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PART II. Black Nationalism and Emigration
- The University of North Carolina Press
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99 PART II Black Nationalism and Emigration The letters, poems, and essays in Part 2 follow Whitfield over approximately two decades, beginning with a eulogy he delivered in 1841 on a fellow member of a black reading society in Buffalo and concluding with a letter he published in 1862 calling on the Union army to recruit black troops. The bulk of the materials in this section are from the 1850s, when Whitfield (now in his thirties) had become prominent among African Americans both as a poet and as an advocate for black emigration to Central or South America. We include in Part 2 the complete Arguments, Pro and Con, on the Call for a National Emigration Convention (1854), which has never before been reprinted and is one of the most revealing African American texts of the antebellum period. Much that was at stake for black leaders in the 1850s debate on black emigration can be gleaned from this document. Arguments reveals that Whitfield was a brilliant controversialist and political thinker who had no fear of debating Frederick Douglass and his associates and whose thoughts on blacks in the United States and the larger Americas may have had an important impact on Martin Delany’s emigrationism. During this contentious period, Whitfield continued writing poems, some politically pointed (such as “The Vision”) and some more personal and lyrical (such as “Morning Song”). In the two essays on black literary periodicals included here, Whitfield argues that blacks should attempt to achieve literary greatness by writing on topics not exclusively linked to race, politics, or nation. At the same time, the documents in this section demonstrate Whitfield’s considerable interest in emigrationism, racism, black nationalism, and law. Even if we resist 100 Black Nationalism and Emigration linking (or reducing) the poetry to the particular politics, say, of black emigration, we cannot ignore that Whitfield’s poetry was written, read, and circulated in specific contexts of cultural debate and assumed some of its meanings from those contexts. The texts in Part 2 thus help to provide a broader picture of the cultural field in which Whitfield’s work was emerging and circulating, though the question of how to read the poetry in relation to that field remains wide open. Whitfield published America early in 1853 and dedicated the volume to Delany, who had publicly broken with Douglass to become the most prominent advocate of black emigrationism during the 1850s.¹ But despite his friendship with Delany, Whitfield demonstrated his political autonomy and savvy by attending Douglass’s July 1853 Colored National Convention in Rochester, New York, which attracted a number of prominent black leaders, and serving on the committee of five that prepared and endorsed the convention’s “Address, of the Colored National Convention, to the People of the United States.” (Douglass was the main author.) The “Address” basically set forth Douglass’s key positions of the time: the great value of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to the antislavery cause, the need for blacks to continue working for their economic uplift in the United States and to resist all emigrationist and colonizationist movements, the evils of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, and the moral imperative of fighting for black citizenship. As Douglass and the committee stated emphatically in the “Address”: “We declare that we are, and of right we ought to be American citizens. We claim this right, and we claim all the rights and privileges, and duties which, properly, attach to it.”² The 1853 “Address” spoke in the spirit of numerous addresses and proclamations emerging from prior African American meetings. There are key similarities, for instance, between the “Address” and the resolutions adopted by an African American meeting in Cleveland that Whitfield had attended in 1838. But in the “Resolutions of the People of Cleveland, on the Subject of African Colonization,” which the sixteen-year-old Whitfield helped to write, we see how even the young Whitfield was prepared to move in directions different from [3.238.135.30] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:38 GMT) Black Nationalism and Emigration 101 those of Douglass. Whitfield and his coauthors of the 1838 “Resolutions ” declared their opposition to the project sponsored by the white leaders of the American Colonization Society of shipping the free blacks to the African colony of Liberia. But Whitfield and his associates saw clear distinctions between the colonization program of the society and the possibilities of black emigration, as suggested by one of the key resolutions...