A fascinating and moving study that explores the successes and
failures of an early movement for black equality, laying bare the
deep roots in America's history both of racial hatred and of
egalitarian idealism. Nash (History/UCLA; The Urban Crucible: The
Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution, 1979)
traces Philadelphia's black community from the days of stavery in
the mid-18th century to the heyday of abolitionism and interracial
harmony in the post-revolutionary period to the increasingly tense
situation faced by independent and successful blacks in the
financially depressed 1820's and 1830's. The idealistic belief in
natural rights and the conviction that the condition of the blacks
was due not to race but to the depravity of slavery (the
environmentalist theory) gave way to the view among whites - often
backed up by such pseudoscientific methodologies as phrenology -
that blacks were by nature inferior to whites. An ideal of racial
integration and desire for black achievement disintegrated into
race riots in the street and mockery in cartoons and tabloids of
the pretentions of the growing black middle class. Nash shows that
despite increasing segregation and violence, the black community
was well-established, successful, and strong by the 1820's. But it
would be another 100 years before the lost ideals of the 1780's and
1790's were recovered. A few leaders - Benjamin Rush, the
abolitionist; James Forten, the sailmaker and political leader;
Richard Allen, the Methodist minister - emerge from these pages as
extraordinary individuals who influenced the course of history. But
this is mostly a study of the average man and woman, of coachmen
and maids and oystermen, the quality of whose lives Nash
reconstructs with extraordinary vividness from public records,
census data, and old newspapers. (Kirkus Reviews)
This book is the first to trace the good and bad fortunes, over
more than a century, of the earliest large free black community in
the United States. Gary Nash shows how, from colonial times through
the Revolution and into the turbulent 1830s, blacks in the City of
Brotherly Love struggled to shape a family life, gain occupational
competence, organize churches, establish neighborhoods and social
networks, advance cultural institutions, educate their children in
schools, forge a political consciousness, and train black leaders
who would help abolish slavery. These early generations of urban
blacks--many of them newly emancipated--constructed a rich and
varied community life.
Nash's account includes elements of both poignant triumph and
profound tragedy. Keeping in focus both the internal life of the
black community and race relations in Philadelphia generally, he
portrays first the remarkable vibrancy of black
institution-building, ordinary life, and relatively amicable race
relations, and then rising racial antagonism. The promise of a
racially harmonious society that took form in the postrevolutionary
era, involving the integration into the white republic of African
people brutalized under slavery, was ultimately unfulfilled. Such
hopes collapsed amid racial conflict and intensifying racial
discrimination by the 1820s. This failure of the great and
much-watched "Philadelphia experiment" prefigured the course of
race relations in America in our own century, an enduringly tragic
part of this country's past.
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