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  • A Tale of Two Cities:Nineteenth-Century Black Community in North Carolina and New York
  • Janette Thomas Greenwood (bio)
Catherine W. Bishir. Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina, 1770–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. 380 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography and index. $24.95.
Judith Wellman. Brooklyn’s Promised Land: The Free Black Community of Weeksville, New York. New York: New York University Press, 2013. xii + 293 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $35.00.

In April 1864, a contingent of black men, led by brick mason Abraham Galloway, slipped out of Union-occupied New Bern, North Carolina, to call on President Lincoln at the White House. They presented the president with a petition from “the colored citizens of North Carolina” requesting that the president “finish the noble work” he had begun with the Emancipation Proclamation by advocating universal manhood suffrage after the war’s end. Citing the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created free and equal,” they also reminded Lincoln that, in North Carolina, free men of color had exercised the right to vote until 1835 (Bishir, pp. 68–69).

Also in 1864, journalist and educator Junius C. Morel, born a slave in the South and now a resident of the black enclave of Weeksville in Brooklyn, endorsed the development of separate African American communities as the key to equality. All rights, including political rights, he argued, depended on property ownership: “We want to be owners of lands, houses and stocks.” By creating separate communities in which blacks could become “industrious farmers, mechanics, and small tradesmen,” they would “gradually rise into respect and esteem as good citizens” and gain the equality they deeply desired (Wellman, pp. 111–12).

Both the New Bern petitioners and Weeksville leader Morel drew on a wealth of prewar experiences that shaped their contrasting strategies for attaining equal rights in 1864. As Catherine W. Bishir elegantly argues in Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina, 1770–1900, black artisans like those who called upon President Lincoln had crafted an identity [End Page 248] and had honed leadership skills that focused on advancing the interests of their race since the time of the American Revolution. The independent, free black enclave of Weeksville, as Judith Wellman shows in Brooklyn’s Promised Land: The Free Black Community of Weeksville, New York, proved to Morel the value of separate black communities that could provide a safe haven for nurturing economic growth, leadership, and respect.

As different as the Southern port city of New Bern and the tiny enclave of Weeksville were, Bishir and Wellman show that black community leaders faced similar struggles and obstacles, as well as the challenge of negotiating constantly shifting terrain, both locally and nationally. Sometimes they retreated, other times they charged forward, but always they acted with the same objective: achieving their full rights as U.S. citizens and securing the safety and freedom of their families, a struggle that they managed to sustain over generations.

Since the late 1960s, the theme of self-help, agency, and political activism has echoed in the rich literature on free black communities. In a 1997 review in this journal, historian Wilson J. Moses feared that “it is becoming increasingly difficult to say much that is new about Free Africans in the antebellum United States,” unless historians somehow managed “to invent some new frameworks of analysis.”1

Moses need not have fretted. Since he wrote his review essay, historians have added much that is new. To highlight but a few examples: Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (2008) illuminated the experiences of a cross-section of Philadelphia’s black women in transition from slavery to freedom. In African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784–1861 (2008), Leslie M. Alexander showed how competing identities shaped political activism and responses to issues such as colonization. Sydney Nathans’ To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (2012) not only recounts the powerful story of one freedom seeker’s passage but also highlights the white allies and networks fostered by free black...

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