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Introduction Dressed in “beautiful blue silk,” Fannie Barrier attended the “fashionable colored wedding” of Josephine A. Stewart and George W. Ball in April 1881, which was held at Berean Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. She joined an illustrious group of what one of the leading white newspapers, the National Republican, called “the youth and beauty of our colored citizens.” A major social event of the season, the wedding illuminated the prominence of black elite culture and highlighted the aristocratic stature of the bride’s family. Her father, Carter A. Stewart, held key positions in numerous social and political organizations and was one of the first fire department commissioner appointees in the city. The invited guests were part of his inner circle and some of the most influential members of the community. In addition to Barrier, they included Francis Grimké, the minister of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, and his wife Charlotte Forten Grimké, a writer, teacher and activist; Anna Thompson Wormley, the wife of hotel owner James Wormley; William Syphax, the first chair of the Board of Trustees for the black school system; and physician Samuel LeCount Cook.1 Barrier’s pedigree, professional status, and physical appearance linked her to the distinguished group. As a member of a prominent mixed-race family from Brockport, New York, she was part of a privileged class. None of her family had ever been enslaved, and like many other upper-class northern blacks, she could trace her lineage to white Europeans. Her father, Anthony J. Barrier, owned a profitable business, had built a substantial real estate portfolio, and was regarded as a leading citizen. Her mother, Harriet Prince Barrier, led the same femalegender -centered life as elite white women in the early nineteenth century. She never worked outside the home, spent most of her time raising three children, and engaged in church activities. Fannie Barrier was an educated professional. She had earned a teaching certificate from Brockport Normal School in 1870 2 Introduction and had taught in the Washington, D.C., public school system since 1877. In addition , her light complexion was in keeping with the affinity of the black upper class for using color as a way to stratify the black community. She looked, one newspaper reported, like an “east Indian of the higher caste.”2 However, a distinct difference made her unique among the black elite. None of the other wedding guests enjoyed the level of social equality that Barrier had prior to her arrival in Washington, the mecca for southern black aristocrats. The subordination of nonwhites and the racial acrimony that defined black life nationally (and in varying degrees in New York) prior to the Civil War had little effect on her. She was unencumbered by racial restraints in Brockport because she had grown up in an environment where the number of blacks remained exceptionally small and the white community embraced her and her family. It was an unsegregated society that encouraged social equality and insulated her from the political turmoil surrounding the debates about slavery and black rights. As she grew up, she had intimate contact with whites: she lived in the neighborhoods with them, attended schools with them, and worshipped together with them. Because so few blacks lived in the village, she engaged more with whites on a daily basis than she did with members of her own race. That changed when she moved south and for the first time experienced the virulent onslaught of white supremacy. In the South, she simultaneously engaged with perhaps the leading black elite society in the country and encountered a large post-slavery generation population of working-class and poor blacks. The adjustment forced her to recognize that regional residency, historical period, and population determined the extent of racial interaction. Arriving in the border state of Missouri during the waning years of Reconstruction to assist newly freed women and men, she was caught in the vortex of white Democrats’ redemption of the region, a process that pervasively usurped black rights. While some black Republican officeholders continued to retain some of their power well into the 1880s and while the circumscribed world of Jim Crow that was unleashed in the 1890s was not yet entrenched, institutionalized injustice had already begun to appear in the form of proscriptions against contact between blacks and whites. Even in its infancy, segregation imposed racial boundaries in public venues and in transportation, ushering in two separate worlds. And despite Washington’s more liberal culture and the black elite...

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