Categories of Freedom

The Social Justice Archive

This essay works against the grain of typical approaches to understanding a social-justice archive to better characterize the CCM’s end by studying a single convention pamphlet. Proceedings of the National Conference of Colored Men of the United States, Held in the State Capitol at Nashville, Tennessee, May 6, 7, 8 and 9, 1879 amasses most aspects of the movement franchise in one textual space while also recording an opening debate among Black leaders that calls for a departure from the namesake markers of the CCM enterprise. The Walt Whitman Archive’s single-author focus locates transhistorical political engagement in a single generative figure with Whitman as a poet of many voices and a contemporary of the CCM. In contrast, the CCP’s ColoredConventions.org harnesses Black cohorts’ intra-action networks and methods to bring attention to the movement’s multivocal structure and strengths in community-building. The site helps to democratize access to a history of nineteenth-century Black literary production previously dispersed, in part, between collections. These include the print anthologies A Survey of the Negro Convention Movement, 1830–1861 (1953) and Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865 (1979).4

Mirroring the Walt Whitman Archive’s approach to making the author’s “vast work freely and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers,” the CCP’s comprehensive method of digital representation temporally streamlines a variety of geocoded textual and visual materials, capturing a growing tally of hundreds of convention sessions, as well as the convention naming practices, leaders, and sites of activity. This approach to content organization democratizes a history of Black protest in conjunction with a distinct area of the nineteenth-century Black protest tradition. Original facsimile and crowd-sourced transcribed minutes constitute the core of the ColoredConventions.org archive. We supplement this core with event calls, newspaper articles, petitions and memorials, advertisements, photographic images, and ephemera, as well as narrative-based exhibits and educational curricula.

The CCP wields the tools of the twenty-first century, especially new media, to provide insight into African Americans’ structurally collaborative platform, which, by 1880, “had to rely almost exclusively on the embryonic form of modern ethnic-group leadership—social-organization-type leadership” not only in Southern states, but also in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the far-West.5 Leading up to the postbellum era, the average Black delegate worked through committee-based, unpaid positions to substantiate claims for “a redress of grievances” driven by racism.6 An examination of the 1879 National Conference of Colored Men in Nashville reveals the nature of the CCM’s transition from the antebellum to the postbellum era.

From Performance to Textual Reproduction: The 1879 National Conference Held in Nashville

The meeting minutes for the 1879 National Conference in Nashville read like a marquee event in the Colored Convention franchise. Sessions were stacked with high-ranking Black politicians such as the former interim governor of Louisiana Pinckney B. S. Pinchback, the son of a white planter and an enslaved woman. The former Alabama congressman James Thomas Rapier served as a secretary tasked with producing the postevent pamphlet of minutes. The resulting document’s opening pages evidence the multimodal nature of CCM literary production, which includes original writing and content editing. According to the pamphlet’s review of the first day of sessions, after a delegate’s introductory eulogy, the celebrity troupe out of Fisk University, the six-member Jubilee Singers, performed the Christian spiritual “Steal Away to Jesus” in the central hall of the Tennessee State Capitol Building— “in splendid style” and “amid great applause.” Instances of humorous banter between delegates make an early appearance in the minutes. Rather than superfluous interjections, these interactions capture nuanced relationship-building at the core of a national-level assembly, the success of which depended on collaboration between travelling community organizers. In a more serious vein,

Rev. Allan Allensworth arose to a point of gallantry, stating that several gentlemen were sitting while ladies were standing. A change in position, as suggested by the delegate from Kentucky, was accordingly made.7

Another resolution presented in favor of protecting attending Black women further defines the unfurling nature of delegate representation, which was nonetheless heavily inscribed with masculine signifiers throughout the print proceedings: “Resolved, That the action of the railroad conductors, in forcibly ejecting the ladies of the Jubilee Singers from the ladies’ car, merits our undivided condemnation.”8 From celebratory oratory to debates leading to the passage of event-level ordinances, this sampling from event culture embodies the delegation’s performance of moral duty across topics. The rhetorical features of the products of collaborative writing at such Black meetings bring attention to delegations’ joint authorial-editorial dexterity. The execution of the convention platform relied on the ability of delegates to tackle emergent issues as they unraveled in real-time with as much vigor and intentionality as the handling of entrenched topics such as emigration proposals that had a history of appearing as Colored Conventions agenda items since the movement’s launch in 1830 (see Figure 8.1, showing positions on emigration taken at Colored Conventions).

The official political pamphlet of the 1879 national convention prompts special consideration as a representative text with which to consider the larger movement’s categorical legibility. The forum takes place between the ultimate decline of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which occurred by 1877, and the decline of the larger movement, which occurred by 1900. On the other hand, the 1879 Proceedings of the National Conference of Colored Men anticipates the forthcoming Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to urban cities in the North, Midwest, and the West when an estimated six million Black people migrated between 1916 and 1970.9 The delegation pursued a national-scale agenda, though the regional concerns of African Americans from the South, including emigration and a healthy lifestyle, dominate the argumentative suppositions behind many of the items appearing in Proceedings of the National Conference of Colored Men.

Emigration discourse in the 1879 literature completes a circular trajectory, from beginning to end, of the movement’s investment in Black constituent concerns surrounding raced-based societal mistreatment. The emigration debates emerged because of a divisive post-Reconstruction political environment in the South. The 1879 meeting mirrored the exigency or high responsivity of early 1830s and 1840s convention delegations, which called meetings to debate about Black people’s emigration out and away from cities or states with active race-based forced removal policies. These meetings primarily sought recourse for Northern free people, particularly Black constituencies with liminal, highly vulnerable social statuses. Black women, fugitives from slavery, lynching victims, and child victims of segregationist school policies are some examples of vulnerable groups. Records show that a proliferation of opinion, a deficit in time and pecuniary resources, and the unlikelihood that agenda items would succeed postevent strained the efficacy of convention work throughout the CCM’s run.

As a self-funded enterprise with mostly unpaid convention organizers at the helm, the 1879 National Conference of Colored Men at Nashville magnified the traditions of the movement, while its mediated (re)production in print reveals internal fissures along the boundaries of acceptable decorum and political direction in the post-Reconstruction era. Practical approaches to good health and to reducing poverty and mortality rates, for example, dampen the impact of arguments for increased emigration of Black communities away from the Southern states. Distinguishing features of the 1879 convention include a comparatively large, approximately 144-member, delegation and the sophisticated quality of the pamphlet’s compilation of materials. Typographical notations in the minutes mark the exuberance of “uproarious” crowds attending the two-a-day meetings.10 The appearance of typographical signifiers like “[Laughter.]” and “[Applause.]” contributes to the lively tone of the pamphlet’s 115 bound pages.11 An appendix of ten essays on race-based sociopolitical issues and four committee reports demonstrates the body’s advancements in publication efficacy.

However, the need for budgets capable of covering the pecuniary demands of large-scale, multiday events also defined a style of charitable leadership in tune with CCM concepts of moral duty. The production of print proceedings reveals the financial strains of the delegate position, as well as opportunities for creative engagement among professional classes of its attendees. It would have cost the average reader twenty-five cents to purchase a copy of the proceedings. In the proceedings, the former Congressman James Rainey calls for a committee on “finance to collect funds for stationery, (and) printing” and to acquire two recording pages who would perform tasks upon assignment and handle parts of the publishing process alongside the committee on printing.12 Rainey later raised $105.50 on the third day to cover such convention expenses.13 But by the end of the event, the “net amount raised by the conference did not meet one-half of the expense of publishing the proceedings,” as the compiler of the minutes, J. W. Cromwell, pointed out.14 One result of the conference’s limited budget is reflected in the finished pamphlet’s appendix, with a list of delegate donations in increments of one dollar and fifty cents.15 This partial list of delegates points to the unpaid position that each delegate occupies by describing their donations to the event. This concluding section of the minutes also includes the works of attendees and absentee participants who could not attend but shared a previously prepared essay. The New Jersey-based William Stewart’s “The Necessity of a National Review Devoted to the Interests of the Negro-American” appears in the pamphlet as one of several papers read aloud during the proceedings. It presents a case for the public presses’ powerful influence over the masses. For Stewart, weekly literary papers and magazines carry broad appeal as luxury items that help to shape an individual’s character while also displaying the aesthetic capacities of American printed content. Differently, national reviews that host research-based essays and commentary are construed as far less popular with the average reader, though they offer a far more productive means to reshape the image of African Americans through an intentional engagement with their population-based concerns. Stewart’s pitch for a periodical devoted to Black people’s interests apart from political or religious sectarianism and with the purpose of dismantling nefarious public policy largely echoed the pamphlet in which his own essay was published. Moreover, this set of proceedings helps to explicate the budgetary strains created by large-scale events, as it also offers a means for understanding the generally fractured history of document production for the movement. By acknowledging budgets, printing costs, methods of distribution, and affiliated media entities, the organizational properties of the Colored Conventions platform become clearer.

Categorizing “Colored Conventions” in Movement Studies

With a firm temporal marker (1830–1900) and a body of known referential titles for movement events as a starting point, I raise greater taxonomical distinctions that require researchers to calibrate their studies with a more local focus. The use of organizational tropes that bring relational clarity to conventions according to activities, values, and material resources presents a legible set of categories characteristic of CCM freedom struggles. Scholars have relied on flexible designations to historicize and analyze the Colored Conventions archive. Derrick Spires has used the term “black hole” and Ivy Wilson has deployed the term “shadow” to deal with issues of invisibility and sparsity that characterize some African American figures, organizations, beliefs, and their associated political literature in an era offering both a warranted hope for full liberation and prevailing obstacles entrenched in most areas of society.16 Examining the internal CCM dynamics provides a three-dimensional characterization of movement culture as both sharing a history with other American social movements and also embodying distinctive features. This method still recognizes the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ American Great Awakening, the Religious Society of Friends, and other Puritan congregations, and the establishment of nineteenth-century Black Protestant denominations that help to contextualize the civic-oriented platform. Indeed, Black convention delegations embraced ceremonial rituals of piety such as prayer, religious song, and ministerial leaders; elements of the Black sermonic tradition also influence CCM literature.

The CCM tradition of observing the condition of Black constituencies serves as the primary analytical base by which the movement should be regarded as a secular social movement. As I have argued elsewhere, following the first decade of its founding, the movement became increasingly guided by a public-facing rather than a religious-facing construct of social organization.17 A moral ethos toward delegates’ duty to serve communities’ needs best describes the methods of the constituent-based representation that other core convention rituals upheld. These rituals include debates, votes, resolutions, and petitioning; these democratic methods provide the core substance of convention documents. In his opening remarks, Pinchback promotes an aesthetics of political performance (or decorum) that is distinct from agents of early American Protestant discourses, including the fiery sermonic traditions of Jonathan Edwards’s Great Awakening and a departure from Reverend Allen’s ties to a single denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The Decline of a Movement: Convention-Naming Practices

The pamphlet captures a debate over convention naming practices to ascertain delegate eligibility, which signals a decline in the movement’s momentum. The discussion reviewed the basis of community representation and the purpose of a predominately Black-led political meeting. The movement’s ongoing debates about delegate seniority and the right to convene movement-sponsored events reflect the heightened diversification of political identities among the pool of activists who claimed association with the ethos of the CCM. President Pinchback yields the Speaker’s stand of the “House of Delegates” to Mississippi delegate John R. Lynch, who orally represents a leadership decorum capable of quelling early unrest about two points.18 They relate to “the aims, objects and purpose” of a “Conference” and a “Convention.”19 Lynch’s first supposition is that the “Conference” should be recognized in the tradition of Colored Conventions, since the “mode of its formation was so familiar to the people of the country that we would meet with no opposition.”20 This position stands, even though the original organizers initially construed the event “not in the interest of any particular political party, especially not as Republicans, not as Democrats, but as free, independent American citizens” intending to present “to the country the grievances of the colored people.”21 The second supposition acquiesces to a “set of gentlemen, chosen by people in a meeting claiming to be delegates,” who think the question of emigration demands “important proportions” of the meetings’ primary foci.22

The 1879 body had hoped to distinguish itself from the “National (Colored) Convention” circuit’s leadership by embracing the term “National Conference.”23 But the body was aware that others had “incurred the expense of both time and money” in selecting and sending delegates under the assumption that the forum would be a traditional national-level “Colored Convention” event that would welcome community-elected or -appointed delegates.24 Nonetheless, the original organizing cohort accepted delegates who traveled to join the proceedings as fully empowered voting members despite the misunderstanding. Each side—originals and assumed members alike—acted on the assumptions of delegation formation that had operated at loosely related “Colored Convention” meetings since the 1830s. The terms “Colored Convention,” “Convention of Free People of Colour,” “Convention of Colored Citizens,” “Convention of Colored Men,” “Convention of Colored Freemen,” “Convention of Colored People,” and “Convention of the Colored Population” brought together mostly autonomously organized meetings under the movement’s platform. Without one of these iterations of the “Colored Convention” tagline (members of the contemporaneous media who had reviewed the events and sought a succinct term to describe like-proceedings regularly used the term “Colored Convention”), organizations with all-Black and predominately Black leadership cohorts are nearly indistinguishable as one of the movement’s ligaments. A sign of the franchise’s declining cohesiveness is reflected in the instability of naming practices surrounding its events and its declining ability to remain relevant based on a shared use of derivatives of the platform’s main title phrases.

Style in the 1879 Pamphlet: The Voice of the 1879 Audience in Typography

Convention decorum directly impacted the 1879 convention literature. At the breakout session of the four-day event, a battle between civic solemnity and charismatic advocacy rose as a leading organizational trope for pursuant discussions. Convention President Pinchback opened the inaugural day’s proceedings with a lament. Instead of a welcoming, promiscuous crowd of biracial backers (colored and white citizens of all classes), his opening remarks described a “disturbing” disunity in reference to “those who have so persistently disturbed the proceedings.”25 Pinchback’s appointed spokesperson, delegate Lynch, promoted a style of discourse “conducted as to reflect credit upon the race . . . (and) the country”26: “I . . . express the hope that all who feel an interest will calmly, deliberately and dispassionately consider the questions for which we have been convened.”27 A rebuttal comes from the Texas delegate B. F. Williams, a self-described “old man” whose stance was informed by his former residential status in Tennessee and “the prayers of our forefathers and mothers.”28 According to Williams, convention officers’ interest in calm deliberation constitutes an unnecessarily competitive and authoritarian tone of foreboding. From Williams’s position, “this Conference (is) more like a house of mourning” than a place to consider the troubles of represented communities.29 Sounds of the attending audience incorporated throughout the exchange strongly suggest that the audience agreed with Williams.

The 1879 pamphlet highlights the audience’s participation in the convention. The 1879 pamphlet allows the audience to participate in convention proceedings. The debate is recorded across 1.5 pages in the form of a dialogue between Pinchback, Williams, and an unnamed delegate, with the attending audience’s sound-based reactions “from the galleries” and the recording secretary’s commentary.30 The following sequence of notations appears in the text as the debate on decorum unfolds. They are integrated into Williams’s speaking lines in ways that suggest they are direct responses to his argument.

[Applause.] [Applause.] [Applause.] [Laughter.] [laughter.] [Laughter and applause.] [laughter,] [Renewed laughter.] (pointing his finger toward the person interrupting him.)31 [uproarious laughter,] [Laughter and applause.] [Applause and laughter.] [Immense applause from the galleries, followed by uproarious and prolonged applause.]32

From the lens of an audience’s empowerment, this sequence may be read as an American realist redevelopment of the chorus in ancient Greek theater. This depiction of an extemporaneous performance reinvents a chorus that oscillates between “music-rhythms” and “speech-rhythms.”33 In Greek tragedies, background rhythms incorporate visually disembodied voices in the stage action to help direct the main action of a theater play. In this case, a typographical sequence directs a performance captured in print. If an audience’s sound-rhythms typify audience direction, then the sequence politicizes crowd sounds that function as auditory support for joyous or clamorous proceedings rather than mournful engagement as delegates discuss serious topics on the debate floor. Alternatively, the sequence reflects nineteenth-century abolitionists’ recording techniques and journalist methods. As Nicole H. Gray argues, antebellum abolitionists relied on phonography, “or verbatim reports . . . claiming to replicate extemporaneous speeches” in print “as a way of ensuring accurate representation.”34 Print circulation of these texts reanimated “the conditions of publicity (the attraction of attention) attendant upon the original events themselves.”35 Denoting recording techniques as a part of Black realist styles of event documentation, the 1879 pamphlet’s writing cohort deploys early-century methods to convey to public readers greater authenticity as they report on real activities.

Figure 8.2 lists the types of discourse—conservative, moderate, and radical—employed at different years’ Colored Conventions.36

Debates in the 1879 Convention Pamphlet: Migration, Health, and Housing

Migration proved to be a dominant topic at the 1879 meeting, drawing impassioned arguments that favored and opposed African Americans’ “exodus” of out of the South.37 Across the minutes, migration is hailed as a totem of conversations about Black people’s upward socioeconomic mobility in the postwar era. By the second day of meetings, each delegate was asked to submit a written report on “the true condition of the masses, . . . of their respective States with regard to labor and education,” with the goal “that such statement govern the action of this Conference with respect to the subject of migration.”38 Many delegates viewed this charge as a call to action for delegates to organize the masses. Alternatively, some debates about a mass exodus denounced state governments in what constituted a public court of opinion. These debates demand improvements in race-based social relations and working conditions given the risk of the depletion of Black constituencies in the South. When taken together, the differences on this subject reflect an identity crisis among the delegation reflective of ongoing platform struggles and the convention’s initial interest in the term “Conference.”

Emigration debates in the minutes demonstrate delegates’ ability to propose a variety of political strategies to confront national crises (see Figure 8.1). The delegate J. A. Braboy from Indiana informs white American “friends” that “a mass exodus of the race” will occur because of a dearth of biracial efforts for securing equal rights for all people in their roles as allies.39 The delegate David Wilson of Huntsville argues that a petition from each represented state should be sent to Congress and the president to create a “new Canaan,” a self-styled utopia in a western state wherein migrating populations could settle.40 Wilson believed such a state could be founded on “Republican principles, to be governed by (the colored people), from governor down to the humblest officer, without fear or intimidation” and with full land ownership.41 Braboy’s and Wilson’s positions raise the recurring centrality of imaginative realism and righteous indignation as motivators for grievance claims aired in the civic sphere on behalf of Black constituencies.

Positions on migration are reflected in resolutions and reports. Believing the south to be an important homestead, some delegates argue that, once rights and privileges such as fair wages are guaranteed, Black populations will remain. Other delegates tie the issue of fleeing populations to the “perfectly . . . sincere” belief among white Americans of “colored inferiority and rightful subordination.”42 In the pamphlet, Black westerners like J. C. Embry welcome travelers with a tone as “positive and emphatic as a thunder-drum in affirming the determination to submit to oppression no longer.”43 One delegate suggests that all “resolutions relating to migration first be referred to the Southern delegates,” likely the original cohort that called the meeting.44 Another resolution declared that African American migrants need prior knowledge of localities before travel, along with enough savings to secure a safe journey and a home in which to settle. Another delegate recommends creating a commission of emigration advisors to choose homes for travelers, while yet another believes a single commissioner should be appointed to oversee all activities. Another delegate proposes a committee of three to visit the western states and territories to report on the “health, climate, and productions” of these areas. By the end of the conference, the delegation agrees to support thousands of southerners in flocking to “the free and fertile West”—with some stipulations in place.45 Their stipulations in the form of social policies allow the distribution of the minutes to serve as print-based voices of counsel on the subject.46

The issue of poverty undermines migration support at the 1879 meeting, which reflects organizational tensions characteristic of the Colored Conventions movement. While less prominent in the minutes in comparison to emigration debates, detailed discussions about poor health and sanitation practices present a key debilitating factor in response to emigration supporters’ arguments about the nature of Black people’s social mobility in the South in comparison to those in cities in the West and North. These positions highlight the fundamental roles that delegates’ assessments of Black populations play in presenting sound counsel on political topics in ways that represent the 1879 pamphlet as instructive guidance for public audiences. Delegate William Still, the prominent activist out of Ohio whose concerted work on the Underground Railroad substantiates his claims, argues that emigration will prove unsuccessful for some vulnerable classes:

Now, I am compelled to say, with deep regret, that our poor people are not prepared to emigrate under any such encouraging aspects. They have been too long shut out from the light of knowledge to be ready for any en masse emigration movement.47

Still’s position is compounded by statistics published in the proceedings that reflect the state of health among African American populations, making the data important indicators of the lack of Black populations’ access to social services and creature comforts. According to the 1879 minutes, J. W. Cromwell, the convention’s clerk, read an absentee physician’s paper. The Howard University faculty member in medicine and Army veteran Alexander Thomas Augusta’s paper, “A Sanitary Condition of the People of the United States,” appears in the pamphlet’s appendix. In it, Doctor Augusta argues that the Black population is growing but that the federal and state governments lack legal safeguards to grant proper access to census records, and “still less attention is paid to give correct reports of the colored people.”48 As a byproduct of this situation, these government record-keeping practices tend “to make no difference between whites and blacks” in vital and other social statistics.49 Augusta’s paper focuses on the District of Columbia’s 1870s vital records. This time encompasses its transition to “Washington, D.C.,” through phases of a commission-governed municipality and radical infrastructure revitalization. Moreover, Augusta’s essay evokes the necessity of post-emancipation Black leadership thought concerning an area wherein the 1862 Compensated Emancipation Act had freed more than three thousand slaves and whose African American men gained access to municipal suffrage in 1868.

Black Literary Realism in the 1879 Convention Pamphlet

A key example of demography-based literature that may have stalled emigration arguments alongside delegate Still’s anti-emigration position, Augusta’s essay raises the enjoyment of good health as a primary goal to accompany acts of accruing wealth and civil rights. The essay indirectly promotes a Black–white racial reconciliation doctrine by considering poor health as a debilitating aspect in narratives of population decline. This comparative study emphasizes colliding social problems impacting not only “the colored race, but . . . all others.”50 It uses vital statistics drawn from census records and annual municipal reports to describe the Black–white racial binary and comment on Black people’s particular struggles. Augusta’s frank and concerned style of discourse appeals to readers to consider the consequences of poor health, including the factors of yellow fever, premature death, despair, and other conditions. The health of these Americans is further menaced by “doctors and sanitarians” who had been overwhelmed and had “been taxed to their uttermost to apply means of cure.”51 Augusta also argues that the dearth of resources includes “sanitary measures, such as disinfectants, quarantine and isolation to stamp out the disease and prevent its recurrence.” Among the paper’s cited diseases are “small-pox, diphtheria, cholera, and the plague, or black fever.”52 The paper displays an overarching cautionary rhetoric, opening with a narrative of viral diseases among the “human family,” including in armies, ship crews, and nations with famous struggles with mass contagion apparent in historical records.53 Then follows a description of America’s particular style of insufficiently documenting or misrepresenting vital statistics. Augusta cites overly high death rates for African Americans and undercounted death rates for white populations.

The essay focuses on sanitation and housing issues in Washington, D.C., during a time when the newly established territorial government of the District of Columbia struggled to manage advancements in its infrastructure following the Organic Act of 1871. Specifically, the essay shows the ways that Black people were severely impaired by area-wide social prejudices. The essay’s citation of vital statistics substantiates claims of “fearful” mortality rates among District of Columbia communities as a case study in hygienic practices.54 Population totals by race, births (including still births and the birth of twins), deaths, marriages, and percentages of mortality of children under five years of age are given for 1874 to 1878. In one case, the author brings attention to disparities in mortality rates for the year 1877: “Deaths—White 2,102, being 1.82 per cent of white population, and 51.23 per cent. of the total mortality; colored 2,001, being 4.44 per cent. Of colored population, and 48.76 per cent. of total mortality.”55

Augusta’s representation of issues concerning Black constituencies presents likely causes associated with harmful lifestyle conditions. They include the housing conditions of “frame shanties” or rows of “small houses” without regulatory standards for sanitation that nonetheless fuel a high-rent housing market for Black people in the Washington, D.C., area. Augusta’s essay especially focuses on Black impoverished communities living in shanties or, alternatively, “mean-cabin(s),” which serve as “temporary or permanent shelter(s).”56 In the context of the 1879 pamphlet, Augusta’s representation of a housing crisis seeks to raise alarm for his sense of a dystopian timeline in which “our wretched poor are born and exist and die in” these conditions in the United States.57

Augusta’s first-person account offering demographic analysis is at the center of his notion of Black convention leadership. The essay’s descriptive passages about Black people’s sociopolitical conditions tie his exposé and the broader pamphlet to the larger American realism literary movement. However, his denouncement of housing conditions, which are presented as facts and are drawn from the course of the author’s experiential work as a physician, seek to prompt social action from empowered governing bodies, rather than to convey an objective study without a philosophical stance for social change. The following passage describes Augusta’s commentary on Black people’s housing conditions:

I found a one-story room about 12 by 12 to 12 by 16 feet, and about seven feet in height, composed of inch and a half boards, the top or roof being covered with felt or gravel. There were no water-spouts to lead the water from the roof, and consequently it ran close to the foundation and under the house, where it often remained for an indefinite period, combined with other surface water and refuse matters.58

He attributes such low-quality living conditions, in part, to bad architectural and material infrastructure. Another example points to homes in states of poor assembly:

Down in the alleys, below grade, with combination roof of felt, tar, shingles, rags, tin, gravel, boards and holes; floors damp and broken, walls begrimed by smoke and age; so domiciled are families, with all the dignity of tenants having rent to pay; perhaps four or five, or may be eight dollars a month, and proud of the distinction though often greatly exercised to meet their obligations.59

In addition to Augusta’s eye-witness accounts, testimonies referenced in the essay describe other conditions detrimental to occupants’ health.

Citizen testimonies recorded in Augusta’s “Sanitary Condition” paper heighten the pamphlet’s engagement with the realist tradition. Testimonials from unnamed individuals cite wild swings in temperature over the course of a day from “75 to 85 degrees of heat, while at night, after the fire went out, the temperature would fall to the freezing point” due to a lack of plaster on shanty home walls. A typical family of a man, wife, three to six children, and a grandparent might inhabit such a home that was likely to have but one “small door” and a three-by-three window for ventilation.60 Conversely, even large shanty cabins could cause extreme discomfort. A lack of proper sanitation and airing out of floors, carpets, and beds were cited as evidence of the housing crisis. The fact that cooking and waste production and containments were held or “done in the same room” also proved problematic causes of unhygienic living conditions.61 After in-person debates and reading of papers such as Augusta’s, the post-event 1879 pamphlet captures the National Executive Committee on Migration’s ultimate decision to support emigration. In one statement that precedes its resolutions, the committee posits:

This migration movement is based on a determined and irrepressible desire, on the part of the colored people of the South, to go anywhere where they can escape the cruel treatment and continued threats of the dominant race in the South.62

Nonetheless, Augusta’s paper demonstrates the educational and political interventions that convention forums’ literary production could promote. His proposal for good health as a central goal of convention-leadership formation and subsequent initiatives for racial uplift helped to diversify the pro-Black advocacy avenues available to reading publics.

Augusta’s analysis reflects the educational capacities of CCM delegations’ advocacy-based labor and subsequent collaboratively written publications. Characteristic of Black convention cultures, the 1879 pamphlet’s appendix features a policy document, “Report of the Committee on a Permanent Form of Organization.” The document proposes a permanent society inclusive of most standing delegate members to facilitate the enactment of agenda items “to Prevent Injustice to the Colored People.”63 This document resolves a future imagined body to pursue both emigration and the improvement of sanitary conditions, thus showing the power of in-person arguments given on the convention floor and classical argumentation rendered in essay form to build momentum for long-term Black activism.

The Literature of the Colored Conventions Movement

Nineteenth-century Black convention meetings’ structures, performative aesthetics, and literary productions sought to amplify evaluations of Black communities’ social condition for delegations, represented communities, and members of the public. Thematic threads that run through the movement’s primary documents capture delegates’ competing positions during processes of proposing racial uplift initiatives. In addition to competing stances that unraveled in movement documents over the linguistic authority of convention-naming practices, the power to provide sound advice necessitated a greater reliance on methods of literary realism among late-century delegations to contextualize and promote Black constituencies’ needs. As the 1879 national meeting demonstrates, the basic tenets of most conventions carrying the “Colored Convention” moniker remained intact long after the movement’s 1830 launch, even as some Black leaders sought to depart from the CCM tradition as the movement’s end neared. Convention activities, including oral and written debates, votes, and the passage of resolutions, were mainly concerned with community- and constituency-building, streamlining political messages, and garnering Black people’s full access to civil rights.

As a byproduct of my role as a co-founder and a former, long-term co-coordinator of the CCP and ColoredConventions.org, my research shows that the known corpus of CCM print proceedings endures as one of the movement’s foundational literary achievements that reflects its practice of Black democratic theory and civic engagement. Like the movement’s historical actors, we established research committees that created the framework and content for ColoredConventions.org. This organizational structure allowed us to borrow from the movement’s editorial methods while also broadening public readers’ access to a range of additional information that we compiled about the movement, including information about Black women’s contributions to meetings, physical event spaces, and related documents apart from primary proceedings. In doing so, I and other CCP members helped to re-envision the idea of scholarly anthologies in the context of visual education in the age of contemporary digital humanism that concentrates on studies of Black intellectual history.

Notes

1. 1. “Formalism,” Britannica Online, accessed May 3, 2021, britannica.com/art/Formalism-literary-criticism.

2. 2. “Stephen Greenblatt,” Britannica Online, accessed May 3, 2021, britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Greenblatt.

3. 3. Elizabeth Gloucester was married to James Gloucester, who served as a data aggregator for the 1843 statistical report in his capacity as a delegate for the 1843 National Colored Convention held in Buffalo, New York. While she did not appear to have served as a CCM delegate, her work with trade organizations and children’s relief associations supplemented the work of the Black convention platform.

4. 4. Survey was edited by Howard Holman Bell. Two volumes of Proceedings of the Black State Convention were edited by Phillip S. Foner and George E. Walker.

5. 5. See Martin Kilson, Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1880–2012 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 52.

6. 6. Proceedings of the National Conference of Colored Men of the United States, Held in the State Capitol at Nashville, Tennessee, May 6, 7, 8 and 9, 1879 (Washington, D.C.: Rufus H. Darby, Steam Power Printer, 1879), 29 (hereafter Proceedings).

7. 7. Proceedings, 18.

8. 8. Proceedings, 10.

9. 9. “Great Migration,” Britannica Online. Accessed February 3, 2022, britannica.com/event/Great-Migration.

10. 10. Proceedings, 8.

11. 11. The minutes compile delegate rolls and speeches, debates, voting tallies and resulting resolutions, committee reports, petitions, statistics, and an appendix of essays advocating for civil rights.

12. 12. Proceedings, 9.

13. 13. Proceedings, 34.

14. 14. Proceedings, 107.

15. 15. Proceedings, 107.

16. 16. Derrick Spires, “Flights of Fancy: Black Print, Collaboration, and Performances in ‘An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America (Rejected by the National Convention, 1843),’” in The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Lynn Patterson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 126.

17. 17. See my essay “‘As the True Guardians of Our Interests’: Black Demography at Colored Conventions,” in Foreman, Casey, and Patterson, Colored Conventions Movement,211–19.

18. 18. Proceedings, 3.

19. 19. Proceedings, 3–4.

20. 20. Proceedings, 3.

21. 21. Proceedings, 4.

22. 22. Proceedings, 4.

23. 23. Proceedings, 2.

24. 24. Proceedings, 8.

25. 25. Proceedings, 3, 98.

26. 26. Proceedings, 4.

27. 27. Proceedings, 4.

28. 28. Proceedings, 7.

29. 29. Proceedings, 7.

30. 30. Proceedings, 8.

31. 31. This line refers to Williams’s actions toward an unnamed delegate.

32. 32. Proceedings, 7–8.

33. 33. H. D. F. Kitto, “The Greek Chorus,” Educational Theatre Journal 8, no. 1 (1956): 2.

34. 34. Nicole H. Gray, “Recording the Sounds of ‘Words that Burn’: Reproductions of Public Discourse in Abolitionist Journalism,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 41, no. 4 (2011): 364.

35. 35. Gray, “Recording the Sounds,” 370.

36. 36. The 1843 convention is denoted as radical due to debates surrounding Henry Highland Garnet’s speech “An Address to the Slaves of the United States” at a time when most antebellum conventions focused on the state of free Black people in the West and Northeast. The 1843 convention rejected the speech due to most delegates’ belief that it encouraged insurrection among enslaved people in the South. The 1848 convention is denoted as radical due to it being the first known departure from an all-male delegation in the movement’s run. The delegation accepted all colored attendees as delegates, including Black women.

37. 37. Proceedings, 9.

38. 38. Proceedings, 12.

39. 39. Proceedings, 14.

40. 40. Proceedings, 29.

41. 41. Proceedings, 29.

42. 42. Proceedings, 106.

43. 43. Proceedings, 106.

44. 44. Proceedings, 10.

45. 45. Proceedings, 105.

46. 46. Proceedings, 106.

47. 47. Proceedings, 59.

48. 48. Proceedings, 43.

49. 49. Proceedings, 43.

50. 50. Proceedings, 42.

51. 51. Proceedings, 42.

52. 52. Proceedings, 42.

53. 53. Proceedings, 42.

54. 54. Proceedings, 47.

55. 55. Proceedings, 44.

56. 56. Proceedings, 45.

57. 57. Proceedings, 45.

58. 58. Proceedings, 45.

59. 59. Proceedings, 45.

60. 60. Proceedings, 45.

61. 61. Proceedings, 45.

62. 62. Proceedings, 100.

63. 63. Proceedings, 67.