Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery by Barbara McCaskill

Author:Barbara McCaskill [McCaskill, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780820348322
Google: ZxnUCgAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 23282377
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2015-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

The Boston Libel Trial of William Craft

The educational problem, which the liberation and enfranchisement of the negroes created, was in all respects peculiar and in some respects very difficult of solution. When the negroes became citizens, especially in those states in which they constituted nearly or quite half the population, the obvious thing to do, in the interest of everybody concerned, was to educate them, that they might become good rather than bad citizens, intelligent voters and worthy members of society rather than an ignorant and possibly dangerous part of the population. But it was not so easy to say how this could be accomplished.

—“Two Schools for Negroes” (1876)

By 1870, William and Ellen Craft had returned to the United States with their children, having realized the loving family they had dreamed of (see figures 6, 7, and 8 for images of three of their five children). In their next two decades in America, they would answer public and personal calls to uplift the collective bodies and minds of black southerners. This idea of collective duty is implicit in the themes of love and liberty that merge in the couple’s speaking, writing, and activism. In the mid-1870s, however, a very public entanglement of suspicions and accusations reminded them, who needed no such reminding, that in a postbellum South where the terms between African Americans and white Americans had shifted, their focus on the intellectual and economic liberation of their people invited obstruction and sabotage. The archival record of the conflict that impugned William Craft’s name and reputation points to how he and Ellen serve as metonyms for the meandering routes African American communities traveled toward full citizenship and freedom.

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