Cincinnati and the Frontiers of Freedom
Categories: In the News , History , Local Interest , Nonfiction , African American
The next lecture in the Library’s weekly Black History Month series will be “Cincinnati’s Black Community in the Pre-Civil War Era,” presented by Nikki Marie Taylor (Saturday, February 10, 2:00 in the Huenefeld Tower Room). Professor Taylor, who recently joined the University of Cincinnati Department of History, is the author of Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati's Black Community, 1802-1868.
Frontiers of Freedom is a study of the determination, resourcefulness, and resilience of African American settlers in this Mason-Dixon border town, as notorious for racism – often violent – as it was distinguished by the work of abolitionists and Underground Railroad conductors, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and Levi Coffin.
What attracted Taylor, a Vassar College professor at the time she began this book, to the history of African American Cincinnati? In her introduction, she writes:
“Black Cincinnatians lived at the dangerous intersection of several American frontiers, including the frontiers of slavery and freedom. This book examines what the meeting of these frontiers at this particular junction meant for them and for the quality of their freedom. Cincinnati, Ohio, was an unusually tough soil on which to build a community, but African Americans slowly planted themselves in it and refused to be uprooted…. If nineteenth-century black Cincinnatians teach us nothing else, they should teach us that freedom is not just a state of being, but a state of striving.”
Here are some other important accounts of African Americans in nineteenth-century Cincinnati and the city’s role in the Underground Railroad:
Race and the City: Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820-1970 edited by Henry Louis Taylor, Jr.
Cincinnati’s Colored Citizens: Historical, Sociological and Biographical by Wendell Phillips Dabney
A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life by Eliza Potter – listen to a reading from “Three Voices from Cincinnati’s Past,” a digital exhibit created for the Library’s celebration of Tall Stacks 2003.
Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South by Steven Weisenburger, the story of Margaret Garner, who escaped to Cincinnati only to be retaken by her master with the worst imaginable consequences
Beloved, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel based on Margaret Garner’s tragedy, as is the Morrison/Danielpour opera Margaret Garner, which premiered in Cincinnati and Detroit in 2005
Reminiscences of Levi Coffin by Levi Coffin
Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory, published by the Smithsonian Institution in collaboration with the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
