so, how do certain bodies become associated with cities?

Still photo from Julie Dash's "Daughters of the Dust."

So, how do certain bodies become associated with cities? The initial answer (so far in the context of the United States): labor needs. Last week, the students looked at black labor in New York during the colonial era. In the coming week, they will continue exploring this issue by looking, among other places, at Charleston, South Carolina during the antebellum period.  Founded by English settlers from Barbados in the seventeenth century, Charleston had an amazingly large concentration of people of African descent, some free and some enslaved. As Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, the author of the book pictured to the right, tells us, urban slavery in Charles Town, later renamed Charleston was, “first and foremost, about labor.” People of African descent were employed in many professions. Some worked in rice mills and other industries, sometimes beside poor whites. Others had jobs related to sea life. Women of color worked as domestic servants and in a variety of trades. Some women were also the "leading purveyors" of needed food, raising prices and picking customers at will. The experiences of these bondsmen and working class blacks contrasted sharply with those around them including free black Eliza Lee, a pastry chef and co-owner of a hotel. Using a chapter from Myers’ recently published book, an essay from Ronald L. Lewis, and a clip from Julie Dash's 1991 motion picture "Daughters of the Dust," the students will learn more about how “industrial” slavery posed tensions with agricultural slavery. Along the way, they will keep thinking about how focusing  on location, specifically, the city, may deepen what we know about African American life across time.

what it means to be "free"

There is a short block near my Alabama neighborhood called the "back way to Holt." It is mostly working class and populated by African American, white and Latino residents. This area’s racial make-up is easy to see during warmer months because the children are sometimes outside playing together. This street paints a story that permits many questions. How early in American history do we see certain bodies coming together residentially or otherwise? How and where does that change? In her study of New York City from the colonial period through 1863, Leslie Harris tells us that though African Americans were made legally free in 1827, New Yorkers increasingly had different ideas about what it meant to be free (we get a sense of this, entertainingly though imperfectly, in Martin Scorsese’s 2002 “Gangs of New York,” which focuses on the Irish working man’s perspective). In 1853, as Harris writes, some African Americans in this city did not want to work in service and domestic professions. They joined forces with white waiters and demanded higher wages. This coalition reflected a class-based interest that was reflected in their after work activities in New York’s Five Points area. However, race-based interests during the Civil War led to changes in some attitudes. Ethnicity and national identity figured into such a shift.  Ultimately, Harris takes the issues of slavery and freedom, which we typically think of as southern issues, and complicates New York’s “vision of community,” which she sees not as a fixed entity, but as one filled with great struggle. As an aside, New York is a port city, a topic addressed earlier on this blog. How does that geographical dynamic complicate the issue at hand?