Black Conventions Movement
The Black Conventions Movement, also known as the Colored Conventions Movement, emerged in the early 19th century as a pivotal form of protest among African Americans, especially free Black individuals in northern urban areas. Rooted in principles of free assembly, these conventions arose as a response to growing institutional racism and the denial of civil rights following the American Revolution. The movement gained prominence with the first major national convention in Philadelphia in 1817, which opposed slavery and colonial plans for Black Americans. Throughout the 1830s, six national conventions were held, addressing a range of issues including economic boycotts, national prayer days, and social reform efforts, all while fostering a sense of Black nationalism.
The movement faced challenges, including interference from white abolitionists who feared its separatist tendencies. A brief revival occurred in the early 1840s, marked by a militant convention that sought to confront slavery directly. Post-Civil War, the movement re-emerged in the 1870s and 1880s, focusing on civil rights advocacy and political organization among freedmen and their allies. Despite its decline in the 1890s due to the rise of Jim Crow laws, the legacy of the Black Conventions Movement persisted, influencing later civil rights efforts and organizations. This historical context illustrates the significant role that these conventions played in the struggle for African American rights and the ongoing quest for equality.
Black Conventions Movement
Mass conventions were a popular means of protest among African Americans of the nineteenth century. Rooted in constitutional principles of free assembly and petition, these conventions were a product of the group consciousness that emerged among free Black individuals in northern urban areas following the American Revolution (1775-1783) and were a reaction to a burgeoning institutional racism that legitimized slavery and stripped free African Americans of basic civil rights during the postrevolutionary period. The first great national convention, held at Philadelphia in August 1817, produced resolutions opposing slavery and denouncing a plan proposed by the United States Congress to colonize Black Americans in Africa. Although largely symbolic, the convention of 1817 inspired the Colored Conventions Movement (also called the Black Conventions Movement or the Negro Convention Movement) of the 1830s, which was to provide a forum for expressions of militancy and nationalism among the growing population of free Black individuals in the North.
The Black Conventions Movement, also known as the Colored Conventions Movement, of the 1830s was aided by the emergence of Black leaders with national status and varied agendas. Although dominated by antislavery societies, the six national conventions held between 1830 and 1835 addressed a variety of issues, including the organization of economic boycotts and mass protests, the observance of national days of prayer and fasting, and the establishment of temperance societies and African missionary groups. The conventions exerted a considerable influence upon local Black communities, chiefly through the encouragement of verbal agitation; yet, the movement was cut short in mid-decade by white abolitionists who, fearing that the Black separatism often advocated by convention delegates would damage the antislavery movement, infiltrated the conventions and split their leadership. The movement was briefly revived in the early 1840s, when young Black militants in New York and Philadelphia called a convention of Black leaders to protest slavery and racial inequality. However, this convention, which failed by one vote to endorse slave insurrection, proved a militant exception to a new spirit of gradualism among Black abolitionists. The last notable antebellum convention, held in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1854, yielded compromise proposals for the repatriation of African Americans that early conventions had so vehemently opposed.
The end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction sparked a revival of the Black Conventions Movement in the 1870s and 1880s, as southern freedmen and northern agitators sought vehicles to petition the government for civil rights and protection from mob violence. These conventions were chiefly local and regional in nature, designed to facilitate political organization and to appeal directly to legislators and state governors. Nevertheless, national conventions continued, the most notable being the National Colored Convention held in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1883, in which the delegates called for an end to economic peonage in the South, equal rights and suffrage for African Americans, and integration of schools and the military.
The Black Convention Movement died out in the 1890s as Jim Crow laws and mob violence swept the South, and accommodationism replaced agitation and protest as a political strategy for Black leaders. However, the tradition of assembly and militancy brought about by the convention movement survived in the Black conferences of the early twentieth century (for example, the Niagara Movement of 1909, which spawned the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), in the mass protest marches of the Civil Rights movement during the 1960s, and in the Million Man March (1995) and Million Woman March (1997).
Bibliography
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