First Fruits of Freedom: The Migration of Former Slaves and Their Search for Equality in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1862-1900

5. A Community within a Community

Chapter 5 A Community Within a Community On the afternoon of 22 June 1891, members of the Mount Olive Baptist Church gathered to lay the cornerstone for their new church on John Street in Worcester. Joined by representatives from the city’s two other black churches as well as white Baptist congregations, church members and their supporters reflected on the long journey from the South to the North, from slavery to freedom, that many of them had made. Amidst prayers, invocations, and joyful hymn singing, George C. Whitney, a member of the First Baptist Church, presented a historical address. As a teenager in 1862, Whitney had joined the 51st Massachusetts regiment and served in New Bern, North Carolina. He was one of many white Worcesterites who helped liberate slaves there. He began his address by providing a brief overview of the black congregation’s beginnings, of the “faithful brethren” who made their new church a reality. He praised the Mount Olive congregation for its self-reliance, noting that “it was a pleasure to assist those who are zealously striving to help themselves.”1 Whitney then focused on what he called the “unwritten history of some of those present.” Pointing out that the full story of the South’s liberated slaves remained unknown to many, the aging veteran took the opportunity to highlight that saga and to draw connections between slavery and the Civil War and the cornerstone-laying. The “unwritten history,” Whitney explained, prompted “reason for great rejoicing over the improvement of [former slaves’] condition during their lives.” He continued, “History would lead one to say A Community Within a Community 131 that if anything could be done to aid this race it should be done.” Whitney then pointed out the “little bronze buttons” that graced the lapels of several persons around him. Several members of the church, including Charles Clark and Andrew Jackson, were black Civil War veterans and belonged—with Whitney—to Worcester’s George H. Ward Post No. 10 of the Grand Army of the Republic; they proudly wore the button that designated their Civil War service. While “a simple thing,” Whitney explained, “that little button is a reminder of a great contest for freedom. It reminds all that the colored race was once enslaved, even in this boasted land of liberty, which called itself a Christian nation. But the button reminds all, also, that the shackles of the slave were broken by war, and that the oppressed were set free.”2 Whitney’s comments attested to the bonds that remained between some Union veterans and the people they helped liberate, even as the cause of black civil rights foundered nationally and locally. With Reconstruction and its promises of black equality a distant, unfulfilled dream, and with white supremacy once again surging in the American South, the slaves’ past and the war that liberated them was never far from the minds of the small congregation and the white benefactors who continued to aid them, nearly thirty years after the first “contrabands of war” arrived in Worcester. The founding of the Mount Olive, later renamed John Street, Baptist Church symbolized the coming-of-age of the southern migrant community that took root in Worcester beginning in the era of the Civil War. The church, built in the heart of the city’s southern black residential enclave, embodied long-standing patronage networks as well as the independence and pride of the southern blacks who founded the church. Self-consciously southern in its membership and worship style, the church signified the migrants’ longterm commitment to the city of Worcester and served to maintain southern culture and tradition in the North. As Whitney’s speech suggested, historical memory provided the foundation for building black southern community in Worcester. Southern identity centered on history—the historical experience and memory of slavery and the Civil War. Southern migrants and their children, sometimes aided by older white patrons like Whitney, fought to keep that memory, and the nation’s promises of full-fledged freedom, alive. They did so by establishing community institutions and celebrations and engaging in political activism. In addition, several of the city’s former slaves published narratives in which they recounted their personal journeys from slavery to freedom. In engaging in these activities, former slaves embraced what historian David W. Blight termed “African American patriotic memory,” part of an 132 A Community Within a Community “emancipationist vision” of the...