Men of Distinction

Columbus Johnson, lived in Dunlap, Kansas. He was born in Maryland, the child of a free man and slave woman who eventually bought her freedom. His mother died when lightning struck a tree, and Columbus was taken to Tennessee where he was auctioned. Johnson learned several trades including harness making and carpentry. He could read and write and frequently read newspapers. While employed at the Braham Mill, he met and married Josephine, a 13 year old slave girl. Columbus Johnson served in the Civil War, and when he was mustered out, he returned to Gallatine, Tennessee. In 1869, Benjamin Singleton, Columbus Johnson and others organized the Tennessee Real Estate Homestead Association. They learned that homesteads were available in Kansas. Johnson went to Topeka where he was active in the Kansas Colonization project with Pap Singleton, under the auspices of the Freedman's Aid Society. His wife and family joined him in Topeka. In 1884, he moved the family to Dunlap where he was active in the community. In June 1884, Johnson and five white businessmen organized the Farmers Bank of Dunlap. He was a trustee in the St. Paul Methodist Episcopal Church and one of the shareholders and organizers of the Dunlap Colored Cemetery Association. Johnson died October 17, 1894. Source: kansasmemory.org

Advert for his photography studio was in the May 9, 1915 edition of the Washington Post. Daniel Freeman, was a painter and sought after society photographer and the first African American to open his own photography studio in Washington D.C., He was also a teacher who taught photography at Frelinghuysen University and started the Washington Amateur Art Society. He represented the District of Columbia in an exhibition at the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. The son of Thomas Freeman and Sarah Payne, Daniel Freeman (1868 - 1926), was an artist and photographer based in Washington, D.C. Born in Alexandria, Virginia his family later moved to Washington, D.C., At 13 he attended drawing classes in the public school system in the District. He studied photography under the direction of E. J. Pullman, and began a business in 1885. He also taught photography and organized the Washington Amateur Art Society. In 1895 Freeman, known as the first black photographer in Washington, D.C., exhibited his works in the Negro Building at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition. His work recorded the customs and scenery of turn-of-the-century Washington. Freeman, opened a studio in DC in 1885, developed the unusual technique of placing a charcoal sketch over the photographic image. Several of his works, including portraits of Frederick Douglass and John Mercer Langston, a Virginia congressman during Reconstruction, remain in private collections. By 1901, at the age of 33, Freeman, also owned a bicycle shop, a framing business, in addition to a photography studio on 14th Street in downtown DC. He was also a Mason, president of the Social Temperance League, and, according to contemporary accounts, the ninth-best rifle shot in the country. He married Gertrude Mead, on October 28, 1903 at the 19th Street Baptist Church in the District. I'm unaware if the couple had children. Freeman died June 3, 1926 and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Washington, DC. Source: Cowan's Auctions; Worthpoint; Washington Post (May 1915)

Photograph identified as "A Negro inventor: Robert Blair, inventor of anti-aircraft gun." Unfortunately, I can't find additional information on Mr. Blair or his invention. However, the January 25, 1936 edition of the Indianapolis Recorder lists him as being from Detroit, Michigan. Source: The Black Book by Middleton A. Harris, w/Morris Levitt, Roger Furman and Ernest Smith

William Tillman faced a brutal choice: slavery or death. He was a 27-year old African-American sailor born a free man in Delaware. He was steward and cook on board the merchant schooner S.J. Waring, about 300 tons, bound for Montevideo, Uruguay with an assorted cargo. Tillman had been on the crew of the Yankee merchantman the S. J. Waring. On July 6 the 300-ton schooner, manned by a crew of eight under the command of Captain Francis Smith, had left New York bound for Montevideo, Uruguay. Three days into its voyage, the ship was captured by a Confederate privateer, named the Jefferson Davis. The Civil War was less than four months old. The rebels ransacked the vessel and ordered Captain Smith, to haul down the Stars and Stripes. He was then taken to the privateer. Tillman was told that he, like the ship, was southern property and that he would be sold into bondage when the ship reached its new destination. The confederates put a five man prize crew on Tillman’s ship and turned her south, toward Charleston. Now, each day at sea beat down on Tillman like a hammer. An overwhelming sense of dread, however, was gradually replaced by iron-willed resolve. Tillman, in concert, with a handful of passengers hatched a bold plan. Tillman’s duties gave him the run of most of the vessel. The rebels were used to seeing him moving about. Moreover, while cautious around the handful of white crewmen and passengers, the prize crew did not consider Tillman capable of either bravery or treachery; it was to be their undoing. Tillman was key to the recapture of the S.J. Waring. And he struck in the middle of the night. On the night of July 16, with the captured ship just 50 miles off Charleston and the captors asleep in their bunks, they sprung, “killing the three with a hatchet, and throwing the bodies overboard. It was all finished in five minutes,” Harper’s Weekly reported in an August 3, 1861 article. In a few bloody minutes, William Tillman had forestalled his descent into slavery and retaken the Waring from the privateers. He now set about returning to New York, offering to unchain the two remaining members of the prize crew if they would help sail the ship and warning them, “If you cut up any antics overboard you go; recollect that I am captain of this ship now.” Hugging the coast, the Waring sailed north “with a fair wind." Bryce Mackinnon one of the passengers that day reported, “On Sunday morning July 21, 1861, at 9 o’clock we got a pilot off Sandy Hook and soon after hired a tug for $60 to tow us up to New York where we arrived at 4 o’clock truly thankful for our great deliverance. Tillman, the negro steward, became the lion of the day, and his history, character and personal appearance were minutely investigated.” Tillman’s heroic action struck a responsive chord among a Northern population that was reeling from the news of the Union defeat at Bull Run on the same day the Waring arrived in New York. The New-York Tribune wrote, “To this colored man was the nation indebted for the first vindication of its honor on the sea.” Another publication reported that the achievement drew “unstinted praise from all parties, even those who are usually awkward in any other vernacular than derision of the colored man.” At Barnum’s Museum Tillman was the center of an “attractive gaze to daily increasing thousands” and “pictorials vied with each other in portraying his features, and in graphic delineations of the scene on board the brig.” Several months later the federal government awarded Tillman the sum of $6,000 (a hefty sum in those days) as prize-money for the capture of the schooner. Sources: ‘The Lion of the Day’ by Rick Beard, NY Times (Aug. 2011) and 'A Story of High Seas Heroism' by C.R. Gibbs, Maritime Administration Photo: Tintype of Mr. Tillman photographed by Abbott of NY was part of the Howard Wolverton Collection of Black American History which was up for auction at the Quinn's Auction House on February 11, 2016 in Falls Church, Virginia.

William C. Goodridge was born enslaved in Baltimore, Maryland. Eventually he became a prominent businessman in York, Pennsylvania and an activist on the Underground Railroad. William C. Goodridge was born to an enslaved African American mother in Baltimore, Maryland in 1806. It is not known who his father was, but it is generally assumed he was a white man. In 1811 he was indentured to the Reverend Michael Dunn who operated a tannery in York. Goodridge received his freedom in 1822 when Dunn went bankrupt. Goodridge then moved to York, Pennsylvania, where he opened his own barber shop. In 1827, he married Evalina Wallace who also became his business partner. The two had seven children, five of which survived to adulthood. Goodridge then opened an employment agency, began to invest in commercial and residential real estate, and in 1842 opened his own freight service, the “Reliance Line of Burthen Cars” on the railroad line between York and Philadelphia. Cementing his position in York, he in 1847 built Centre Hall, a five-story commercial property in the center of town. The same year they were married, the Goodridges moved into a well-built brick home along Philadelphia Street and William lived there until the mid-1860s. The couple quickly expanded their barber business to include the sale of various items, to include a baldness cure known as Oil of Celsus. Goodridge then opened a freight service, the Reliance Line, in 1842 which operated primarily between York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. In 1847 he built the tallest building in York, Centre Hall, a five-story commercial property located in central York. Goodridge operated an employment agency from Centre Hall and rented out space to various businesses, to include a tavern and York’s first newspaper, The Democrat. One of Goodridge’s sons also operated a photography studio within Centre Hall. As a mixed race businessman in a town and state where many vehemently opposed the abolition movement, Goodridge kept a low profile, especially after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 made aiding escaped slaves a federal crime, so we will never know the extent of his activities. His name, however, is associated with two major events in the struggle against slavery. In the aftermath of the Christiana riot in neighboring Lancaster County, some of the black men who had participating in that deadly firefight made the first leg of their trip north to safety in Canada concealed in a special freight car of Goodridge’s Reliance Line. In the aftermath of John Brown’s failed raid on the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry in October 1859, Osborne Perry Anderson, one of Brown’s trusted lieutenants, fled to York, where Goodridge arranged his safe passage by railroad to Philadelphia. By 1856, Goodridge owned 12 properties in York and was one of the wealthiest African Americans in south central Pennsylvania. However, things began to go awry after his wife died in 1852 and most of his properties were sold at auction after he went bankrupt just prior to the start of the Civil War. Goodridge remained a barber in York until 1864 when he moved to East Saginaw, Michigan to live with family. He then moved on to Minneapolis to live with his daughter, Emily, where he died in 1873 at age 66. In 1998, the Goodridge home in York became one of the first Underground Railroad sites designated by the National Park Service as a National Historic Landmark. There the Goodridge Freedom House and Underground Railroad Museum is working towards opening a museum in his honor. Until recently, the only known image of William C. Goodridge, was a grainy one published in a York newspaper in 1907. In September of 2015, an original ambrotype believed to be of Goodridge was sold on ebay. The photograph, which is not marked, is small but clear. The buyer, Robert Davis of Sacramento, contacted Carol Kauffman at the Crispus Attucks Association in York to share his discovery. The association had been working on the restoration of the Goodridge Freedom House & Underground Railroad Museum in York for several years. "It's an amazing picture for the time," Kauffman said. Davis loaned that photograph as well as three tintypes of Goodridge's descendants to the Crispus Attucks Association for a reception that took place in 2015 in honor of William C. Goodridge. The event was held at the York railroad station. It was also part of a fundraiser for the renovation of his former home in York. Sources: Enterprising Images: The Goodridge Brothers, African American Photographers, 1847-1922 by John Vincent Jezierski; Michigan Historical Museum; York Daily Record, Teresa Boeckel (staff writer); theclio

In a sea of white faces, John Saunders Chase waited patiently amid the stares and glares of the swarm of humanity surrounding him. Cameras flashed as reporters hurled questions at him and jotted down his responses. It was June 7, 1950. Chase, an African American, was smartly dressed in a double-breasted coat and tie, as he stood in line in Gregory Gym at The University of Texas at Austin. Chase, born in Annapolis, Md., was 25 years old at the time. Although nervous, he recalls being befuddled at the fanfare that greeted his arrival. “I remember, specifically, a photographer who talked non-stop to me about making history and getting the ‘right moment’ on film,” Chase said. “He told me that I wasn’t officially accepted into the university until it became a ‘contract’—in other words, until the university took my money. He was right there next to me at that moment to snap a photo.” The road to “that moment” began at an early age for Chase. Growing up, he idolized his older sister and was devoted to following in her footsteps. When she enrolled at Hampton University in Virginia he was destined to do the same. And although he knew what he wanted to do in life, he was, originally, at a loss to define it. Chase earned a bachelor of science degree in architecture from Hampton University in 1948, and he never wavered in his determination to become an architect. Architecture was his life-long passion and he was determined to realize his dream. Only, unknown to him, his dream was colorblind and the world around him wasn’t. And, on that warm summer day in June, whether he intended to or not, the determined young man from Annapolis made history. He and Horace Lincoln Heath became the first two African Americans to enroll at The University of Texas at Austin. Chase did succeed, and in doing so, became the first African American to graduate from the university’s School of Architecture, which was then, and is still now, one of the most highly recognized architecture programs in the country. Upon receiving his master’s degree in architecture, Chase was offered a position as an assistant professor at Texas Southern University (TSU) in Houston. He and his wife moved to Houston with great expectations of seeing his career as an architect blossom into a reality. Shortly after arriving in Houston, however, Chase’s dream was, yet again, shattered by black and white realities. In interview after interview at architectural firms, Chase was denied employment. When he showed up, resume in hand, to apply for a job, he was told there were no available openings. Every job he applied for vanished when he walked through the front door. So Chase started his own business. “I thought to myself, if no one will hire you, you’re going to take that state examination, pass it and hire yourself,” said Chase. “So that’s what I did. I hired myself. In a matter of years, Chase achieved a number of impressive “firsts.” Chase became the first African American to practice architecture in Texas. He became the first African American to be accepted into the Texas Society of Architects. And he became the first African American to be accepted into the Houston chapter of the American Institute of Architects. He died at the age of 87 on March 29, 2012. Source: University of Texas at Austin Center for American History, article by Amy Maverick

"In a composite nation like ours, as before the Law, there should be no rich no poor, no high, no low, no white, no black, but common country, common citizenship, equal rights, and a common destiny." ~ Frederick Douglass Standing-room-only crowds greeted him in the U.S and in Europe. People wept as he recounted the horrors of slavery or erupted in laughter as he mimicked his former slave master. White spectators openly gushed about Douglass’ “muscular, yet lithe and graceful” 6-foot, 200-pound frame, his “full and rich” baritone, and compared him to an “African prince.” When people talk today about Douglass’ speaking prowess, they often cite his defiant “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” address. But he gave another speech that deserves wider recognition because Douglass spoke with uncanny precision about the kind of debates we’re having now about race, immigration, and what makes America exceptional. The speech is called “Composite Nation” and in it Douglass tackles a question that lurks behind many of the current political debates in the US: Is the country better off having a multitude of races, ethnic groups and religious beliefs? Or would it, and other nations, fare better with a homogenous population where most people look alike and share the same religious beliefs? Douglass’ answer has inspired and challenged historians for over a century. The historian Jill Lepore called it “one of the most important and least-read speeches in American political history.” And the historian Andrew Roth said Douglass’ address is “one of the earliest and still most eloquent” tributes to the beauty of America’s ever-expanding definition of the “We” in “We the people. “The Composite Nation speech is a brilliant vision of America’s evolving “tapestry” in all its colors, shades, and ethnicities,” Roth, a scholar-in residence at the Jefferson Educational Society, wrote. What makes it great? And why is it so little-known today? Part of its greatness is due to timing. Douglass was sketching a vision of a post-racial America a century before the term was invented. He delivered the first version of the speech in 1869 in Boston. A bloody Civil War fought over slavery had ended only four years earlier. The country was attempting to build its first multiracial democracy through the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, which ended slavery, granted Black men the right to vote and introduced birthright citizenship. But overt White supremacy was still a social and political norm. Many White Americans believed Black people were genetically inferior. Anti-Irish and German-Catholic prejudice was pervasive. Chinese immigrants were being attacked and lynched by mobs, and by 1882 the US Congress would pass the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first significant law restricting immigration in the US. It was a time in America when people openly embraced Social Darwinism, the idea that White people were meant to rule over others because they were innately superior. That belief was so ingrained that a politician like Garrett Davis, a Democratic senator from Kentucky, could openly say: “I want no Negro government; I want no Mongolian government; I want the government of the White man which our fathers incorporated.” But Douglass’ Composite Nation speech was filled with an audacious hope that belied the pervasive prejudice of his era. He said he supported Chinese immigration to America and hoped for the day when more Chinese people could become citizens, vote and hold office. “I want a home here not only for the Negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours,” Douglass said. He also argued that immigration made the US stronger and scorned those who believed White people are the “owners of this continent” and that “it is best not to take on board more passengers than the ship will carry.” His pointed to other isolated countries of his era whose leaders boosted of their “pure blood” but lagged behind all other countries in dynamism and prosperity. “Those races of men which have maintained the most separate and distinct existence for the longest periods of time; which have had the least intercourse with other races of men, are standing confirmation of the folly of isolation,” he said. The glue holding together this Composite Nation would be the “principle of absolute equality,” he said, no matter one’s race, ethnicity or religious beliefs. “We shall spread the network of our science and civilization over all who seek their shelter, whether from Asia, Africa or the isles of the sea,” he said. “We shall mold them all, each after his kind, into Americans…” No political figure — not even Abraham Lincoln — talked that way about the US in the mid to late 19th century. Lincoln once proposed to end slavery by shipping willing slaves back to Africa, and said that he could not envision Black and White people living together in social and political equality. Nicholas Bromell, a historian who appears in the PBS film, says it was routine for even progressive leaders like abolitionists to warn of the “hordes” of Chinese immigrants coming to America during that era. “He was way ahead of his time,” says Bromell, author of “The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass.” “He was speaking for a multiracial, diverse America in the 1860s,” he says. “He was absolutely alone. I can’t think of another public figure who took such an unequivocal position like he did.” Some 150 years later, Douglass’ vision of the US as a “multi-hued global beacon of liberty” remains fiercely contested. He confronted an even more hostile political climate than democracy advocates face today. In his Composite Nation speech, he took on critics who couldn’t imagine that a multi-racial democracy could work. He called them “ministers of despair” and mocked critiques such as “You will never make the Negro work without a master, or make him an intelligent voter, or a good and useful citizen.” He implied that constant predictions of democratic doom could become self-fulfilling prophecies. Keep listening to people who say democracy can’t work, and it won’t. “They never see the bright side of anything and probably never will,” Douglass said of these critics. “Like the raven in the lines of Edgar A. Poe they have learned two words, and these are ‘never more.’” Many of Douglass’ claims have been validated by the passage of time. Consider the impact of immigrants. Many immigrants today outwork, outvote and outfight native-born Americans — as Douglass predicted they would a century and a half ago. One in five Medal of Honor recipients have been immigrants. Immigrants are nearly twice as likely to start businesses as native-born Americans. And nearly half of all Fortune 500 companies including Apple, Google and Amazon were founded by immigrants and their children. Diversity has other strengths as well. Groups that include people with different backgrounds and cultures consistently come up with more innovative solutions to problems because they’re not confined to one perspective, research says. Douglass was also ahead of his time in rejecting the notion of inherent differences between races. Science has since confirmed that race is a biological fiction — there is only one human race, homo sapiens. “Man is man, the world over,” Douglass said in his speech. “A smile or a tear has no nationality; joy and sorrow speak alike to all nations, and they, above all the confusion of tongues, proclaim the brotherhood of man.” Douglass’ optimism may sound quaint today. And there is undeniably a part of White America that has long been suspicious of democracy. Some Founding Fathers opposed granting the vote to ordinary citizens, and early electoral districts were kept large to inhibit campaigning by all except those wealthy enough to travel across their expansive boundaries, the historian Lawrence Goldstone wrote in a recent essay called “America, then and now.” Many didn’t think ordinary citizens could be entrusted to lead their own government, and that only those who owned real property should be allowed to vote. For that reason, only 6% of the nation was eligible to vote in the first presidential election, Goldstone said. But he said that what makes the US the envy of the world is its citizens’ halting yet ultimately successful struggle to expand the very rights the Founders sought to limit. “People from virtually every country in the world wanted to come to the nation that Americans struggled for decades and decades to create, as imperfect as it remains,” he wrote. “They did not come because its leaders disparaged the poor, incarcerated racial or political minorities, or mocked the handicapped and those whose sexual orientation did not fit in faux religious boxes. If that is what they wanted, they had any number of other choices, such as Iran, Russia or Hungary.” Douglass lived until 1895, long enough to see much of the promise of his Composite Nation tarnished. He saw the Supreme Court demolish hard-won laws that granted Black citizens political power. He saw the rise of Jim Crow and murderous White mobs that used insurrectionist violence to attack and overthrow biracial governments throughout the Deep South. The vision he had of America was “in tatters,” the historian David Blight, who won the Pulitzer Prize for “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” said in an essay. “By the 1890s Douglass, aging and in ill health but still out on the lecture circuit, felt hard-pressed to sustain hope for the transformations at the heart of the “Composite Nationality” speech.” As time passed, his Composite Nation optimism may have seemed increasingly out of touch. People likely related more to the fury Douglass expressed at American hypocrisy and racism in his 1852 Fourth of July speech. “As nativism, racism, and nationalism converged in the closing decades of the 19th century, the idea of America as a cosmopolitan nation of immigrants fought for survival,” Blight wrote. A battle is still being fought over that idea today. Douglass’ vision of America as a multi-hued beacon of global liberty still looms ahead of us like a rhetorical North Star. It might seem far-fetched, but we’ve already seen the alternatives — in the January 6 insurrection and the mounting sense of dread many Americans now feel about the future. Douglass lived in an even more brutal era and experienced the worst forms of racial prejudice and American hypocrisy. And yet he still believed that we could, and would, do better. So should we. Our Composite Nationality (full speech): teachingamericanhistory.org/document/our-composite-nation... Sources: cnn.com: "It’s one of the most radical and prophetic speeches in American history. And hardly anyone knows about it," article written by John Blake (Oct. 2022); NY Historical Society; Smithsonian: National Museum of American History

Physician and newspaper publisher, Louis Charles Roudanez was born free in June of 1823 in Saint James Parish, Louisiana. He was the son of a French merchant named Louis Roudanez and a black woman named Aimée Potens. Though his baptismal record registers him as white, Roudanez identified as a person of color throughout his life. He received his early education in New Orleans, where he also worked in a shop and invested his money in municipal bonds. Like many 'gens de coleur libre' (free people of color) in New Orleans, Roudanez went to France for higher education. At twenty-one years old, Roudanez was living in Paris where he studied medicine. He completed his degree in seven years and returned to the United States in 1851. The New Orleans Tribune lists his enrollment into Dartmouth’s medical school to continue his study of medicine, but other sources list Cornell University. After receiving his second degree, Roudanez returned to New Orleans and established his own practice. When the Union Army took New Orleans in 1862 during the Civil War, Roudanez saw that the time was right to demand equality for free men of color. He started the militant Republican journal, L’Union, published in French and edited by Paul Trevigne. It was the first black newspaper to be published in Louisiana. When L’Union failed in 1864 from lack of support, Roudanez established a new journal called La Tribune de la Nouvelle Orléans (The New Orleans Tribune), which was published in English and French. La Tribune was the first bilingual black newspaper in the United States. La Tribune and its editors asserted their right to citizenship; they demanded weekly wages for recently emancipated slaves and pushed for free public education for all. Roudanez was also an officer of the Freedman’s Aid Association, an organization that attempted to establish producer and consumer cooperatives managed by former slaves. Despite using much of his personal fortune to keep La Tribune afloat, politics and internal conflicts caused the paper’s demise in 1870. From then on, Roudanez spent most of his time practicing medicine in his home, and less and less of his energy went into politics. He remained devoted to his wife, Celie Sauley and his children, three of whom would become doctors of medicine as well. Louis Charles Roudanez died at the age of sixty-seven in his home in New Orleans on March 11, 1890. Sources: Dictionary of American Negro Biography by Rayford Logan and Michael R. Winston, eds., (1982); The New Orleans Tribune: An Introduction to America's First Black Daily Newspaper; The Historic New Orleans Collection; © The Roudanez Family Collection, © Mark Charles Roudané

In 2004, Pennsylvania native Mary Groce was going through a box of family papers with her cousin Aileen when she found a sheet of old letterhead for an “Emory C. Malick, Licensee: Pilot No. 105.” Included on the letterhead was a photograph of a handsome young man in a Curtiss pusher-type airplane. Groce handed the letterhead to her cousin, asking: “Have you ever seen this photo of our great-uncle Emory?” She recalls her cousin’s surprise: “Aileen looked at the paper and replied, ‘Oh my God. He’s black.” Since that day, Groce has been researching her great-uncle’s story, and is now writing a book about him, which she hopes to publish next year. “I was never told about Emory or my mixed heritage,” says Groce, “although this explains my brother’s blond afro.” Her family’s secrecy may also explain, in part, why Malick’s historical significance has been lost. Emory Conrad Malick, who studied at the Curtiss Aviation School on North Island, San Diego, received his pilot’s license in March 1912, when he was 31 years old, making him not only the first known African American pilot, but also the first black person to get a pilot’s license in the United States some 14 years before aviator James Herman Banning, who was long thought to be the first. Once Groce has finished her book, she hopes to donate Malick’s papers to the National Air and Space Museum. In the meantime, she has given the Museum copies of various items. “We don’t often collect copies of material,” says Patti Williams, the Museum’s supervisory and acquisition archivist. “We like originals, but this story is really intriguing. We love to collect anything on early minority pilots because there were just so few of them.” Of the information Groce has given the Museum, Williams says, “It changes our entire perception. Was Malick the anomaly? Or were there other minority pilots that we just don’t know about?” There’s still a lot about Malick that isn’t known, but Groce has discovered that before 1910, he built and flew his own gliders near the Susquehanna River. By 1914, reports Pennsylvania’s Selinsgrove Times, Malick had purchased a biplane, which he flew over the town “to the wonderment of all…. Factories temporarily shut down to witness the novelty.” Malick later moved to Philadelphia, where he did aerial photography for the Aero Service Corporation and Dallin Aerial Surveys, and worked for the Flying Dutchman Air Service, which offered flight instruction, aerial photography, and passenger flights. Some of the family’s papers indicate that Malick helped establish Flying Dutchman with Ernest Buehl, something Groce is hoping to confirm. On a brisk March day in 1928 at a Camden, New Jersey airshow, Malick took two passengers for a quick hop in his Waco three-seater. They were barely aloft when the engine died. Malick banked to the left to avoid spectators; unfortunately, the wind caught the aircraft, and the Waco crashed. “The entire plane seemed to crumple as if it had been smitten by the fist of a giant,” reported the Sunbury (Pennsylvania) Daily Item. The two passengers were injured. Later that year, Malick crashed again—the cause isn’t known—this time injuring himself and killing his passenger. He never flew again. He remained interested in aviation; at a flying club banquet, Malick displayed the 60-horsepower engine that powered his 1914 flight over the town. But the aviator refused all opportunities to go flying. Documents at the Snyder County Historical Society say that in the 1930s, when local pilots offered to take Malick flying, he would reply, “I had my fun, and now I’m done.” In December 1958, when he was 77 years old, Malick slipped and fell on an icy sidewalk in Philadelphia. He died in the hospital. With no identification on him, his body lay unclaimed in the morgue for more than a month, until his identity could be established. Malick’s sister—Groce’s grandmother—was put up for adoption when she was two, and family history got a bit blurred. Now Groce is trying to recover information that was lost for two generations. When she does, we hope to learn more about this pilot. Source: Malick Family Collection Article by Rebecca Maksel, Air & Space Magazine

Photograph and text appeared in a newspaper dated July 1, 1928: He was the motive power for the hand press first utilized by The Chattanooga Times. In later years he edited, published, printed and circulated his own newspaper, The Weekly Blade. It was Chattanooga's most unique publication. For an extended period The Times made a feature of clippings from Editor Miller;s columns under the heading "Flashes from The Blade." With Miller's death several years ago The Blade was discontinued. Randolph Miller was formerly enslaved who moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee from Georgia in October 1864. He began a new life in the newspaper industry in 1865 after surviving the horrors of slavery and war. Learning to read as he went, he worked as a pressman on several newspapers before starting his own paper, the Weekly Blade in 1898. The Blade became one of the only newspapers in the country to be published and edited by a former slave. Miller used The Blade to advocate for the rights of communities of color still under the heavy oppressions of white supremacy. The Blade ran for twelve years, and Miller became known for his condemnation of segregation. In 1905, as rebellion against the imposition of Jim Crow laws exploded across Tennessee, Miller organized a three-week boycott of Chattanooga’s newly-segregated streetcars. He started his own taxi service in 1905, the Hack Line, that ran between Chattanooga and outlying African American communities. Plagued by ill health and overwork, Miller stopped publication of the Blade after twelve years. He died at the reported age of eighty-six in 1916 and is buried in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Chattanooga. Sources: [A.W. Judd, Photographer, Chattanooga, TN, Chattanooga History Center; Center for Historic Preservation and the James E. Walker Library at Middle Tennessee State University; The People's History of Chattanooga]

James Alexander Chiles (1860 - 1930), was born in Virginia, one of eight children of Richard and Martha Chiles. He attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and earned his J.D. degree from the University of Michigan Law School. When he moved to Lexington, Kentucky he became the first African American to practice law there. He was also listed as a real estate agent. In 1890 he opened his own law office at 304 W. Short Street. His business was a success; by 1907, he was one of four African American lawyers in the city. In 1910 he argued in the Supreme Court case against the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad for desegregation of railroad coaches after he was removed by force to the Colored coach in spite of his first class ticket from Washington D.C. to Lexington. Chiles was also an active member of the Colored Seventh Day Adventist congregation in Lexington; he was a trustee, deacon, and treasurer of the first church built in 1906 at the corner of Fifth and Upper Streets. His wife, Fannie J. Chiles, was the first librarian for the church. Bio: University of Kentucky James Mullen, Photographer (Lexington, KY)

This circa 1840 sixth plate daguerreotype is thought to be James Forten (1766-1842). It was in an exhibit which ran from May 22nd through August 9th, 2015. It was titled, 'Many Thousand Gone,' co-curated by Associate Professor of History William Hart and students in his Spring 2015 African American History course. The exhibit consisted of nearly 100 photographs generously loaned to the Middlebury Museum in Vermont by George R. Rinhart, a private collector, of Palm Springs, California. The exhibit takes its title from a 'sorrow song' dating from the Civil War sung by black Union soldiers and freedmen and women. The lyrics to its opening stanza are: No more auction block for me, No more, no more; No more auction block for me; Many thousand gone James Forten was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to free parents, Thomas and Sarah Forten on September 2, 1766. At the age of fourteen, Forten volunteered for service in the Revolutionary War. Assigned to the Royal Lewis, a privateer that supported the Continental Navy, he worked various posts, including powder boy and sailor. Captured by the British on his second cruise, he escaped sale into slavery in the West Indies by winning the friendship of the British captain, who made Forten a companion for his young son. Choosing imprisonment rather than allegiance to Britain, Forten then spent seven long months on a British prison ship. Freed in a prisoner exchange in 1782, he returned to Philadelphia, and to a mother and sister who had both believed him dead. After the war, Forten spent a year working in shipyards and sail lofts along the River Thames in England. Returning to Philadelphia, he rejoined Robert Bridges sail loft as an apprentice sailmaker, and rose steadily through the ranks. In 1798 Bridges decided to retire and asked the thirty-two-year-old Forten to remain in charge of the loft. He then loaned him enough money to purchase the business. Within three years Forten owned it outright. Forten had been experimenting with different types of sails for many years. By the early 1800s he had invented one that enabled ships to maneuver more adeptly and to maintain greater speeds. Although he did not patent the sail, he was able to benefit financially, as his sail loft became one of the most successful and prosperous in Philadelphia. In the early 1800s Forten presided over an integrated workforce of at times more than thirty men, who obeyed his strict rules of hard work, church attendance, abstention from alcohol, and strict punctuality. At times he noted sarcastically that although legally entitled to vote, he was prevented by whites from exercising this right. A shrewd investor, he bought up houses and land in Philadelphia and the surrounding region, purchased stock in the Mount Carbon Rail Company, and made loans to a variety of local businessmen - both black and white. His fortune was considerable for any man, black or white. While Forten had a luxurious life-style, he also used his financial resources for humanitarian causes. He used more than half of his wealth to purchase the freedom of slaves, finance William Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, operate an Underground Railroad station out of his home on Lombard Street, and fund a school he had opened for black children in his house. Forten worked closely with other antislavery leaders, such as Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, and was a founding member of the Free African Society and the American Reform Society. Vocal in his opposition to slavery, he was also active in other reform causes, particularly women's rights and temperance, and was involved in almost every major civic event concerning the African American community in Philadelphia from the 1790s until his death in 1842. Indecisive on the question of colonization - a popular plan to resettle free blacks in Africa - he became a firm opponent and refused offers that he set an example by leaving the country. Forten married Charlote Vandine and together they raised eight children. Unable to enroll their children in schools of their choice, he hired tutors to educate them. In 1833, Forten, his wife and three of their daughters (Margaretta, Harriet, and Sarah), helped to found the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, the first integrated women's abolitionist organization. Two daughters, Harriet and Sarah, married abolitionist brothers Joseph and Robert Purvis, respectively, and spoke out in favor of abolition and black suffrage. As a successful African American businessman and civic leader, James Forten for many years personified the American Revolution's ideals of equality and opportunity. In the early 1800s, however, race relations in Pennsylvania, as elsewhere in the nation, deteriorated. In the state's 1838 constitution African American men lost the right to vote in Pennsylvania; at the same time, slave catchers from the South terrorized free blacks, and competition for jobs and housing in Philadelphia led to hostility and violence. Forten received repeated threats on his life, and in 1834 whites attacked and almost killed his son on the streets of Philadelphia. As King Cotton reinvigorated slave-holding in the American South, the promise of economic opportunity and social harmony between the races in Pennsylvania gave way to restricted economic opportunities and loss of the rights and privileges of citizenship for blacks. James Forten died on March 4, 1842 at the age of seventy-six. Source: A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten by Julie Winch

Lonnie Carmen poses with an airplane he built using a motorcycle engine from his recycling business. A so-called “junk man,” people handed over their unwanted goods to Carmon who refurbished and resold them at his Columbus home. As told by his granddaughter Yvette Davis, Carmon came across a motorcycle engine and began crafting his plane around it. Without any prior training or blueprints, the naturally gifted Carmon built a fully functional aircraft. Lonnie Carmen built the above airplane in 1926 with a motorcycle engine. He was the first African American Columbus airman. The homebuilt machine flew, but the pilot had to hide it in a barn in the black community of Urbancrest for fear that some of the jealous pilots flying out of Norton Field would damage it. Lonnie's daughter, Anna, the second of his six children, says that he was self-employed, always had a truck or two and would haul things for people. He sometimes would haul old cars home and would have them running within hours. Saturday was always airplane day and Lonnie would pile the family into the Franklin sedan and drive to the flying field to give the whole family airplane rides. People in the southend neighborhood of Main Street and Grant Avenue would wait for Lonnie and his passengers to fly the new Piper Cub that he owned in the 1930s over the neighborhood at five hundred feet. On Sunday afternoons, he would take his drive in the Franklin or a hand-me-down Durant and the destination would always be Port Columbus to watch the air machines coming and going. Lonnie Carmen was an inventor, mechanic, family man and Columbus' first African American aviator. Sources: Arnett Howard Collection; Columbus African American Collection; 955thelou.com article by D. L. Chandler

The Colored American began publishing in 1893 under the ownership of Edward Elder Cooper, who had distinguished himself as the founder of the Indianapolis Freeman, the first illustrated African American newspaper. The Colored American operated its presses at 459 C Street in Washington's northwest quadrant. The weekly publication promoted itself as a national Negro newspaper and it carried lengthy feature stories on the achievements of African Americans across the country. Publisher Cooper relied on contributions from such prominent black journalists such as John E. Bruce and Richard W. Thompson to sustain the national scope of his paper, which readers could obtain for a $2.00 annual subscription. The Colored American included a regular column called "City Paragraphs" that highlighted events in the nation's capital and routinely featured articles on religion, politics, education, military affairs, and black fraternal organizations. The paper distinguished itself by its use of original reporting rather than relying on boiler-plate, filler material taken from other publications. Like other papers, however, it included advertising, much of it geared to black consumers. The paper ran editorials and political cartoons that championed improved social conditions in the black community and expanded rights for African Americans. Although it held a reputation for political independence, the Colored American was actually staunchly Republican. Cooper allied himself and his paper with Booker T. Washington, and the publisher looked to the famous black educator for financial assistance. Another financial backer was lecturer and activist Mary Church Terrell, a noted African American civil rights advocate who wrote a column for the paper titled "The Women's World," under the pseudonym Euphemia Kirk. Unfortunately for the Colored American, Cooper proved to be a poor businessman and, because of some unorthodox business practices and extensive debts to creditors, financial problems plagued the paper. It ceased publication in November 1904. Image: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Samuel R. Lowery was born approximately thirty years before the outbreak of the Civil War, but, unlike many other blacks of his time, he was never enslaved. Lowery, though a free man at birth, did not fully escape the prejudice, discrimination, and neglect that most of his fellow blacks endured. In the 1884 World Exposition in New Orleans, for example, Lowery entered his mulberry leaves (food for silkworms) in the competition. His rival from France received $1,000 to produce an exhibit. Lowery, who received no such aid, had to pay for and construct his own exhibit. Despite this handicap, Lowery won the competition. His mulberry leaves were the largest. Not only that, they far surpassed the competition in usefulness, since they stimulated, on site, the growth of 100,000 worms and cocoons, while the competition failed to generate any. Not all Lowery's experiences of discrimination ended in triumph, however. After the Civil War, for example, the school he had established in Rutherford County, Tennessee, near where he had studied law, was completely destroyed by the Ku Klux Klan. Although Lowery did suffer from discrimination because of his skin color, his mother, Ruth Mitchell, was actually a Cherokee Indian. She had purchased her formerly enslaved spouse Peter Lowery, Samuel's father, and was thus responsible for Samuel being born free. She had freed not one man, but two. Lowery was born on December 9, 1832 in Davidson County (near Nashville), Tennessee. Unfortunately, his mother died in 1840, when he was only eight. His father worked at various times as a hack driver, a farmer, a livery stable operator, and a janitor at Franklin College. It was at Franklin that Samuel was able to study for the ministry, in classes separate from the white students. Lowery began his preaching career in 1849 at Nashville's Church of the Disciples, where he remained until 1857. At that time, prior to the Civil War, during Lincoln's 1856 election campaign, great unrest broke out over the issue of slavery, causing the less fortunate whites, especially, to resent the wealthier, free blacks and to attack their businesses and force the closing of free black schools. In Nashville, twenty-four free blacks were jailed, though they were later released. In 1856, both Lowery and his father decided to flee to the North. Lowery married Adora Robinson in 1858. The couple had two children, Ruth and Annie. In 1859, Lowery moved to Canada, where he stayed for three years, avoiding the racial turbulence in the United States during that time. In Canada he established Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ). The Lowerys' flight North to free regions was part of that large and continuing pattern of migration by blacks seeking freedom. Many blacks felt that there was less racial prejudice in Canada. Returning to the United States around 1862, Lowery and his family settled on a farm his father had given him in Fayette County, Ohio. In 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Lowery returned to Nashville, where he preached and attended to the spiritual needs of free men and the soldiers of the Fortieth U.S. Colored Troops under the command of Colonel R. K. Crawford. Later, after losing his bid to be chaplain to that unit, Lowery was attached to the Ninth U. S. Heavy Artillery as chaplain. He also taught basic educational skills to soldiers of the Second U. S. Colored Light Artillery. After the war, Lowery settled with his family in Nashville, where he felt called to teach and preach—and to undertake a new career. He soon began to study law in Rutherford County with a white attorney, and subsequently he established his own practice. Lowery's interest in law may have begun much earlier, since an 1850 letter of legal advice from Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer then himself, is addressed to "Samuel R. Lowry." Lincoln's letter apparently advises Lowery on the lack of real estate rights by occupants being evicted from a residence. At the time Lowery himself began to practice law, he was also active in several organizations, such as the State Colored Men's Convention, the National Emigration Society, and the Tennessee State Equal Rights League. In 1875, after the closing of a school he ran in Nashville, he moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where he continued his law practice and his preaching. His eventual success as lawyer was such that on February 2, 1880, Lowery was nominated by Belva Ann Lockwood to practice law before the U. S. Supreme Court. Lowery has the distinction of being the first African American to earn this honor. On December 10, 1867, prior to his Alabama move and long before the Supreme Court event, Lowery and his father had established the Tennessee Manual Labor University. The school was located on Murfreesboro Road in Smyrna, Tennessee, near the black settlement Ebenezor. Like the Franklin College where both Lowerys had studied, the newly founded school was designed to provide its students with basic knowledge in agriculture, mechanical arts, and Christian ethics, all practical knowledge that would allow the freedmen to thrive in their new and changing environment. To support the school, Lowery traveled frequently to raise funds in various communities. Unfortunately, a scandal arose concerning money related to a fundraising trip for the university, a trip undertaken by the Reverends Lowery and Wadkins. The fault in the scandal was not Lowery's, however. Wadkins raised $1,632, but appropriated all but $200 for expenses. Although Wadkins was the culprit, Lowery, head of the school, received the blame. The white Christian Church excommunicated Lowery and withheld crucial support, resulting in the school's closing in 1872. After moving to Huntsville, Alabama in 1875, Lowery undertook several projects, including the establishment of a cooperative community, Loweryvale, in Jefferson County and the editing of the Southern Freeman. Most notably, he founded three new enterprises. One was Lowery's Industrial Academy, founded on the same principles as the earlier Nashville school and established to provide training in silk production. It was allied with the two other business enterprises, the Birmingham Silk Company (founded with the backing of several business leaders), and the S. R. and R. M. Lowery Silk Culture and Manufacturing Company. Lowery's daughter Ruth, who died in 1877, just two years after the company began, was the "R. M." of the company name. It was Ruth who first grew interested in silkworm culture, when she visited an exhibit dedicated to it. Her father bought her some worm eggs at the exhibit, which she carried home and fed on mulberry leaves. His daughter's project sparked Lowery's own interest in silkworm cultivation, and he began to see its business potential. Her interest in and expertise with silkworm growing had both inspired her father and provided him an outlet when he became discouraged with politics. The daughter's death did not dampen Lowery's devotion to her dream of silk production. In fact, following Ruth's death, Lowery visited two notable silkworm growers, John Kyle of New Jersey and Fred Cheney of Connecticut. Kyle was the first successful silk manufacturer in the United States, and Cheney was the biggest grower of silkworms in the country. Both urged Lowery to begin work in the business, and Cheney predicted he would succeed within ten years. Lowery, because of his industry and knowledge, was given forty acres of land near Birmingham to develop the silkworm enterprise. After the meeting with Kyle and Cheney, he returned to Alabama, ordered French mulberry seeds, and started a hardy stand of trees, trees that produced the world's largest mulberry leaves. Lowery, carrying before him the vision of his daughter's work with silkworm cultivation and silk production, threw himself into the project. He viewed the silk industry as the successor to cotton for American blacks, offering a profitable income, better working conditions, and shorter hours. He envisioned that the new industry would provide more refined employment for black women and children. He died in Loweryvale, Alabama in 1900. Though Lowery's career was quite varied, a consistent theme and preoccupation sustained him. As educator and editor, he aimed to elevate the abilities and aspirations of his race. As lawyer, he sought to defend their interests. As preacher, he ministered to their spirit. As entrepreneur, he worked to provide opportunity for a better economic future for them. At the core of Lowery's efforts was the deeply felt desire to improve conditions for Black Americans. Sources: Childs, John Brown. The Political Black Minister: A Study in Afro-American Politics and Religion. Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall & Co., 1980; Simmons, William J. Men of Mark: A Eminent, Progressive and Rising. Cleveland, Ohio: Geo. M. Rewell & Co., 1887; Notable Black American Men, Book II, Lois A. Peterson

en·slave /inˈslāv,enˈslāv/ past tense: enslaved; past participle: enslaved make (someone) a slave. Similar: sell into slavery; condemn to slavery; disenfranchise; condemn to servitude; subject to forced labor; subjugate; hegemonize, suppress, tyrannize, oppress, dominate, exploit persecute. On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass was invited to address the citizens of his hometown, Rochester, New York. Whatever the expectations of his audience on that 76th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Douglass used the occasion not to celebrate the nation’s triumphs but to remind all of its continuing enslavement of millions of people. Read the entire speech below: Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens: He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day. A feeling has crept over me, quite unfavorable to the exercise of my limited powers of speech. The task before me is one which requires much previous thought and study for its proper performance. I know that apologies of this sort are generally considered flat and unmeaning. I trust, however, that mine will not be so considered. Should I seem at ease, my appearance would much misrepresent me. The little experience I have had in addressing public meetings, in country schoolhouses, avails me nothing on the present occasion. The papers and placards say, that I am to deliver a 4th [of] July oration. This certainly sounds large, and out of the common way, for it is true that I have often had the privilege to speak in this beautiful Hall, and to address many who now honor me with their presence. But neither their familiar faces, nor the perfect gage I think I have of Corinthian Hall, seems to free me from embarrassment. The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable—and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight. That I am here today is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have to say, I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding exordium. With little experience and with less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together; and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence, I will proceed to lay them before you. This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations. Fellow-citizens, I shall not presume to dwell at length on the associations that cluster about this day. The simple story of it is that, 76 years ago, the people of this country were British subjects. The style and title of your "sovereign people" (in which you now glory) was not then born. You were under the British Crown . Your fathers esteemed the English Government as the home government; and England as the fatherland. This home government, you know, although a considerable distance from your home, did, in the exercise of its parental prerogatives, impose upon its colonial children, such restraints, burdens and limitations, as, in its mature judgment, it deemed wise, right and proper. But, your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would, certainly, prove nothing, as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on the tyranny of England towards the American Colonies. It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers. But, to proceed. Feeling themselves harshly and unjustly treated by the home government, your fathers, like men of honesty, and men of spirit, earnestly sought redress. They petitioned and remonstrated; they did so in a decorous, respectful, and loyal manner. Their conduct was wholly unexceptionable. This, however, did not answer the purpose. They saw themselves treated with sovereign indifference, coldness and scorn. Yet they persevered. They were not the men to look back. As the sheet anchor takes a firmer hold, when the ship is tossed by the storm, so did the cause of your fathers grow stronger, as it breasted the chilling blasts of kingly displeasure. The greatest and best of British statesmen admitted its justice, and the loftiest eloquence of the British Senate came to its support. But, with that blindness which seems to be the unvarying characteristic of tyrants, since Pharaoh and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea, the British Government persisted in the exactions complained of. The madness of this course, we believe, is admitted now, even by England; but we fear the lesson is wholly lost on our present ruler. Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression. Just here, the idea of a total separation of the colonies from the crown was born! It was a startling idea, much more so, than we, at this distance of time, regard it. The timid and the prudent (as has been intimated) of that day, were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it. Such people lived then, had lived before, and will, probably, ever have a place on this planet; and their course, in respect to any great change, (no matter how great the good to be attained, or the wrong to be redressed by it), may be calculated with as much precision as can be the course of the stars. They hate all changes, but silver, gold and copper change! Of this sort of change they are always strongly in favor. These people were called Tories in the days of your fathers; and the appellation, probably, conveyed the same idea that is meant by a more modern, though a somewhat less euphonious term, which we often find in our papers, applied to some of our old politicians. Their opposition to the then dangerous thought was earnest and powerful; but, amid all their terror and affrighted vociferations against it, the alarming and revolutionary idea moved on, and the country with it. On the second of July, 1776, the old Continental Congress, to the dismay of the lovers of ease, and the worshipers of property, clothed that dreadful idea with all the authority of national sanction. They did so in the form of a resolution; and as we seldom hit upon resolutions, drawn up in our day whose transparency is at all equal to this, it may refresh your minds and help my story if I read it. [We] solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of right, ought to be free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown; and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be [totally] dissolved. Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded; and to-day you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation’s history —the very ring—bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny. Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost. From the round top of your ship of state, dark and threatening clouds may be seen. Heavy billows, like mountains in the distance, disclose to the leeward huge forms of flinty rocks! That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. Cling to this day—cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight. The coming into being of a nation, in any circumstances, is an interesting event. But, besides general considerations, there were peculiar circumstances which make the advent of this republic an event of special attractiveness. The whole scene, as I look back to it, was simple, dignified and sublime. The population of the country, at the time, stood at the insignificant number of three millions. The country was poor in the munitions of war. The population was weak and scattered, and the country a wilderness unsubdued. There were then no means of concert and combination, such as exist now. Neither steam nor lightning had then been reduced to order and discipline. From the Potomac to the Delaware was a journey of many days. Under these, and innumerable other disadvantages, your fathers declared for liberty and independence and triumphed. Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory. They loved their country better than their own private interests; and, though this is not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede that it is a rare virtue, and that when it is exhibited, it ought to command respect. He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country, is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise. Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests. They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was "settled" that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were "final;" not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times. How circumspect, exact and proportionate were all their movements! How unlike the politicians of an hour! Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their defense. Mark them! Fully appreciating the hardship to be encountered, firmly believing in the right of their cause, honorably inviting the scrutiny of an on-looking world, reverently appealing to heaven to attest their sincerity, soundly comprehending the solemn responsibility they were about to assume, wisely measuring the terrible odds against them, your fathers, the fathers of this republic, did, most deliberately, under the inspiration of a glorious patriotism, and with a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom, lay deep the corner-stone of the national superstructure, which has risen and still rises in grandeur around you. Of this fundamental work, this day is the anniversary. Our eyes are met with demonstrations of joyous enthusiasm. Banners and pennants wave exultingly on the breeze. The din of business, too, is hushed. Even Mammon seems to have quitted his grasp on this day. The ear-piercing fife and the stirring drum unite their accents with the ascending peal of a thousand church bells. Prayers are made, hymns are sung, and sermons are preached in honor of this day; while the quick martial tramp of a great and multitudinous nation, echoed back by all the hills, valleys and mountains of a vast continent, bespeak the occasion one of thrilling and universal interests nation’s jubilee. Friends and citizens, I need not enter further into the causes which led to this anniversary. Many of you understand them better than I do. You could instruct me in regard to them. That is a branch of knowledge in which you feel, perhaps, a much deeper interest than your speaker. The causes which led to the separation of the colonies from the British crown have never lacked for a tongue. They have all been taught in your common schools, narrated at your firesides, unfolded from your pulpits, and thundered from your legislative halls, and are as familiar to you as household words. They form the staple of your national poetry and eloquence. I remember also that as a people Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor. This is esteemed by some as a national trait—perhaps a national weakness. It is a fact, that whatever makes for the wealth or for the reputation of Americans, and can be had cheap will be found by Americans. I shall not be charged with slandering Americans if I say I think the American side of any question may be safely left in American hands. I leave, therefore, the great deeds of your fathers to other gentlemen whose claim to have been regularly descended will be less likely to be disputed than mine! My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now. Trust no future, however pleasant, Let the dead past bury its dead; Act, act in the living present, Heart within, and God overhead. We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence. Sydney Smith tells us that men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own. This truth is not a doubtful one. There are illustrations of it near and remote, ancient and modern. It was fashionable, hundreds of years ago, for the children of Jacob to boast, we have "Abraham to our father," when they had long lost Abraham’s faith and spirit. That people contented themselves under the shadow of Abraham’s great name, while they repudiated the deeds which made his name great. Need I remind you that a similar thing is being done all over this country to-day? Need I tell you that the Jews are not the only people who built the tombs of the prophets, and garnished the sepulchres of the righteous? Washington could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves. Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men, shout —"We have Washington to our father."—Alas! that it should be so; yet so it is. The evil that men do, lives after them, The good is oft’ interred with their bones. Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us? Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been tom from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the "lame man leap as an hart." But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people! "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth." Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery—the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;" I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be fight and just. But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man, (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, their will I argue with you that the slave is a man! For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men! Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him. What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to bum their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood and stained with pollution is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength than such arguments would imply. What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past. At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced. What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour. Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival. Take the American slave-trade, which, we are told by the papers, is especially prosperous just now. Ex-Senator Benton tells us that the price of men was never higher than now. He mentions the fact to show that slavery is in no danger. This trade is one of the peculiarities of American institutions. It is carried on in all the large towns and cities in one-half of this confederacy; and millions are pocketed every year, by dealers in this horrid traffic. In several states, this trade is a chief source of wealth. It is called (in contradistinction to the foreign slave-trade) "the internal slave trade." It is, probably, called so, too, in order to divert from it the horror with which the foreign slave-trade is contemplated. That trade has long since been denounced by this government, as piracy. It has been denounced with burning words, from the high places of the nation, as an execrable traffic. To arrest it, to put an end to it, this nation keeps a squadron, at immense cost, on the coast of Africa. Everywhere, in this country, it is safe to speak of this foreign slave-trade, as a most inhuman traffic, opposed alike to the laws of God and of man. The duty to extirpate and destroy it, is admitted even by our doctors of divinity. In order to put an end to it, some of these last have consented that their colored brethren (nominally free) should leave this country, and establish themselves on the western coast of Africa! It is, however, a notable fact that, while so much execration is poured out by Americans upon those engaged in the foreign slave-trade, the men engaged in the slave-trade between the states pass without condemnation, and their business is deemed honorable. Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and America religion. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human flesh-jobbers, armed with pistol, whip and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the cotton-field, and the deadly sugar-mill. Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! There, see the old man, with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn! The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul! The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Follow the drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me citizens, where, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States. I was born amid such sights and scenes. To me the American slave-trade is a terrible reality. When a child, my soul was often pierced with a sense of its horrors. I lived on Philpot Street, Fell’s Point, Baltimore, and have watched from the wharves, the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with their cargoes of human flesh, waiting for favorable winds to waft them down the Chesapeake. There was, at that time, a grand slave mart kept at the head of Pratt Street, by Austin Woldfolk. His agents were sent into every town and county in Maryland, announcing their arrival, through the papers, and on flaming hand-bills headed “Cash for Negroes.” These men were generally well dressed men, and very captivating in their manners. Ever ready to drink, to treat, and to gamble. The fate of many a slave has depended upon the turn of a single card; and many a child has been snatched from the arms of its mother by bargains arranged in a state of brutal drunkenness. The flesh-mongers gather up their victims by dozens, and drive them, chained, to the general depot at Baltimore. When a sufficient number have been collected here, a ship is chartered, for the purpose of conveying the forlorn crew to Mobile, or to New Orleans. From the slave prison to the ship, they are usually driven in the darkness of night; for since the antislavery agitation, a certain caution is observed. In the deep, still darkness of midnight I have been often aroused by the dead heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door. The anguish of my boyish heart was intense; and I was often consoled, when speaking to my mistress in the morning, to hear her say that the custom was very wicked; that she hated to hear the rattle of the chains, and the heart-rending cries. I was glad to find one who sympathized with me in my horror. Fellow-citizens, this murderous traffic is, to-day, in active operation in this boasted republic. In the solitude of my spirit, I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the South; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity, on the way to the slave markets, where the victims are to be sold like horses, sheep and swine, knocked off to the highest bidder. There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men. My soul sickens at the sight. Is this the land your Fathers loved, The freedom which they toiled to win? Is this the earth whereon they moved? Are these the graves they slumber in? But a still more inhuman, disgraceful, and scandalous state of things remains to be presented. By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. By that act, Mason & Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children as slaves remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. The power is co-extensive with the Star-Spangled Banner and American Christianity. Where these go, may also go the merciless slave-hunter. Where these are, man is not sacred. He is a bird for the sportsman’s gun. By that most foul and fiendish of all human decrees, the liberty and person of every man are put in peril. Your broad republican domain is hunting ground for men. Not for thieves and robbers, enemies of society, merely, but for men guilty of no crime. Your lawmakers have commanded all good citizens to engage in this hellish sport. Your President, your Secretary of State, your lords, nobles and ecclesiastics enforce, as a duty you owe to your free and glorious country, and to your God, that you do this accursed thing. Not fewer than forty Americans have, within the past two years, been hunted down and, without a moment’s warning, hurried away in chains, and consigned to slavery and excruciating torture. Some of these have had wives and children, dependent on them for bread; but of this, no account was made. The right of the hunter to his prey stands superior to the right of marriage, and to all rights in this republic, the rights of God included! For black men there are neither law, justice, humanity, not religion. The Fugitive Slave Law makes makes mercy to them a crime; and bribes the judge who tries them. An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so. The oath of any two villains is sufficient, under this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery! His own testimony is nothing. He can bring no witnesses for himself. The minister of American justice is bound by the law to hear but one side; and that side, is the side of the oppressor. Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world, that, in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America, the seats of justice are filled with judges, who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding in the case of a man’s liberty, to hear only his accusers! In glaring violation of justice, in shameless disregard of the forms of administering law, in cunning arrangement to entrap the defenseless, and in diabolical intent, this Fugitive Slave Law stands alone in the annals of tyrannical legislation. I doubt if there be another nation on the globe, having the brass and the baseness to put such a law on the statute-book. If any man in this assembly thinks differently from me in this matter, and feels able to disprove my statements, I will gladly confront him at any suitable time and place he may select. I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were not stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it. At the very moment that they are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, and for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences, they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance, and makes it utterly worthless to a world lying in wickedness. Did this law concern the "mint, anise and cummin" —abridge the fight to sing psalms, to partake of the sacrament, or to engage in any of the ceremonies of religion, it would be smitten by the thunder of a thousand pulpits. A general shout would go up from the church, demanding repeal, repeal, instant repeal! And it would go hard with that politician who presumed to solicit the votes of the people without inscribing this motto on his banner. Further, if this demand were not complied with, another Scotland would be added to the history of religious liberty, and the stern old Covenanters would be thrown into the shade. A John Knox would be seen at every church door, and heard from every pulpit, and Fillmore would have no more quarter than was shown by Knox, to the beautiful, but treacherous queen Mary of Scotland. The fact that the church of our country, (with fractional exceptions), does not esteem "the Fugitive Slave Law" as a declaration of war against religious liberty, implies that that church regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man. It esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind. The Bible addresses all such persons as "scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, who pay tithe of mint, anise, and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith." But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of die slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines. who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity. For my part, I would say, Welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything—in preference to the gospel, as preached by those divines. They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throng of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that "pure and undefiled religion" which is from above, and which is "first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy." But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation—a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, "Bring no more vain ablations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea! when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow." The American church is guilty, when viewed in connection with what it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed in connection with its ability to abolish slavery. The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that "There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it." Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday school, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds; and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive. In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be done? We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. From what quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? As the champions of oppressors, the chosen men of American theology have appeared—men, honored for their so-called piety, and their real learning. The Lords of Buffalo, the Springs of New York, the Lathrops of Auburn, the Coxes and Spencers of Brooklyn, the Gannets and Sharps of Boston, the Deweys of Washington, and other great religious lights of the land, have, in utter denial of the authority of Him, by whom the professed to he called to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example or the Hebrews and against the remonstrance of the Apostles, they teach "that we ought to obey man’s law before the law of God." My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be supported, as the "standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ," is a mystery which I leave others to penetrate. In speaking of the American church, however, let it be distinctly understood that I mean the great mass of the religious organizations of our land. There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are. Noble men may be found, scattered all over these Northern States, of whom Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn, Samuel J. May of Syracuse, and my esteemed friend [Rev. R. R. Raymond] on the platform, are shining examples; and let me say further, that upon these men lies the duty to inspire our ranks with high religious faith and zeal, and to cheer us on in the great mission of the slave’s redemption from his chains. One is struck with the difference between the attitude of the American church towards the anti-slavery movement, and that occupied by the churches in England towards a similar movement in that country. There, the church, true to its mission of ameliorating, elevating, and improving the condition of mankind, came forward promptly, bound up the wounds of the West Indian slave, and restored him to his liberty. There, the question of emancipation was a high[ly] religious question. It was demanded, in the name of humanity, and according to the law of the living God. The Sharps, the Clarksons, the Wilberforces, the Buxtons, and Burchells and the Knibbs, were alike famous for their piety, and for their philanthropy. The anti-slavery movement there was not an anti-church movement, for the reason that the church took its full share in prosecuting that movement: and the anti-slavery movement in this country will cease to be an anti-church movement, when the church of this country shall assume a favorable instead or a hostile position towards that movement. Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties) is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria, and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and bodyguards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill. You glory in your refinement and your universal education yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation—a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against her oppressors; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse! You are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America. You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labor; yet, you sustain a system which, in its very essence, casts a stigma upon labor. You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a threepenny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard-earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country. You profess to believe "that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth," and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate, (and glory in your hatred), all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you "hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;" and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, "is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose," a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country. Fellow-citizens! I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a by word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever! But it is answered in reply to all this, that precisely what I have now denounced is, in fact, guaranteed and sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States; that the right to hold and to hunt slaves is a part of that Constitution framed by the illustrious Fathers of this Republic. Then, I dare to affirm, notwithstanding all I have said before, your fathers stooped, basely stooped. To palter with us in a double sense: And keep the word of promise to the ear, But break it to the heart. And instead of being the honest men I have before declared them to be, they were the veriest imposters that ever practiced on mankind. This is the inevitable conclusion, and from it there is no escape. But I differ from those who charge this baseness on the framers of the Constitution of the United States. It is a slander upon their memory, at least, so I believe. There is not time now to argue the constitutional question at length - nor have I the ability to discuss it as it ought to be discussed. The subject has been handled with masterly power by Lysander Spooner, Esq., by William Goodell, by Samuel E. Sewall, Esq., and last, though not least, by Gerritt Smith, Esq. These gentlemen have, as I think, fully and clearly vindicated the Constitution from any design to support slavery for an hour. Fellow-citizens! there is no matter in respect to which, the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it. What would be thought of an instrument, drawn up, legally drawn up, for the purpose of entitling the city of Rochester to a track of land, in which no mention of land was made? Now, there are certain rules of interpretation, for the proper understanding of all legal instruments. These rules are well established. They are plain, common-sense rules, such as you and I, and all of us, can understand and apply, without having passed years in the study of law. I scout the idea that the question of the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of slavery is not a question for the people. I hold that every American citizen has a fight to form an opinion of the constitution, and to propagate that opinion, and to use all honorable means to make his opinion the prevailing one. Without this fight, the liberty of an American citizen would be as insecure as that of a Frenchman. Ex-Vice-President Dallas tells us that the constitution is an object to which no American mind can be too attentive, and no American heart too devoted. He further says, the constitution, in its words, is plain and intelligible, and is meant for the home-bred, unsophisticated understandings of our fellow-citizens. Senator Berrien tell us that the Constitution is the fundamental law, that which controls all others. The charter of our liberties, which every citizen has a personal interest in understanding thoroughly. The testimony of Senator Breese, Lewis Cass, and many others that might be named, who are everywhere esteemed as sound lawyers, so regard the constitution. I take it, therefore, that it is not presumption in a private citizen to form an opinion of that instrument. Now, take the constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery. I have detained my audience entirely too long already. At some future period I will gladly avail myself of an opportunity to give this subject a full and fair discussion. Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country." Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. "The arm of the Lord is not shortened," and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are, distinctly heard on the other. The far-off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, "Let there be Light," has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen, in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. "Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God." In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it. God speed the year of jubilee The wide world o’er When from their galling chains set free, Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee, And wear the yoke of tyranny Like brutes no more. That year will come, and freedom’s reign, To man his plundered fights again Restore. God speed the day when human blood Shall cease to flow! In every clime be understood, The claims of human brotherhood, And each return for evil, good, Not blow for blow; That day will come all feuds to end. And change

Henry Lee Price (H.L. Price), son of formerly enslaved Samuel Price, he founded the town of Cuney, Texas (named after his son, Cuney Price). Settled by those formerly enslaved just after the Civil War, Cuney was once known as Andy, Texas after Andrew Bragg, the first black landowner in the area. But a real community didn't appear until 1902, when the Texas and New Orleans Railroad made the town a flag stop. Around 1914 H. L. Price, and local investors formed a company and mapped out a town site. They named the town after Price's son, Cuney Price. He had been named after Norris Wright Cuney, a black politician and head of the Texas Republican party. A post office was granted in 1917. In 1929, Cuney had 100 people when the highway (U.S.175) was paved. The town's major businesses moved to be near the increased traffic. In the throes of the Great Depression, the population shrank to a mere 25 citizens. Over the years it increased slowly to 170 (1990). Cuney incorporated in November 1983. Sources: Price Johnson Family Collection, Portal to Texas History/Watkins Studio, Palestine, TX; texasescapes.com

African-Americans played a prominent role in New Bedford, Massachusetts growth, progression and history. There is hardly a facet of society, high or low, that they did not participate in. From menial jobs like custodian, cook and lamplighter to ship building, medicine, and law. One of those professions, photography, was beginning to take off in America in 1880s. One particular New Bedford citizen saw the merit and potential revenue that could be generated by someone who had a keen eye and attention to detail. That man was James E. Reed, who was one of the first African American photographers in New Bedford’s history. By 1895 James E. Reed was bringing in enough revenue to open his own studio, which he did with his partner white Phineas C. Headley. Headley & Reed were the premier studio at 5 Purchase Street in New Bedford and ran a successful business from 1890-1896. For unknown reasons Headley left the business in 1896, however, Reed continued on until 1914. James married Anna Jourdain. His wife studied at the Swain School of Design and used the skills she learned there to embellish her husband’s photos by coloring and tinting them. This breathed life into the otherwise black and white photos and surely contributed to the popularity of Headley & Reed and especially Reed when he struck out on his own. His wife also worked on Tiffany style lampshades for the famous Pairpoint Company of New Bedford. It seemed at this point in Reed’s life perhaps his passion for photography – as a business anyhow – had waned as he moved on and became the first Photostat Operator for the Massachusetts State Archives, a position he held until he retired. James E Reed left an abundance of photos behind capturing the city and region for three decades giving us a window to the past. So many photos that the Newbedford Whaling Museum had an exhibition in 1991 titled, 'James E. Reed: Pioneer Black Photographer.' Source: newbedfordguide.com written by Joe Silvia