#post-emancipation

[forthosebefore]

St. John Colony outside Lockhart, Texas began in the early 1870s, when a group of Black families, led by the Rev. John Henry Winn, relocated here from Webberville.

The original 14 families purchased about 2,000 acres of land to establish a town and family farms. Originally named Winn’s Colony in honor of the reverend, the community’s name was changed after Winn organized St. John Missionary Baptist Church in 1873.

The community grew steadily and at its peak included homes of about 100 families, farms, stores, a school, cotton gin, and grist mill. The boundaries of the colony extended into Bastrop County. A post office, under the name Mackiesville, opened in 1890 with Lewis Mackey as postmaster. In addition to St. John Missionary Baptist, churches included Zion Union Missionary Baptist and Landmark Missionary Baptist.

The post office was closed in the 1920s, and the school was consolidated with Lockhart schools in 1966. The community graveyard, known as St. John Cemetery or Zion Cemetery, contains the graves of many of the area’s pioneers. Descendants of some of the founding families still reside in St. John Colony.

Learn more about post-Emancipation Black communities from The Texas Freedom Colonies Project: https://www.thetexasfreedomcoloniesproject.com

Image: Headstone of Jane Roland in the St. John Colony cemetery Source: Texas Historical Commission Facebook

Visit www.attawellsummer.com/forthosebefore to learn more about Black history.

Need a freelance graphic designer or illustrator? Send me an email.

[universal-equivalent-blog]

The Urgency of a Third Reconstruction | Dissent Magazine

The ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment marked a turning point in U.S. history. Yet 150 years later, its promises remain unfulfilled.

“The ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment on July 9, 1868 was a turning point in United States history. Arriving at the height of Reconstruction, the amendment marked the first time the U.S. Constitution explicitly addressed the question of who qualified as an American citizen. Southern African Americans who had won their freedom in the Civil War were, in effect, forcing the country to redefine its identity, and to make good on its promise of universalism. The vision of emancipation expressed in the Amendment was expansive, serving to enshrine in law the principles of due process and equal protection as well as the basic right to citizenship.

Yet, a century and a half later, its goals remain unfulfilled. Movement leader Reverend William J. Barber II argues that the task facing the United States today is nothing short of a “Third Reconstruction,” drawing on the legacies of both the Reconstruction era of the 1860s and 1870s and the civil rights movement, or “Second Reconstruction,” of the 1960s and 1970s. In making these historical connections, today’s activists can understand that they aren’t alone, and draw both lessons and spiritual strength from those previous eras of promise and dashed expectations. If the left wishes to make the most of the Third Reconstruction—not just defeating a revanchist right wing at the polls but fundamentally changing the nation for the better—we can draw important insights from these two previous eras of civic revolution.”

[soulbrotherv2]

Remains of Black People Forced Into Labor After Slavery Are Discovered in Texas

The remains of dozens of people found at a construction site in Texas this year are mostly likely those of African-Americans who were forced to work on a plantation there around the turn of the 20th century, officials said this week.

That finding, announced Monday, opens a window onto a little-remembered period in which blacks in certain Southern states were essentially treated like slaves post-emancipation. 

[Click here to read the article in its entirety at the New York Times.]

[sock-to-the-third]

In time, even upon [Landry’s] healing, even when his jaw allowed it, even when the rivers on his back shored up and no longer pulsed alongside the beating of his heart, he could not being the words forth in whole units and began to wonder why he would wish to do so in the first place, considering how little the act of speaking had ever done for him.

pg136 [Ch11] of The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris

[blacktransgendervarianthist-blog]

Frances Thompson

Frances Thompson was a former slave from Maryland who lived in Memphis with another freed slave, Lucy Smith. In 1865, when the historical Memphis riots broke out, Thompson and Smith were raped and beaten by seven white men, two of whom were police officers (Rosen, 69). Thompson would later testify before a congressional committee, though the rioters would never be brought up for criminal hearings. Frances better fits our definitions of transness as she lived publicly and privately as a woman, and it was not discovered until a decade after the Memphis riots that she was trans when she was arrested for cross-dressing (Rosen, 283-285). These allegations were used to discredit Thompson’s charges against the seven white men who brutalized her. This combination of heterosexism and racism caused Frances to be subject to defamation and ridicule and for her assailants to walk free in the post-emancipation South.

Works Cited

Rosen, H. (2009). Gender and American culture : Terror in the heart of freedom : Citizenship, sexual violence, and the meaning of race in the postemancipation South. Chapel Hill, US: The University of North Carolina Press.

[soulbrotherv2]

Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Gender and American Culture) by Hannah Rosen

The meaning of race in the antebellum southern United States was anchored in the racial exclusivity of slavery (coded as black) and full citizenship (coded as white as well as male). These traditional definitions of race were radically disrupted after emancipation, when citizenship was granted to all persons born in the United States and suffrage was extended to all men. Hannah Rosen persuasively argues that in this critical moment of Reconstruction, contests over the future meaning of race were often fought on the terrain of gender.

Sexual violence—specifically, white-on-black rape—emerged as a critical arena in postemancipation struggles over African American citizenship. Analyzing the testimony of rape survivors, Rosen finds that white men often staged elaborate attacks meant to enact prior racial hierarchy. Through their testimony, black women defiantly rejected such hierarchy and claimed their new and equal rights. Rosen explains how heated debates over interracial marriage were also attempts by whites to undermine African American men's demands for suffrage and a voice in public affairs. By connecting histories of rape and discourses of "social equality" with struggles over citizenship, Rosen shows how gendered violence and gendered rhetorics of race together produced a climate of terror for black men and women seeking to exercise their new rights as citizens. Linking political events at the city, state, and regional levels, Rosen places gender and sexual violence at the heart of understanding the reconsolidation of race and racism in the postemancipation United States. [book link]