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This chapter is all about ‘Theresa; a Haytien Tale’ (1828), a short story that was serialized and published anonymously in the first African American newspaper Freedom’s Journal, and is now considered to be the first African American short story. The author argues that this brief text provides an even more redemptive role for women of color. ‘Theresa’ imagines women as central to the liberation of the colony through their unfailing and unquestioning allegiance to the revolutionary cause. ‘Theresa’ is therefore not buttressed by pseudoscientific claims of the innate savagery or hyper-sexuality of “black” women, but instead unequivocally celebrates their ability to contribute to slave rebellions, imagining a hitherto denied active role for women of color in the events of the Haitian Revolution.

This chapter focuses on Freedom's Journal, America's first black newspaper, with Samuel Cornish (1795–1859) and Russwurm as senior and junior editors, respectively. They sought to make Freedom's Journal a “medium of intercourse” between African Americans in different states as well as have it serve as a forum for its constituency of readers on various issues that concern them. Cornish and Russwurm saw Freedom's Journal as an organizer; they sought to meld the scattered black population in the United States into one people, with the Journal as its advocate and articulate voice. Freedom's Journal also saw itself as an educator, in both the narrow and the wider sense of the term, and emphasizing this role, it promised to “urge upon our brethren the necessity and expediency of training their children, while young, to habits of industry, and thus forming them for becoming useful members of society.”

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.

Born in North Carolina of a slave father and free mother, David Walker dedicated himself, with iron resolve, to the emancipation of people of color, eventually publishing his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, in which he urges a founding principle of nationalism, unified struggle. Another feature of his nationalism included his belief in the need for blacks themselves to record their history. Even as he found deficiencies in slave culture such as, he thought, the insufficient presence of Christianity, he believed in African moral character. He did not believe all Africans had rejected Christianity, that many had fused their own morality with Christianity, thereby transforming it, at times carrying it to its highest heights. Walker viewed the racism of Thomas Jefferson and the efforts of Henry Clay to oust blacks from the country unworthy of a land purporting to be free.

Maria Stewart becomes immersed in a community that fosters powerful black leaders and institutions: Thomas Paul, David Walker, John Telemachus Hilton, the Prince Hall Masons, the African Baptist Society, the Massachusetts General Colored Persons Association, the purveyors of Freedom’s Journal, and more. Transformed by personal, financial, religious, and intellectual support, she takes up community activism.