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This chapter examines how black girls were represented in the earliest extant examples of the black press by focusing on Freedom's Journal, published from 1827 to 1829, and the Colored American (1837–1841). Articles about black girlhood in the early black press offer insights into the everyday struggles of African Americans in the early republic. In a sense, early black newspapers served as conduct manuals as they emphasized the model family, encouraging readers to be temperate, industrious, and pursue intellectual development through literacy and education. Although the ideal black family figured prominently in both Freedom's Journal and the Colored American, this chapter argues that the stories and columns they published reveal stress and struggle in black households in the early decades of the nation. It cites the striking absence of black mothers in these articles in the heyday of the ideal of republican motherhood, an indication that many black mothers were working for wages outside the home.

This chapter begins by discussing the designation of “Colored American Day” on August 25, 1893. It then explains that this day was designated in order to combat the exclusionary climate during the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, wherein almost all black Americans were excluded in the planning and execution of the fair’s exhibitions. Ida B. Wells and other African-Americans urged blacks to boycott the fair for they feared the event might provide whites with ammunition to mock the race. It discusses that “Colored American Day” was observed in a dignified manner and the appearance and demeanor of the participants brought honor to the race. This chapter adds that the event demonstrated that acculturation was the avenue to greater acceptance into the larger social order. The emergence of ragtime and The Creole Show was a cultural innovation, an important first step toward the development of the black musical comedies.

This chapter focuses on Pauline E. Hopkins's “Of One Blood” in the context of the African American periodical in which it was serialized, the Colored American Magazine. Published only a few years after the surprising Italian defeat at Adwa, “Of One Blood” contributed to the magazine's project of “documentary Ethiopianism” as expressed in histories and biographies but it also preserved the fantastic conception of Ethiopia that helped create Ethiopianism. “Of One Blood” is exemplary as a fictional text that introduces the mysticism that the historical and ethnographic texts of the Colored American Magazine avoid while still participating in documentary Ethiopianism by sending its characters to Ethiopia. The chapter also discusses how “Of One Blood” activates Regalization Fantasy, which is intrinsic to imperial Ethiopianist ideology. As a result of the fantasy's paradoxical inclusivity and exclusivity, the imperial model of Ethiopianism seen in “Of One Blood” contains the irritant that leads to its own dismantling by mid-century.

This chapter traces the influence of travelers like William and Lucy Gantt Sheppard on more conventionally fictionalized literary work by authors like Hopkins who never traveled to Africa themselves. Her novel Of One Blood, which was first serialized in the influential Colored American Magazine, where she was an editor, is indicative of the way that broadly internationalist culture circulating around the Congo, and other geopolitical spaces, was grounded in the black press. This chapter argues that connections between Of One Blood and the missionary careers of the Sheppards illuminate the transatlantic routes that have contributed to the development of African American literature and culture, further challenging common generalizations that, in the early twentieth century, modern Africa was unknown to African Americans. Early twentieth century American representations of Africa, such as Of One Blood, were informed by intellectual networks of writers and activists that were nurtured through the black press as well as literary societies, civic organizations, HBCUs, and religious institutions.

This chapter explores the critical debate about Pauline Hopkins' contradictory relationship to imperialism in her work by arguing that her characterization of Reuel Briggs in Africa in the serially published novel Of One Blood, Or, The Hidden Self (1902–3) self-consciously echoes and signifies ambivalent constructions of black cosmopolitanism found in the Colored American Magazine (CAM). Drawing on Hopkins' correspondence about her published works in the magazine that she adapted for her portrayal of Reuel, it contends that that Hopkins' story about a racially ambiguous figure shadowing the white man's burden both symptomizes and diagnoses the magazine's uneasy linkage between African American uplift and U.S. global power. By placing Hopkins' novel in this textual and historical context, the chapter proposes not to resolve the question of Hopkins' conflicted relationship to imperialism but to demonstrate that she self-consciously identified this conflict when she pieced together Reuel's perspectives.

Chapter 3 identifies the moment when colored travelers launched a movement in earnest. The movement took off in the late 1830s and early 1840s, when segregation on the Massachusetts railroad turned brutal. In part, this was because steam-powered passenger railroads were new. It was also because the president of one of the foremost Boston railroad lines created a novel invention, a separate car to carry black people and the poor. Rail road workers in Massachusetts dubbed the space the “Jim Crow car.” It was a method of racial control that institutionalized segregation as no method of transportation had before. In keeping with the criminalization of black mobility, the railroad directors not only insisted that people of color ride in the dirty, cramped spaces, but officials also employed conductors who served as enforcers and routinely beat, kicked, and ousted colored travelers who attempted to ride in the first-class car. To activists, standing up and risking white violence in the name of equality became a mark of black masculinity. In a strategy that continues to buttress civil rights protest today, colored travelers held the state accountable by turning to the courts for redress.

A major leader of blacks in the 19^th century who has been underestimated, Henry Highland Garnet emerged from the precocious black student body at New York's African Free School to in time be hailed by Frederick Douglass as the foremost intellectual among blacks of his time. Focusing on the spiritual cost occasioned by successive generations of blacks passing on to subsequent generations the accumulated damage of enslavement, that insight premised his revolutionary stance as perhaps his most original contribution to nationalist theory. Since blacks alone had experienced that degradation, they had no choice but to lead in the overthrow of slavery. Under the pseudonym “Sidney,” Garnet advanced brilliant arguments for oppressed blacks leading their own struggle for freedom. Deeply humanistic, he was a leading advocate of the need for the liberation of white workers as well.