RADICAL BLACK ACTIVISTS AND JOHN BROWN
Over the course of two days in 1858, Black activists and white allies met in Chatham, Canada, to discuss John Brown’s plans for overthrowing “the infernal institution” of slavery. This exhibit explores Black convention activists’ relationships with John Brown. It provides a richer and more complex understanding of the influence of Black activist networks on one of the most well-known radicals of the nineteenth century.
Credits
Curator: Jessica Thelen, PhD student in English. Created for Dr. P. Gabrielle Foreman’s ENGL/HIST 677 class, Spring, 2019, University of Delaware.
Edited by P. Gabrielle Foreman, Penn State University, and Samantha Q. de Vera, UC Irvine.
Proofread and technical review by Kaitlyn Tanis, University of Delaware, Eunice Toh, Penn State University, and Lauren Cooper, Penn State University.
Acknowledgements: Dr. Derrick Spires (Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Dr. Jeffrey Insko (Associate Professor and Coordinator of American Studies at Oakland University), Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson (Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, Wellesley College), Michelle Byrnes, Anna Lacy, Lauren Cooper, Eunice Toh, and “academic twitter,” specifically #twitterstorians.
Special thanks to Gale, a Cengage Company and Accessible Archives Inc.® for granting permission for the use of the materials from 19th Century U.S. Newspaper and African American Newspapers: The 19th Century.
The Colored Conventions Project works with teaching partners and their students to create digital content on the rich history of Black political organizing in the nineteenth-century. Visit our Teaching Partners page to browse the curriculum and find information on becoming a teaching partner.
Cover image (Clockwise left to right): John Brown via Wikimedia Commons; Henry Highland Garnet, source: blackpast.org; Jermain Loguen, source: Howard University Gallery of Art via Wikimedia Commons; Osborne Perry (P.) Anderson, source: www.blackpast.org; Martin R. Delany, source: Heinz History Center/Smithsonian Institution; Anna Murray Douglass, source: Library of Congress; Frederick Douglass, source Art Institute of Chicago; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, source: New York Public Library Digital Collections; Harriet Tubman, source: blackpast.org; Abraham Shadd, source: Chatham-Kent Archives; Isaac D. Shadd, source: Chatham-Kent Black Historical Society; Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Wikimedia Commons; Mary Ellen Pleasant, source: The Bancroft Library, Online Archive of California. Background: map of Harpers Ferry Raid, c.1909, by W.E.B. Du Bois, source: Wikimedia Commons.