusetts Indian Enfranchisement Act: Ethnic Contest in Historical Context, 1849-1869," Ethnohistory, 40(Fall 1993). Massachusetts Republicans, headed by Charles Sumner, also tried, though in vain, to strike the "white only" clause from federal naturalization laws so that Asian immigrants (mainly the Chinese) could become American citizens.
59. Dale Baum, "Woman Suffrage and the 'Chinese Question': The Limits of Radical Republicanism in Massachusetts, 1865-1876," New England Quarterly, 56 (March 1983).
60. For general unpopularity of the federal Civil Rights Bill, even among Northern Republicans, see Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), Chap. 4.
61. George H. Martin, The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System: A Historical Sketch (New York, 1894).
62. Henry L. Allen, "Segregation and Desegregation in Boston's Schools, 1961-1974," in From Common School to Magnet School: Selected Essays in the History of Bostons Schools, ed. James W. Fraser, et al. (Boston, 1979), pp. 109-10;
63. Thomas H. O'Connor, The Hub: Boston Past and Present (Boston, 2001), p. 231.
64. In 1850 about a half of Boston's school-age children were of foreign parentage and in 1855 the rate rose to as high as 59%. Josiah Curtis, M.D, Report of the Joint Special Committee on the Census of Boston, May, 1855, including the Report of the Censors, with Analyical and Sanitary Observations (Boston, 1855), pp. 7-8.
65. Oscar Handlin, Boston's Immigrants, 1790-1880: A Study in Acculturation, rev. and enl. ed. (Cambridge, Mass, 1979), pp. 135-36.
66. Truancy and vagrancy (Boston police officials cited over a thousand of such cases in 1849, most of them involving immigrant children) was an urgent concern of those in charge of education and of order. Martin, The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System, pp. 216-17;
67. Dennis P. Ryan, Beyond the Ballot Box: A Social History of the Boston Irish, 1845-1917 (Rutherford, N.J, 1983), p. 58.
68. "Immigration," Massachusetts Teacher, 4(Oct. 1851), p. 290.
69. Senate Document No. 55, pp. 1-2,
70. in Documents printed by order of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, during the session of the General Court, A. D. 1850 (Boston, 1850).
71. "Immigration," p. 290.
72. Semi-Weekly Republican, 22 August 1849,
73. George F. Williams, Report of Committee on Public Instruction, on Case of a Child excluded from a Public School of this City [City Document No. 54] (Boston, 1854), p. 8.
74. Quoted in Richard H. Abbott, "Massachusetts: Maintaining Hegemony," in Radical Republicans in the North: State Politics during Reconstruction, ed. James C. Mohr (Baltimore, 1976), p. 13. Charles Sumner also spoke to the same effect in the Roberts Case: a person "may be poor, weak, humble, black.-he may be of French, of German, of English, of Irish extraction-but before the Constitution of Massachusetts all these distinctions disappear." Sumner, Argument, pp. 10-11.
75. James W. Sanders, "Boston Catholics and the School Question, 1825-1907," in From Common School to Magnet School, pp. 65-70;
76. Ryan, Beyond the Ballot Box, pp. 58-61;
77. See also Thomas H. O'Connor, The Boston Irish: A Political History (Boston, 1995), pp. 150-51;
78. idem, Bibles, Brahmins, and Bosses: A Short History of Boston, third edition: revised (Boston, 1991), p. 168 for Brahmins' concern about immigrant education.
79. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991), pp. 133-50.
80. Robert A. Woods, ed., Americans in Process: A Settlement Study (Boston, 1903), pp. 378-79, 60, 50.
81. For this "whitening" process of European immigrants in general, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).
82. Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (New York, 2000), pp. 89-90.
83. "Might vs. Right," Hub, 26 January 1884.
84. See also "Civil Rights," ibid., 10 November 1883;
85. "White and Black," ibid., 24 May 1884.
86. Thomas Paul Smith, An Address delivered Before the Colored Citizens of Boston in Opposition to the Abolition of Colored Schools, on Monday Evening, Dec. 24, 1849 (Boston 1850), p. 5 [emphasis original].
87. It seems that Smith had a larger following among the masses than integrationists. Anti-black school activists prided themselves on being "the cream of the colored population," and they averred that they had "the property and intelligence" with them. Andrew Bigelow, et al., Report of a Special Committee of the Grammar School Board, presented August 29, 1849, on the Petition of the Sundry Colored Persons, praying for the Abolition of the Smith School; with an Appendix [City Document No. 42] (Boston, 1849), p. 11.
88. Historian J. Morgan Kousser finds by his analysis of black petition-signers that "the integrationists constituted an elite" (professionals, skilled workers, and small business owners), while those who favored the black school and black teachers were "fairly representative, occupationally, of average blacks in antebellum Boston" (servants, laborers and the like), although he interprets the phenomenon as showing the desegregation movement's strength and righteousness. Kousser, "'The Supremacy of Equal Rights'," pp. 993-999.
89. Unidentified newspaper clipping (ca. 1848), in Black Abolitionist Papers, microfilm edition (Sanford, N.C., 1981), reel 5, frame 549.
90. Triumph of Equal School Rights, pp. 22-23. Black integrationists, tied up with white abolitionists rather than with the black masses, abhorred the idea that African Americans should band together. Nell urged the abolition of all-black organizations including the Massachusetts General Colored Association and even black churches.
91. James Oliver Horton, Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community (Washington, D.C., 1993), p. 48.
92. "Proceedings of the New England Colored Citizens Convention."
93. Quite a few black residents in Providence, just like Smith and others who were for the black school in Boston, favored integrating public schools and retaining their "colored schools." George Henry, Life of George Henry: Together with A Brief History of the Colored People in America (Providence, 1894),
94. in From African to Yankee: Narratives of Slavery and Freedom in Antebellum New England, ed. Robert J. Cottrol (Armonk, N.Y., 1998), pp. 208-09.
95. See also Cottrol, The Afro-Yankees: Providence's Black Community in the Antebellum Era (Westport, 1982), pp. 90-101.
96. George A. Levesque, "Boston's Black Brahmin: Dr. John S. Rock," Civil War History, 26(Dec. 1980), pp. 324-46 (quotation at pp. 344-46).
97. For Remond's aristocratic attitude, see Sibyl Ventress Brownlee, "Out of the Abundance of the Heart: Sarah Ann Parker Remond's Quest for Freedom" (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 1997), pp. 91, 95-97.
98. Hub, 13 October 1883. See Omori, "Burden of Blackness," pp. 106-84, for an in-depth analysis of the life and thoughts of black "elites" in post-bellum Boston.
99. Pauline E. Hopkins, "How a New York Newspaper Man Entertained a Number of Colored Ladies and Gentlemen at Dinner in the Revere House, Boston, and How the Colored American League was Started," Colored American Magazine, 7(March 1904), p. 159.
100. Mary White Ovington, The Walls Came Tumbling Down (New York, 1947), pp. 22-24.
101. Robert C. Hayden, Boston's NAACP History, 1910-1982 (Boston, 1982), pp. 1-3.