2.14 - Black Organizing in the North: Freedom, Women's Rights, and Education
Building Community as Free Black People
Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the free Black population in the United States steadily grew. By 1860, free people made up about 12 percent of the total Black population. Interestingly, there were actually more free Black people living in the South than in the North, but in both regions their numbers remained small compared to the much larger enslaved population.
Despite being a small minority, free Black communities in cities like Philadelphia, New York, and New Orleans built real, lasting institutions. They formed mutual-aid societies, organizations that pooled resources to fund Black schools, businesses, and independent churches, and to support the work of Black writers and public speakers. These institutions became the backbone of free Black community life, providing support and infrastructure that simply wasn't available elsewhere.
One of the earliest examples was the Free African Society, founded in Philadelphia in 1787 by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones. Members paid dues that helped widows, orphans, and the sick, and the group grew into independent Black churches. Allen went on to found Bethel Church, which became the center of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, organized as its own denomination in 1816. Independent Black churches like these served as meeting places, schools, and centers of antislavery organizing.
Black Women's Activism and Techniques of Advocacy
In the nineteenth century, Black women activists took on the specific challenge of making sure gender, and Black women's particular experiences, weren't left out of the broader antislavery conversation. They did this primarily through speeches and published writing, using public voice as their main tool for advocacy.
Maria W. Stewart stands out as a genuine pioneer in this regard. She was the first Black woman to publish a political manifesto, and she was also among the very first American women, of any race, to deliver a public address. Her activism throughout the 1830s helped lay groundwork for what would become the first wave of the feminist movement in America.
Stewart was born free in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1803 and became an activist in Boston after her husband's death. Her 1831 pamphlet, Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, was published by William Lloyd Garrison, the white abolitionist who ran The Liberator. Between 1832 and 1833 she gave four public lectures in Boston, speaking to audiences of both men and women, which was rare and controversial for any woman at the time. Criticism, including from within Boston's Black community, led her to stop lecturing in 1833, and her speeches were published in 1835.
The Broader Significance of Black Women's Activism
Black women activists were doing something that wouldn't be formally named for over a century: drawing attention to how race and gender discrimination intersected and compounded each other in their own lived experience. They fought simultaneously for abolition and for women's rights, work that directly helped pave the way for the later women's suffrage movement.
By consistently highlighting how race, gender, and class were connected in their own experiences, these activists were essentially anticipating political debates and frameworks that remain central to African American politics even today. Their work wasn't confined to their own era, it set the terms for conversations about identity and justice that are still ongoing.
Required Sources
"Why Sit Here and Die" by Maria W. Stewart, 1832
Stewart gave this lecture on September 21, 1832, at Franklin Hall in Boston, where the New England Anti-Slavery Society held its meetings. It opens with the question "Why sit ye here and die?" (from a Bible story about lepers who decide to act instead of waiting to starve), and it makes two big arguments. First, it rejects colonization: free Black people should not be shipped to Africa but should stay and demand their rights in America. Second, it describes how racism trapped free Black people in the North, especially women, in low-paid domestic service in white families' kitchens, and argues that their condition was little better than slavery. By speaking publicly about the specific burdens on Black women, Stewart showed the kind of attention to race, gender, and class described above.
Why sit ye here and die? If we say we will go to a foreign land, the famine and the pestilence are there, and there we shall die. If we sit here, we shall die. Come, let us plead our cause before the whites. If they save us alive, we shall live; and if they kill us, we shall but die.
[...] Tell us no more of Southern slavery; for, with few exceptions, although I may be very erroneous in my opinion, yet I consider our condition but little better than that. [...]
[...] Let our girls possess what amiable qualities of soul they may [...] it is impossible for scarce an individual of them to rise above the condition of servants.
Maria W. Stewart, Lecture Delivered at the Franklin Hall, Boston, September 21, 1832 (known as "Why Sit Here and Die"), printed in Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (1879), pp. 55 to 56. Source: Internet Archive