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   Mental Feasts Literary and Educational Societies and Lyceums Then, members of this society, as ye cultivate the oratorical, do it diligently, and with purpose; remembering that it is by the exercise of this weapon, perhaps more than any other, that America is to be made a free land not in name only but in deed and in truth. —William G. Allen, 1852 Every winter this church gave many entertainments to aid in paying off the mortgage, which at this time amounted to about eight thousand dollars. Mrs. Smith, as the chairman of the board of stewardesses, was inaugurating a fair—one that should eclipse anything of a similar nature ever attempted by the colored people, and numerous sewing-circles were being held among the members all over the city. Parlor entertainments where an admission fee of ten cents was collected from every patron, were also greatly in vogue, and the money thus obtained was put into a fund to defray the expense of purchasing eatables and decorations, and paying for the printing of tickets, circulars, etc., for the fair. —Pauline Hopkins, 1900 African Americans created societies for self-improvement, general racial uplift, and mutual aid as early as 1780, when the African Union Society was organized in Newport, Rhode Island.1 Black educational societies developed subsequently with expanded goals and were variously called literary, educational , reading-room, or debating societies and lyceums.2 Their development paralleled but rarely intersected with the history of the white American lyceum movement that usually had a community orientation, in that lectures, plays, and debates were held in public spaces. The first white lyceums on record were  Mental Feasts established in 1826 to provide a practical and inexpensive education for youth, to keep the community informed, and to train artisans in the practical applications of the sciences.3 In other words, they were always linked to popular education: in the initial stages in order to have informed workers, but eventually to disseminate practical and useful information community-wide. These early lyceums in the United States were called societies for mutual education and concentrated on education in the sciences. Collective endeavors, they were controlled and supported by the people whom they were organized to educate. They tended to leave political arguments for debating societies. Carl Bode links the rise of the lyceum movement to the Age of Jackson, beginning in 1828 when Andrew Jackson was elected president, and to the rise of democracy, when the white male population was given more control over government. During this period of populism, Jacksonians pushed to extend voting rights beyond landowners to include all white men of legal age. With the removal of the property requirement, more white American men could vote, and interest grew in having them acquire the education that would better equip them for participation in this new democracy. The lyceum, along with the development of public schools, helped them to acquire it. The lyceum also had the advantage of being cheap, costing nothing, of course, to those who did not participate. As the topic of lectures changed from the application of science to such subjects as biographies of famous persons, the audience included more women and others with broader interests. Bode writes that “[i]f there was ever an American dogma during these decades, it was the desirability of personal improvement.”4 Josiah Holbrook, generally credited with sustaining the lyceum movement, listed several benefits directly associated with the acquisition of literacy, including improving the quality of conversations, establishing libraries, training future teachers, providing an alternative to the “promiscuous assemblage of children” in public schools, and maintaining town histories.5 The lyceum also provided a legitimate form of evening entertainment; thus, while the education function remained, the lyceum developed into a source of amusement as well. This overview of the lyceum movement in early-nineteenth-century America provides a framework for considering the ways in which African American lyceum-type societies functioned as sites of rhetorical education.6 While few African Americans participated in or were welcomed to the meetings of the AngloAmerican lyceums, it is important to have a sense of the larger lyceum movement within which these associations developed. The desire for self-improvement, first economic, then intellectual, led African Americans to establish associations of their own to offer mutual support in these endeavors. The organizations had many similar and parallel goals. But the early societies were formed by blacks for   Mental Feasts blacks, not so much in response to rejection by white societies as...

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