How Blacks Built America by Joe R. Feagin

Author:Joe R. Feagin [Feagin, Joe R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies
ISBN: 9781134474769
Google: cZFGCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-07-30T02:48:13+00:00

Early Petitions against Enslavement

Another major type of protest action by African Americans involved the filing of important petitions for freedom and against slavery. The first of these petitions was filed in 1773, well before the white elite’s Declaration of Independence, by enslaved blacks in an organized effort in the Massachusetts colony. They described enslaved lives as quite “embittered with this most intolerable reflection” of never being able to “possess or enjoy anything, no not even life itself.”6 A related type of protest in Massachusetts and other colonies (later, states) involved filing numerous lawsuits insisting that the enslaved black plaintiffs should be freed.

After the creation of the new United States, these petitions continued at state and federal levels, and white political leaders routinely rejected them. In one 1799 petition to the President, Senate, and House of Representatives, seventy free black Philadelphians protested aspects of the implementation of the inhumane Fugitive Slave Law. They emphasized their “natural right to Liberty,” as described in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution’s preamble. They called on white officials to act as “Guardians of our Civil Rights, and Patrons of Equal and National Liberty” and concluded that government action “extending of Justice and equity to all Classes, would be a means of drawing down the blessings of Heaven upon this Land.”7 Again, this forceful black counter-framing drew attention to the great oppression faced by black Americans and also to the moral obligation of white leaders to implement their stated liberty and civil rights ideals.

In this founding era, we note the importance of the small percentage of African Americans who were officially free. Early free black leaders such as Richard Allen, Daniel Coker, and Prince Hall publicly insisted on black liberation from slavery and other oppression. They used the weapon of petitions and published writings and organized street protests to condemn white tyranny and to press adamantly for the liberties articulated in the country’s revolutionary ideals. Using newspapers and pamphlets, the public media of the day, they vigorously argued that slavery “violated both secular and sacred creeds,” and they forced some in the white public to pay attention to black counter-framing of slavery’s oppression.8 These free blacks firmly proclaimed that all African Americans should be treated as U.S. citizens with full civil rights.

In this era, a few of these leaders articulated the idea of black colonization overseas, especially in Africa, as a solution for the oppressed conditions of blacks who were free or might be freed in the future. However, at one important meeting of black Philadelphians in 1817, when several made the case for black colonization in Africa, not one black person in the large audience supported this idea. Although a modest number of black Americans did migrate to Africa (mainly to what became Liberia), the colonization idea was eventually abandoned by most black supporters even as numerous whites were supportive. By the 1830s, free black leaders were playing a key role in attacking colonization and lessening its support among white abolitionists.9 Note, too,

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