Organizing Freedom: Black Emancipation Activism in the Civil War Midwest by Jennifer R. Harbour (review)

Jennifer R. Harbour’s Organizing Freedom provides a riveting account of the complex nature of Black emancipation activism in antebellum and wartime Illinois and Indiana. Harbour deals impressively with subjects few historians have examined in depth: early Black migration to the Midwest, Black organizational and community development beyond the Northeast, and Black women’s activist and emancipation strategies within those regions. Black people migrated to the Midwest in search of educational, religious, and occupational freedoms (among other things), writes Harbour. Instead, they encountered a menacing world between slavery and true freedom. In response to growing Black populations in the Midwest, Illinois and Indiana passed a series of Black codes ensuring that Black people would not benefit from each state’s civil rights laws. Understanding how Black men and women responded to these threats on an everyday basis—all while managing to thrive and survive despite them—is the goal of Organizing Freedom.

Harbour structures her book around three interlocking goals. The first is to expand readers’ definition of emancipation to include the agency and activism of midwestern African Americans. Their experiences of freedom, she emphasizes, disrupt dichotomous notions of a slave South and free North. As Harbour notes, “to be black meant that freedom was never a given, no matter where one lived” (4). Harbour’s second goal is to shift attention away from emancipation in the Northeast and South and directly to Black women’s activism in the Midwest. Finally, Harbour seeks to provide an in-depth exploration of Black organizational activity in the Midwest in the decades before the Civil War. Crucial to this point and a connecting thread throughout the text is the idea of “emancipation activism.” She considers this to be a “gradual, incremental process” that unfolded alongside institution building and specifically at Black schools and churches (124). Harbour utilizes newspapers, church records, organizational records, state convention proceedings, letters, abolitionist papers, and government archival material to successfully reconstruct the social context of Black emancipation. A major strength of the text is its readability and the author’s ability to seamlessly weave stories of Black activism in Illinois and Indiana across paragraphs and pages. One wonders, however, if this emphasis minimizes the actual on-the-ground lived experiences of Blacks in each state, as well as the way those experiences varied between the Midwest’s rural and urban spaces. One wonders, too, whether Harbour over-emphasizes unity in her argument about the unique regional identity Blacks created in midwestern activist spaces. Did forms of violence or activism vary among states and counties, or across specific types of geographical spaces, such as towns and counties bordering slave states, port and urban cities, and rural settlements? Was residence in one of these spaces more advantageous than others? These are important questions for future scholarship to consider, given that it is the diversity of Black experiences within the Midwest that makes the region unique.

Perhaps the most noteworthy historiographical contribution of Harbour’s investigation is its attention to Black women’s political work and activism in the wartime Midwest. Scholarship on nineteenth-century Black women Midwesterners has lagged behind studies of Black women in other regions. The words of one archivist—“We don’t carry black women here”—impelled Harbour to delve deeper into recovering their voices (xiii). Chapter 5 is especially dedicated to that project. In its pages, Harbour distinguishes between the opportunities available to middle-and workingclass Black women. She also draws attention to the parallel gender roles that emerged between Black men and women in the realms of political activism, racial uplift, and community duty. With little to no access to the social and political worlds their counterparts traversed, Black women created their own political culture that allowed them to contribute to the larger goal of the Black community: emancipation for all. They first turned their attention inward to family and community itself by organizing philanthropic and mutual aid...