Essential The Official African American Thread#2

[IllmaticDelta]

Paul Cuffee

Paul Cuffee or Paul Cuffe (January 17, 1759 – September 7, 1817) was a Quaker businessman, sea captain, patriot, and abolitionist. He was of Aquinnah Wampanoag and Ashanti descent and helped colonize Sierra Leone. Cuffe built a lucrative shipping empire and established the first racially integrated school in Westport, Massachusetts.[1]

A devout Christian, Cuffee often preached and spoke at the Sunday services at the multi-racial Society of Friends meeting house in Westport, Massachusetts.[2] In 1813, he donated most of the money to build a new meeting house. He became involved in the British effort to resettle freed slaves, many of whom had moved from the US to Nova Scotia after the American Revolution, to the fledgling colony of Sierra Leone. Cuffe helped establish The Friendly Society of Sierra Leone, which provided financial support for the colony.

The person who spearheaded “the first, black initiated ‘back to Africa’ effort in U.S. history,” according to the historian Donald R. Wright, was also the first free African American to visit the White House and have an audience with a sitting president. He was Paul Cuffee, a sea captain and an entrepreneur who was perhaps the wealthiest black American of his time.

Cuffee was born on Cuttyhunk Island, off Southern Massachusetts, on Jan. 17, 1759, and died on Sept. 7, 1817. He was one of 10 children of a freed slave, a farmer named Kofi Slocum. (“Kofi” is a Twi word for a boy born on Friday, so we know that he was an Ashanti from Ghana.) Kofi Anglicized his name to “Cuffee.”

Paul’s mother was Ruth Moses, a Wampanoag Native American. He ended up marrying a member of the Pequot tribe from Martha’s Vineyard, Alice Pequit.

In 1766, Kofi purchased a 116-acre farm in Dartmouth, Mass., on Buzzard’s Bay, which he left upon his death in 1772 to Paul and his brother, John. When his father died, Paul changed his surname from Slocum to Cuffee, and began what would prove to be an extraordinarily successful life at sea.

Starting as a whaler, then moving into maritime trading, Paul Cuffee eventually “bought and built ships, developing his own maritime enterprise that involved trading the length of the U.S. Atlantic coast, with trips to the Caribbean and Europe,” according to Wright. But he was also politically engaged: In 1780, he, his brother and five black men filed a petition protesting their “having No vote on Influence in the Election with those that tax us,” because they were “Chiefly of the African Extraction,” as his biographer, Lamont Thomas, reports. He was jailed, but got his taxes reduced.

Cuffee’s dream was that free African Americans and freed slaves “could establish a prosperous colony in Africa,” one based on emigration and trade. Cuffee’s visit to the White House happened like this: The U.S. had established an embargo on British goods in 1807, and relations were worsening with Great Britain. On April 19, 1812, U.S. Customs in Westport, Mass., seized Cuffee’s ship and its cargo upon its return from Sierra Leone and Great Britain as being in violation of the embargo. When customs refused to release his property, Cuffee sought redress directly from President James Madison.

On May 2, 1812, he went to the White House, where he met with Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin and with Madison himself, who greeted him warmly and ordered that his goods be returned. Madison queried Cuffee about his recent visits to Sierra Leone, and his ideas about African-American colonization of the new British colony.

The British had founded a settlement there for London’s Committee of the Black Poor; it was called the Province of Freedom in 1787. Then Freetown was founded as a settlement for freed slaves in 1792, the year when the black Loyalists (including George Washington’s former slave, Harry Washington) arrived from Nova Scotia. In 1808, Sierra Leone became a colony.

Cuffee’s dream was that free African Americans and freed slaves “could establish a prosperous colony in Africa,” one based on emigration and trade. As Wright put it, “Cuffee hoped to send at least one vessel each year to Sierra Leone, transporting African-American settlers and goods to the colony and returning with marketable African products.”


Engraving of Paul Cuffee by Mason & Maas, from a drawing by John Pole, M.D. (Library of Congress)

Sierra Leone was already populated in part by former American slaves who had received their freedom by running away from their masters and joining the British as black Loyalists in the Revolutionary War. When the British lost to the Americans, many of these black Loyalists were settled in Nova Scotia. And when conditions there proved too harsh, they had petitioned to be relocated in Sierra Leone.

To distinguish his plan from British and American efforts essentially to use colonization as a way of removing the threat that free African Americans posed to the continuation of slavery, in 1811 Cuffee founded the Friendly Society of Sierra Leone, a cooperative black group intended to encourage “the Black Settlers of Sierra Leone, and the Natives of Africa generally, in the Cultivation of their Soil, by the Sale of their Produce.” He made two trips to the colony that year.

In 1812, after returning from Sierra Leone, Cuffee traveled to Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York to form an African-American version of the British “black poor” organization. Named the “African Institution,” it had self-contained branches in each city, and was charged with mounting a coordinated, black-directed emigration movement.

Cuffee’s close friend, the wealthy sailmaker and inventor James Forten, became the secretary of the Philadelphia African Institution, while Prince Saunders, a well-known teacher and secretary of the African Masonic Lodge in Boston, became the secretary of the Boston African Institution. Cuffee’s movement seemed to be gaining steam among some of the most powerful and wealthy leaders of the free black community throughout the North.

On Dec. 10, 1815, Cuffee made history by transporting 38 African Americans (including 20 children) ranging in age from 6 months to 60 years from the United States to Sierra Leone on his brig, the Traveller, at a cost of $5,000. When they arrived on Feb. 3, 1816, Cuffee’s passengers became the first African Americans who willingly returned to Africa through an African-American initiative.

Cuffee’s dream of a wholesale African-American return to the continent, however, soon lost support from the free African-American community, many of whom had initially expressed support for it. As James Forten sadly reported in a letter to Cuffee dated Jan. 25, 1817, a meeting of several thousand black men had occurred at Richard Allen’s Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, to discuss the merits of Cuffee’s colonization program and the work of the African Institution. The news was devastating: “Three thousand at least attended, and there was not one soul that was in favor of going to Africa. They think that the slaveholders want to get rid of them so as to make their property more secure.” And then in August, Forten co-authored a statement that declared that “The plan of colonizing is not asked for by us. We renounce and disclaim any connection with it.”

When Paul Cuffee died just a month later, on Sept. 7, 1817, “the dream of a black-led emigration movement,” Dorothy Sterling concludes, “ended with him.” However, the cause of black emigration would be taken up by a succession of black leaders, including Henry Highland Garnet, Bishop James T. Holly, Martin R. Delany, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and, of course, Marcus Mosiah Garvey.

Some of his descendants

 

[IllmaticDelta]

William Warrick Cardozo

William Warrick Cardozo (1905-1962) was an African-American scientist who pioneered research on individuals suffering from sickle cell anemia.[1] He initially attended Hampton University and later Ohio State University.[2] He was a medical doctor who worked primarily in Washington DC.[3] He additionally worked on the development of African-American children as well as Hodgkin's disease.[1] He died of a heart attack.[2]

*William Warrick Cardozo was born on this date in 1905. He was an African American physician and pediatrician.

From Washington D.C. Cardozo attended the public schools in his hometown. His father was Frederick Lewis Cardozo and his mother was Blanche Warrick. He also attended Hampton Institute and went to Ohio State University where he received his AB in 1929 and MD in 1933. He was an intern at City Hospital and took a two-year fellowship at Children’s Hospital and Provident Hospital in Chicago. He is best remembered for his pioneering investigations into sickle cell anemia.

Cardozo’s ground breaking paper, “Immunologic Studies of Sickle Cell anemia,” appeared in the Archives of Internal Medicine, October 1937. That same year he left the Midwest to begin a private practice and join Freedmen’s Hospital and the Howard University College of Medicine. Cardozo worked for 26 years as a school medical inspector for the District of Columbia Board of health. He would later be promoted to clinical assistant professor and clinical associate professor of pediatrics. In addition to his work on sickle cell anemia, Cardozo studied and published research in children’s gastrointestinal disorders, Hodgkin's disease, and the early growth and development of black children.

He also served for twenty-four years as a medical inspector for the District of Columbia Board of Health. William Warrick Cardozo passed away suddenly in Washington, D.C. on August 11, 1962, after suffering a massive heart attack.

Sixty years ago this month, W. Warrick Cardozo published a paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine entitled, "Immunologic Studies in Sickle Cell Anemia," which reported the results of one of the first studies of the disease. Cardozo, a young American physician, discovered that sickle cell anemia--a condition in which a majority of red blood cells are crescent shaped--runs in families and that it strikes almost exclusively people of African descent. In addition, Cardozo found that not all victims were killed by the disease and that not all persons whose blood contained sickle cells suffered from anemia. These important observations came 13 years before researchers had identified the hemoglobin abnormality that causes sickle cell anemia.

[Source: Emily McMurray, Ed. Notable Twentieth Century Scientists. Gale Research Inc. ITP. 1995.]

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Tunis Campbell

Tunis Gulic Campbell (April 1, 1812 – December 4, 1891) was an African-American politician of the 19th century, and a major figure in Reconstruction Georgia.

Tunis Campbell was the highest-ranking and most influential African American politician in nineteenth-century Georgia. Born on April 1, 1812, in Middlebrook, New Jersey, he was the eighth of ten children of free black parents. From ages five to eighteen he attended an otherwise all-white Episcopal school in Babylon, New York, where he trained for missionary service with the American Colonization Society's program of transporting African Americans to Liberia. Upon graduation—which coincided with the onset of the second Great Awakening and the rise of William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator—Campbell joined the Methodist Church and threw himself into evangelical uplift. In 1832 he founded an anticolonization society and pledged "never to leave this country until every slave was free on American soil."
While he preached against slavery and established schools, Campbell worked as a hotel steward in New York City and Boston. His Hotel Keepers, Head Waiters, and Housekeepers' Guide (1848) provides practical information for supervising and running a first-class hotel, but the book is more valuable for its instruction in interracial social skills, its insistence that managers recognize the dignity of labor, and its emphasis on the need for workers to be educated, well paid, prompt, clean, and competitive. White employers described Campbell as a man disposed "to elevate the condition and character of persons of his color."
Before the Civil War (1861-65) he actively participated in the Colored Convention Movement and often shared the stage with the writer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. By 1861 Campbell was married, had three children, and was a copartner in a New York bakery. In 1863 U.S. secretary of war Edwin Stanton commissioned the fifty-one-year-old Campbell to work in Port Royal, South Carolina, where former slaves were gathering under the protection of the U.S. military.
After Union general William T. Sherman captured Savannah in December 1864, on his march to the sea, and Congress set up the Freedmen's Bureau in March 1865, Campbell was appointed to supervise land claims and resettlement on five Georgia islands: Ossabaw, Delaware, Colonels, St. Catherines, and Sapelo. Georgia planters, who received pardons from U.S. president Andrew Johnson, regained control of these islands in 1866. Campbell quickly purchased 1,250 acres at Belle Ville in McIntosh County and there established an association of black landowners to divide parcels and profit from the land.
In 1867 Congress ordered a further Reconstruction of the South. As vice president of the Republican Party in Georgia, Campbell worked to register voters before being elected as a justice of the peace, a delegate to the state constitutional convention, and a state senator from the Second Senatorial District (Liberty, McIntosh, and Tattnall counties). In the legislature Campbell pushed for laws for equal education, integrated jury boxes, homestead exemptions, abolishment of imprisonment for debt, open access to public facilities, and fair voting procedures. As a justice of the peace, minister, and political boss, Campbell organized a black power structure in McIntosh County that protected freed people from white abuses, whether against their bodies or in labor negotiations. He headed a 300-strong African American militia that guarded him from reprisals by the Ku Klux Klan or others, even though his home was burned, he was poisoned, and his family lived in constant fear.
After Democrats regained state power in 1871 by forcing Republican Governor Rufus Bullock to flee the state, they began a concerted effort to overturn Reconstruction. Campbell's legislative seat was taken, and a series of lawsuits kept him in legal trouble. He traveled to Washington, D.C., where he met with U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant and Senator Charles Sumner to urge that the government intervene actively to save Reconstruction. Finally, in 1876, while the U.S. attorney general tried to free him, Campbell was tried and convicted of malfeasance in office, taken from a Savannah jail, handcuffed, chained, and leased out for one year to a convict labor camp. Upon release he went immediately to Washington to meet with U.S. president Rutherford B. Hayes and wrote a small book, Sufferings of the Reverend T. G. Campbell and His Family in Georgia (1877). He died in Boston on December 4, 1891.

 

[Black Lightning]

The African Civilization Society (ACS) was founded in 1858 by Henry Highland Garnet who sought to encourage blacks American to immigrate to Africa. Garnet envisioned educated black Americans moving to the African Continent as cultural missionaries to lead the economic, political, and moral development of the various indigenous peoples. The ACS Constitution outlined its goals for civilizing and Christianizing Africa and people of African descent in other areas of the world. The ACS also saw itself as a major force in the destruction of the African slave trade and in promoting African self-governance and self-reliance. Specifically, the ACS sought to make African nations independent cotton producers. They believed that cotton grown in Africa and sold on the world market would break the monopoly of southern United States slave-grown cotton in European and American textile production, and thus hasten the end of slavery.

Headquartered in the Weeksville section of Brooklyn, New York, the ACS worked with black churches and schools. Prominent African Americans involved with the ACS included Reverend Amos N. Freeman, Reverend Rufus L. Perry, Richard H. Cain, and John Sella Martin.

Embracing a 19th Century version of cultural nationalism, the ACS argued that black Americans should lead their own education efforts and establish and control the political and social institutions in their communities. This majority-male organization was one of the first 19th Century groups to recognize the importance of black women in reform and uplift efforts. Challenging the prevailing view that black Americans were dependent by nature and by generations of enslavement, they called on black leaders to elevate their race through the promotion of ideas of self-reliance and self-help. Such efforts, they said, required an educated leadership.

By 1866 the African Civilization Society employed 69 African Americans engaged in teaching over 2,000 students in Sabbath and day schools in the Northeast. Also by that date, the ACS was the only black association sending teachers to the South to educate the freed people.

The African Civilization Society began to decline around 1866 due to financial difficulties. By 1869 the organization ended its activities.

 

[Black Lightning]

Jacob Francis, Revolutionary War veteran, was born on January 15, 1754 in Amwell, New Jersey. His mother was African American and his father’s race was unknown. What is known of Francis’ childhood is found in the personal testimony included on his military pension application.

It is unknown if Francis was born free or into slavery, but as a child he was bound out to no fewer than five men before coming of age. His first indenture was with Henry Wambaugh, who then sold Francis’ time to Michael Hatt, who in turn sold the boy’s time to farmer Minner Gulick (1731-1804). When Francis was 13, Gulick sold his time to Joseph Saxton who, in May 1768, took the young man as his servant to New York, Long Island and then to the Island of St. John. In about November 1769, the two sailed to Salem, Massachusetts where Saxton sold the fifteen-year-old’s time to Salem resident Benjamin Deacon, with whom Francis remained until he turned 21 in January 1775.

Within a matter of weeks, the Revolutionary War erupted nearby. By October, Jacob Francis had enlisted as a private in the 8th Massachusetts Regiment, which became the 16th Continental Regiment under the command of Colonel Paul D. Sergeant. Jacob took the surname of one of his previous custodians upon enlistment, but later changed it after learning his surname from his mother.

Francis’ regiment helped drive the British out of Boston. They then sailed to New York where they participated in the Battle of Long Island on August 27, 1776. His regiment then retreated to Peekskill, New York, then to Morristown, New Jersey, and finally into Trenton, New Jersey in time for the Battles of Trenton on December 26, 1776 and January 2, 1777. Francis left his Army unit in 1777 at Trenton to return to his childhood home, where his mother was in ill health. Francis did not return to his unit to muster out or receive his back pay. Instead he enrolled in the New Jersey militia, serving until 1781.

In September 1789, Jacob Francis married Mary, an enslaved woman from the household of Nathaniel Hunt, and soon thereafter purchased his wife’s freedom. Jacob and Mary settled in Flemington, New Jersey and had a large family, including sons John, Jacob, Isaac, and Abner H. Francis.

During its 1826 July 4th celebration, the city of Flemington honored its living Revolutionary War soldiers, including two African American veterans, Jacob Francis and Lewis English. By this time, Francis had still not collected the back pay owed to him by the U.S. government. Within a few years, however, Francis sought compensation under an 1832 Act of Congress, which expanded military pension benefits to include all those who had served at least two years in the Continental Army or State militias. After submitting his detailed service narrative, supported by the testimony of several character witnesses, his name was placed on the pension roll in 1833.

Jacob Francis died on July 26, 1836 in Trenton. Mary Francis was granted his widow’s pension in 1843.

 

[Black Lightning]

Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation (1775)

This historic proclamation, dated November 7, 1775 and issued from on board a British warship lying off Norfolk, Virginia, by royal governor and Scottish aristocrat John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, offered the first large-scale emancipation of slave and servant labor in the history of colonial British America. It grew out of Dunmore’s efforts to counter an impending attack on his capital of Williamsburg by patriot militia in the spring of 1775, when he several times threatened to free and arm slaves to defend the cause of royal government. By the time he retreated offshore he was already gathering slaves seeking refuge; his November proclamation commanding Virginians to support the crown or be judged traitors now formally offered freedom to all slaves and indentured servants belonging to rebels and able to bear arms for the crown. Within weeks, several hundred slaves, many with their families, had joined him. They enlisted in what Dunmore christened his “Ethiopian Regiment” and formed the bulk of the royal troops that first defeated patriot forces but then fell victim to disease and attack, evacuating the Chesapeake Region for New York by August 1776.

Dunmore’s proclamation offered freedom only to those who would flee from rebel masters and serve the crown. Its purpose was strategic, to disable rebellion, rather than humanitarian, yet its effect was rather the reverse. White southerner colonists swung to oppose royal authority as it appeared that Dunmore and his “Damned, infernal, Diabolical” proclamation were inciting slave insurrection: nothing, it can be argued, so quickly lost the South for the crown. British officialdom, however, never repudiated the proclamation’s message and soon established an alliance with black Americans that brought thousands of escaped southern slaves to the side of the British forces operating in the south. The role and plight of these fugitives during and after the Revolutionary War would alter the course of a host of black lives and help swell sentiment, particularly in Britain, for an end to slavery and the slave trade. A short-term failure, Dunmore’s proclamation set in motion events far beyond its author’s intentions.

 

[Black Lightning]

James Armistead [Lafayette] was an African American spy during the American Revolution. Born in Virginia as a slave to William Armistead in 1760, he volunteered to join the Army in 1781. After gaining the consent of his owner, Armistead was stationed to serve under the Marquis de Lafayette, the commander of French forces allied with the American Continental Army. Lafayette employed Armistead as a spy. While working for Lafayette he successfully infiltrated British General Charles Cornwallis's headquarters posing as a runaway slave hired by the British to spy on the Americans.

While pretending to be a British spy, Armistead gained the confidence of General Benedict Arnold and General Cornwallis. Arnold was so convinced of Armistead's pose as a runaway slave that he used him to guide British troops through local roads. Armistead often traveled between camps, spying on British officers, who spoke openly about their strategies in front of him. Armistead documented this information in written reports, delivered them to other American spies, and then return to General Cornwallis's camp.

In the summer of 1781, General George Washington sent a message to General Lafayette, instructing him to keep his forces strong and to inform him of Cornwallis's equipment, military personnel, and future strategies. Lafayette sent several spies to infiltrate Cornwallis's camp, yet none proved able to produce valuable information for him until he received Armistead's reports dated July 31, 1781. The information in these reports helped Lafayette trap the British at Hampton. Later that summer Armistead's reports helped the Americans win the battle at Yorktown, prompting the British to surrender.

After the Revolution, Lafayette praised Armistead for his dedication and instrumental role in the surrender at Yorktown. Armistead returned to William Armistead after the war to continue his life as a slave, as he was not eligible for emancipation under the Act of 1783 for slave-soldiers (he was considered a slave-spy). In 1784, Lafayette found Armistead in Virginia and was disappointed to find he was still a slave. Lafayette wrote a testimonial on Armistead's behalf and two years later the Virginia General Assembly emancipated him. It was at this time that Armistead made "Lafayette" his last name, in honor of the General.

After receiving his freedom, he moved nine miles south of New Kent County in Virginia, bought forty acres of land and began farming. Armistead married, raised a large family and was granted $40 a year by the Virginia legislature as pension for his services during the American Revolution.

James Armistead Lafayette died in 1832 at the age of 72 in Virginia.

 

[Black Lightning]

Minister Jarena Lee was the first authorized female preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church. Lee, whose family or maiden name is unknown, was born to a poor but free black family on February 11, 1783, in Cape May, New Jersey. In 1790 at the age of seven, Lee was sent to work as a live-in servant for a white family named Sharp.
Lee moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as a teenager and continued to work as a domestic servant. One afternoon, Lee attended a worship service at Bethel Church where Bishop Richard Allen, founder of the A.M.E. Church, was scheduled to preach. After hearing the powerful sermon delivered by Allen, Lee became filled with the Holy Spirit and converted to Christianity.

In 1807 Lee heard the voice of God commissioning her to preach the Gospel. She was initially reluctant to pursue ministry, given the male-dominated nature of the church. However, she decided to confide in Bishop Allen and revealed to him her call to preach. Allen told Lee that he could not grant her permission to preach because he was required to uphold the A.M.E. Church’s ban against female ministers.

In 1811 Lee married Pastor Joseph Lee, and the couple had two children. After seven years of marriage, Lee’s husband died. During the course of her marriage and after her husband’s death, her desire to proclaim the word of God grew even stronger. This caused Lee to renew her advocacy for women in ministry.

In 1819 during a worship service at Bethel Church, a guest preacher began struggling with his message and abruptly stopped preaching. As he stared into the congregation at a loss for words, Lee sprang to her feet and began preaching, picking up where the minister had left off. After Lee’s sermon, she was afraid that Bishop Allen would punish her for preaching without permission. On the contrary, Allen was so impressed by Lee that he officially gave her authorization to preach the Gospel. Allen asserted that God had called Lee to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Shortly thereafter, Lee began to travel to various cities for preaching engagements and was highly praised for her powerful sermons.

In addition to her work in ministry, Lee was also heavily involved in the abolitionist movement and joined the American Antislavery Society in 1839. To share her experiences in ministry, Lee decided to pen her autobiography titled The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee. She completed her autobiography in expanded form in 1849. The exact date and circumstances of Minister Lee’s death are unknown. However, the records of Mount Pisgah AME Church Cemetery where she is buried indicate that she died in 1855. Other sources list her death in 1857.

 

[Black Lightning]

Elizabeth Freeman was born into slavery in Claverack, New York in 1742. During the 1770s, she lived in the household of Colonel John Ashley of Sheffield, a prominent citizen who at that time also served as a judge of the Berkshire Court of Common Pleas. Colonel Ashley purchased Freeman from a Mr. Hogeboom when she was six months of age. Upon suffering physical abuse from Ashley’s wife, Freeman escaped her home and refused to return. She found a sympathetic ear with attorney Theodore Sedgwick, the father of the writer Catherine Sedgwick. Apparently, as she served dinner to her masters, she had heard them speaking of freedom—in this case freedom from England—and she applied the concepts of equality and freedom for all to herself.

In 1781 Freeman, with the assistance of Sedgwick, initiated the case Brom and Bett v. Ashley that set a precedent for the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts. According to the Massachusetts Judicial Review, the 1781 Berkshire county case of Brom and Bett v. Ashley, often referred to as the Mum Bett or Elizabeth Freeman case, was unique because it occurred less than one year after the adoption of the Massachusetts Constitution and because, in contrast to prior freedom suits, there was no claim that John Ashley, the slave owner, had violated a specific law. This case was a direct challenge to the very existence of slavery in Massachusetts.

Once free, Freeman stayed with the Sedgwick family as a servant in gratitude to Theodore Sedgwick. Sedgwick in arguing a later case used the example of Freeman when he said in defense of the abolition of slavery, “If there could be a practical refutation of the imagined superiority of our race to hers, the life and character of this woman would afford that refutation.” Freeman died on December 28, 1829 at 85 years of age.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett

Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett (October 16, 1833 – November 13, 1908) was an African American who was appointed United States Ambassador to Haiti in 1869. He was the first African-American diplomat.

Ebenezer Bassett was appointed as new leaders emerged among free African Americans after the American Civil War. An educator, abolitionist, and civil rights activist, Bassett was the U.S. diplomatic envoy in 1869 to Haiti, the “Black Republic” of the Western Hemisphere. Through eight years of bloody civil war and coups d'état there, Bassett served in one of the most crucial, but difficult postings of his time. Haiti was of strategic importance in the Caribbean basin for its shipping lanes and as a naval coaling station.

Ebenezer D. Bassett was appointed U.S. Minister Resident to Haiti in 1869, making him the first African American diplomat. For eight years, the educator, abolitionist, and black rights activist oversaw bilateral relations through bloody civil warfare and coups d'état on the island of Hispaniola. Bassett served with distinction, courage, and integrity in one of the most crucial, but difficult postings of his time.

Born in Connecticut on October 16, 1833, Ebenezer D. Bassett was the second child of Eben Tobias and Susan Gregory. In a rarity during the mid-1800s, Bassett attended college, becoming the first black student to integrate the Connecticut Normal School in 1853. He then taught in New Haven, befriending the legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Later, he became the principal of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s Institute for Colored Youth (ICY).

During the Civil War, Bassett became one of the city’s leading voices into the cause behind that conflict, the liberation of four million black slaves and helped recruit African American soldiers for the Union Army. In nominating Bassett to become Minister Resident to Haiti, President Ulysses S. Grant made him one of the highest ranking black members of the United States government.

During his tenure the American Minister Resident also dealt with cases of citizen commercial claims, diplomatic immunity for his consular and commercial agents, hurricanes, fires, and numerous tropical diseases.

The case that posed the greatest challenge to him, however, was Haitian political refugee General Pierre Boisrond Canal. The general was among the band of young leaders who had successfully ousted the former President Sylvan Salnave from power in 1869. By the time of the subsequent Michel Domingue regime in the mid 1870s Canal had retired to his home outside the capital. Domingue, the new Haitian President, however, brutally hunted down any perceived threat to his power including Canal.

General Canal came to Bassett and requested political asylum. A standoff resulted, with Bassett’s home surrounded by over a thousand of Domingue’s soldiers. Finally, after five-month siege of his residence, Bassett negotiated Canal’s safe release for exile in Jamaica.

Upon the end of the Grant Administration in 1877, Bassett submitted his resignation as was customary with a change of hands in government. When he returned to the United States, he spent an additional ten years as the Consul General for Haiti in New York City, New York. Prior to this death on November 13, 1908, he returned to live in Philadelphia, where his daughter Charlotte also taught at the ICY.

Ebenezer D. Bassett was a role model not simply for his symbolic importance as the first African American diplomat. His concern for human rights, his heroism, and courage in the face of pressure from Haitians, as well as his own capital, place him in the annals of great American diplomats.

We know Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as two of today's most high-profile African American political figures, but who paved the way for these notable diplomats? More than one hundred and thirty years ago, Ebenezer D. Bassett served as the first black United States ambassador. In the midst of the aftermath of the Civil War, the U.S. government broke the color barrier by naming this leading educator, abolitionist, and activist to the controversial post of ambassador to the hemisphere's Black Republic - Haiti. For the first time, a nation founded on the principle that "all men are created equal" would have as its representative abroad someone previously less than equal under the law. This movement toward equality proved to be a force impossible to turn back, leading to a wider acceptance of blacks in U.S. foreign policy. This book lays bare the struggles Bassett faced as a pioneer of one the most controversial subjects in America's history: racial integration.

This book highlights Bassett's achievements, which directly contributed to the racial revolution in the U.S. These include being appointed the first African American diplomat and chief of a U.S. diplomatic mission, leading the integration of public schools, and fighting for equal rights alongside revolutionaries such as Frederick Douglass. Bassett played a critical role in foreign affairs during the late 19th century, the formative years of American expansionism in Latin America and the Caribbean. 2008 marks the 100th anniversary of Bassett's death. Though he is long forgotten by history, his legacy as an innovator, activist, and diplomat lives on, and his life story--a tale of intelligence, integrity, and bravery--serves as an inspiration to patriotic Americans of all races and backgrounds. Hero of Hispaniola secures Bassett's legacy as the first African American political figure, a man who not only altered the American political structure, but led the way for all future civil rights advocates to follow.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs (17 April 1823 – 11 July 1915) was an African-American attorney, judge, diplomat and banker. Born in Philadelphia, he moved to California as a young man during the California Gold Rush. Angered by discriminatory laws passed in 1858, he and several hundred American blacks moved that year to Victoria, British Columbia. Gibbs lived and worked there for ten years.


After the American Civil War, Gibbs and many of the other black settlers returned to the United States. In the late 1860s, he settled in Little Rock, Arkansas, the capital of the state, and became an attorney. He was active in Reconstruction politics, and in 1873 Gibbs was elected as a city judge, the first black judge elected in the US. In 1897 he was appointed as American consul to Madagascar.


Early life and education

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs was born in 1823 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (a free state), as the second of four siblings, the eldest being brother Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs. Their father was a Methodist minister.[1] As a young adult, Gibbs became active in the abolitionist movement in the city and worked for Frederick Douglass.[2] He was also involved in the Philomatheon Institute of Philadelphia, a literary organization which included Douglass, Charles Burleigh Purvis, William Whipper, and Izaiah Weir.[3] Philadelphia had long had a flourishing free black community, as people had found work there even before the revolution and slavery was abolished after the Revolutionary War. Like tens of thousands of other men, Gibbs moved to California during the Gold Rush years.[2] He arrived in San Francisco in late 1850 and tried to find work as a carpenter, a trade he had pursued in Philadelphia, but was discouraged by discrimination he faced. He then partnered with Nathan Pointer selling clothers, and then with Peter Lester importing boots and shoes. In 1851 together with Jonas H. Townsend, W. H. Newby, and William H. Hall, he published the Alta California,[3] "the state's only African-American newspaper."[2] He was later a proprietor, publisher, and contributor to another paper, The Mirror of the Times.[4] He was also active in statewide conventions of black people in 1854, 1855, and 1857, and together with Lester, stood against poll taxes in San Francisco.[3]


In 1858 he and other American blacks were angered when the California legislature passed discriminatory laws intended to discourage blacks from entering or staying in the state: they were deprived of the right to own property and were disqualified from giving evidence against a white person in court. All black people in California were required to wear distinctive badges.[5] Angered by these developments, Gibbs and two other African-American men went to British Columbia to meet with Sir James Douglas, governor of the province, to learn about the treatment of blacks in Canada. Douglas assured the Americans that they would be treated like other residents in this frontier area.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on April 17, 1823, Mifflin Wistar Gibbs apprenticed as a carpenter. By his early 20s he was an activist in the abolition movement, sharing platforms with Frederick Douglass and helping in the Underground Railroad. Black intellectual ferment of the era gave him a superb education outside the classroom, and he became a powerful writer. In 1850 he migrated to San Francisco, California; starting as a bootblack, he was soon a successful merchant, the founder of a black newspaper, Mirror of the Times, and a leading member of the city’s black community.

In 1858 Gibbs moved to Victoria in what is now British Columbia, part of a mass migration of black men and women seeking equality under the British flag. Again he prospered, first as a merchant, then as a property developer, contractor, and elected politician. In 1866 Gibbs was elected to the Victoria (BC) City Council becoming the second black elected official in Canada and only the third elected anywhere on the North American continent.

Gibbs briefly returned to the US in 1859 to court and marry Maria Alexander, who had studied at Oberlin College. In developing a coal mine in the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1869-70, he built British Columbia’s first railroad. A tireless advocate for the black community, he helped to organize the colony’s first militia, an all-black unit known as the African Rifles. As an elected delegate to the Yale Convention, he also helped to frame the terms by which British Columbia entered the Canadian confederation.

Mifflin and Maria Gibbs separated in the late 1860s. Returning to the United States in 1870, Gibbs studied law in Oberlin, Ohio (where his wife Maria had settled, and where four of their five children graduated from Oberlin College). He toured the Reconstruction South and settled in Little Rock, Arkansas, soon becoming the first black elected municipal judge in the United States. His long and sometimes dangerous efforts on behalf of the Republican Party earned him an ambiguous reward: at the age of 74, Republican President William McKinley in 1897 named Gibbs U.S. consul in Tamatave, Madagascar. After four years Gibbs resigned in 1901 at 78 for health reasons. He returned to publish an autobiography, Shadow and Light, in 1902, with an introduction by Booker T. Washington.

Back in Little Rock, Gibbs launched Capital Citiy Savings Bank, became a partner in the Little Rock Electric Light Company, gained control of several pieces of local real estate, and supported various philanthropic causes. He died in Little Rock on July 11, 1915 at the age of 92.

Canada 150: Mifflin Gibbs was first black elected to public office in B.C.

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, circa 1873.Photo by ROYAL B.C. MUSEUM B.C. ARCHIVES

To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.

The Fathers of Confederation tend to dominate the imagination as white, whiskered and well-heeled — pinnacles of prosperity in the property-owning social upper crust. But one of B.C.’s most remarkable framers of the terms under which the westernmost province joined Canada was a black man who started out as a carpenter’s apprentice, worked with the Underground Railway to spirit escaped slaves from the American South to safety in Canada and England, and came to Victoria with the gold rush in 1858.

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs was born in Philadelphia on April 17, 1823, the second of four children born to Jonathan C. Gibbs, a Methodist minister, and Maria Jackson, whom he described as “a hard-shell Baptist.” In 1831, when he had been enrolled in school for only a year, his father died suddenly and he had to find work to support his ailing mother. He was eight years old. Gibbs held and drove horses for a doctor for $3 a month until he was 16 when he apprenticed to a carpenter.

In 1839, he joined a literary society whose members included educated anti-slavery activists. Gibbs was soon helping slaves escape from the South. In 1849, famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass invited him on a lecture tour of New York State to denounce slavery. Gibbs made a sufficient impression that years later, when he wrote his memoir, Shadow & Light, Booker T. Washington wrote the introduction.

The following year, Gibbs followed the California gold rush to San Francisco where he worked as a carpenter and as a bootblack. He saved his earnings and became partners in a business importing fine boots and shoes. He started a newspaper. In 1857, he found himself subject to a poll tax although as a black he was denied the vote. Since he couldn’t vote, he refused to pay the tax. His property was seized and put up for auction. Then the state legislature debated restricting black immigration and black children were forced out of public schools.

In June, 1858, he joined a contingent of more than 400 San Francisco blacks invited to Vancouver Island by James Douglas, brought a big inventory of miners supplies and equipment, sold out immediately and the next day was in business in Victoria as a merchant. He was elected to Victoria city council in 1866, the first black person elected to public office, served two terms and chaired the finance committee.

He was the Saltspring Island delegate to the Yale Convention, a meeting of 26 delegates from around B.C., which was important in propelling the colony toward union with Canada in 1871. Gibbs returned to the U.S. in 1870, settled in Arkansas, became the first black judge in the country, then a diplomat, founded a bank, and died July 15, 1915, having left an indelible mark on B.C.

 

[Black Lightning]

Educator Mary Jane Patterson is considered to be the first African American woman to receive a B.A. degree when she graduated from Oberlin College in 1862. A fellow Oberlin alumnus, Lucy Stanton Day Sessions, graduated twelve years earlier but was not in a program that awarded official bachelor’s degrees.

Although Patterson’s early years are unclear, it is believed that she was born into slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1840. As a young girl, she arrived in Oberlin, Ohio with her family during the mid-1850s. In 1857 she completed a year of preparatory coursework at Oberlin College. Rather than transitioning into Oberlin’s two-year program for women, she enrolled in the school’s “gentlemen’s course,” a four-year program of classical studies that led to a Bachelor of Arts degree with high honors in 1862.

Patterson spent the next year as a teacher in the southern Ohio town of Chillicothe. At the age of 22 she left Ohio for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where she taught at the Institute for Colored Youth for the next five years. In 1869 Patterson moved to Washington, D.C. to teach at the newly founded Preparatory High School for Colored Youth (later M Street High School and now Paul Laurence Dunbar High School) which was the first U.S. public high school for African Americans and the first public high school in Washington, D.C.

Two years later in 1871 Patterson became principal of the school, serving for one year before being appointed assistant principal when Richard T. Greener, the first black graduate of Harvard University in Massachusetts, came on as principal. Greener left after one year, and Patterson resumed her position as principal, staying there until her resignation in 1884. During her tenure the school thrived and became well known as a prestigious institution for secondary education.

It is believed that Patterson remained at the school as a teacher following her tenure as principal. Aside from her career as an educator, Patterson was involved in women’s rights, helping to found the Colored Women’s League of Washington, D.C. She died at the age of 54 on September 24, 1894. Her home at 1532 15th Street, NW is part of the Washington, D.C.’s historic walking tour. -

 

[Black Lightning]

Joseph Charles Price, founder and first president of Livingston College, in North Carolina, was born free on February 10, 1854 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His mother, a free black woman named Emily Paulin, moved with her son to New Bern, North Carolina which was then occupied by Union forces, to escape the violence of the Civil War. Shortly after, she married David Price and Joseph took his stepfather's name. In New Bern Joseph Price studied at St. Cyprian Episcopal School founded for the children of ex-slaves by Boston educators. He later attended Shaw University in Raleigh in 1873 but transferred to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1875. Price graduated as valedictorian in 1879 after winning several oratorical prizes. Impressed with the young Price, Bishop James Walker Hood of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church appointed him to its delegation to the World Ecumenical Conference meeting in London, England.
In London Price amazed audiences with his powerful speaking. Called "The World's Orator" by the British press, Price was encouraged by the delegation to stay in England and raise funds for the reestablishment of Zion Wesley Institute, later to be Livingston College. The original school was founded in 1870 as a seminary for training A.M.E. Zion ministers, but closed after only three years in operations. Over the next year, Price was able to raise $10,000 for the school, and returned to North Carolina in 1882. The town of Salisbury offered the school $1,000 and 40 acres called "Delta Grove" belonging to J.M. Gray. The school opened later that year with 28-year-old Joseph Price as its president.

For the next ten years Price served as president of Livingston College. In 1890 he became involved in the Afro-American League and was elected president of the National Protective Association. That same year he was voted one of the "Ten Greatest Negroes Who Ever Lived." Price advocated education to help ameliorate the damages done by generations of slavery and discrimination for whites as well as blacks. He died in Salisbury, North Carolina in 1893.

 

[Black Lightning]

Mary Eliza Mahoney, America’s first black graduate nurse, was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts on May 7, 1845. Originally from North Carolina, her parents were among the southern free blacks who moved north prior to the Civil War seeking a less racially discriminatory environment. The eldest of three siblings, Mahoney attended the Phillips Street School in Boston.

At the age of 20, Mary Mahoney began working as a nurse. Supplementing her low income as an untrained practical nurse, Mahoney took on janitorial duties at the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Incorporated on March 18, 1863, New England Hospital provided its patients state-of-the-art medical care by solely female physicians. It also assisted women in the practical study of medicine.

On March 3, 1878, Mary Mahoney was accepted into New England Hospital’s graduate nursing program. During her training, Mahoney participated in mandatory 16-hour-per-day ward duty, where she oversaw the well-being of six patients at a time. Days not requiring ward duty involved attending day-long lectures while simultaneously devoting time to her studies. Completing the rigorous 16-month program on August 1, 1879, Mahoney was among the three graduates out of the 40 students who began the program and the only African American awarded a diploma. Upon her graduation Mary Mahoney became the first African American graduate nurse.

Mary Mahoney worked as a nurse for the next four decades. During her 40-year career she attracted a number of private clients who were among the most prominent Boston families. A deeply religious person, the diminutive five-foot tall, ninety-pound Mahoney devoted herself to private nursing due to the rampant discrimination against black women in public nursing at the time.

Mary Mahoney was widely recognized within her field as a pioneer who opened the door of opportunity for many black women interested in the nursing profession. As such, when the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN) was organized in New York in 1908, Mahoney was asked to give the welcoming address. Following her speech at the first NACGN Convention at Boston in 1909, Mahoney was made a lifetime member, exempted from dues, and elected chaplain.

Admitted to New England Hospital for care on December 7, 1925, Mahoney succumbed to breast cancer on January 4, 1926 at the age of eighty-one. Numerous honors were posthumously given to Mary Mahoney, including the Mary Mahoney Medal, an award offered annually which signifies excellence in nursing.

 

[Black Lightning]

John Henry Merrick—insurance agent, entrepreneur, business owner—was born in Clinton, North Carolina on September 7, 1859. Merrick was born a slave; he lived with his mother Martha Merrick and a younger brother. With the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation his family was freed. When Merrick was twelve he and his family relocated to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He got a job as a helper in a brickyard which provided support for his family. At the age of eighteen Merrick moved to Raleigh, North Carolina where he began work as a hod carrier. Merrick eventually became a brick mason and worked on the construction of Shaw University in Raleigh.

Merrick also worked as a shoe shine boy in a barbershop. When he was not shining shoes he watched and learned the trade of barbering. In 1880, his friend John Wright asked Merrick to join him in relocating in Durham, North Carolina to start a new barbershop business. After six months Merrick bought shares in the barbershop and became its co-owner. In 1892 Wright sold his shares to Merrick making him sole proprietor. Eventually Merrick owned eight barbershops in Durham. Responding to the prevailing racial segregation patterns, Merrick owned shops that catered exclusively to black and white customers.

In 1881, one year after Merrick arrived in Durham to work as a barber, he began buying property in an all-black section of the city known as the Hayti. He bought and built rental properties and by the end of the decade Merrick was one of the largest property owners in the Hayti. Merrick then joined two other Durham businessmen, Dr. Aaron M. Moore and Charles Clinton Spaulding to create the Merrick-Moore-Spaulding Land Company.

In 1883 Merrick joined businessmen John Wright, W.A. Day, J.D. Morgan, and T.J. Jones to purchase the Royal Knights of King David, a fraternal lodge which had a budding insurance business. The Royal Knights of David provided inexpensive insurance policies to lodge members. Often this was the only insurance available to African Americans in the Durham area. The lodge and its insurance business expanded across six southeastern states over the next twenty-five years. By the time of his death in 1919, on August 6, 1919, Merrick was the largest shareholder in the lodge's insurance business.

Merrick is most remembered, however, as one of the founders of the North Carolina Mutual Provident Life Insurance Company which eventually became the largest black-owned insurance company in the United States. Realizing the limitations of lodge-sponsored insurance, Merrick joined Aaron McDuffie, P.W. Dawkings, D.T Watson, W.G. Pearson, E.A. Johnson, and James E. Shepard in 1898 to found North Carolina Mutual Provident Life. Each founder contributed $50 to purchase shares. Merrick was selected as the first company president. Six months after its founding, however, Merrick bought out the other partners and brought in Dr. Aaron M. Moore. They shortened the company name to North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company. By 1918, North Carolina Mutual had over $1 million in insurance in force and was at that point the largest black-owned insurance firm in the nation. Later they founded the Bull City Drug Company, the Durham Negro Observer, the local black newspaper, and the short-lived Durham Textile Mill. Merrick also helped establish Mechanics and Farmers Bank and the Lincoln Hospital in Durham. Through their efforts Durham, North Carolina became the 20th Century city with the greatest concentration of black-owned business firms in the United States.