Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (31 page)

Independent of their white colleagues, black leaders adopted not only the substance but also the form of American representative democracy as embodied in the U.S. federal system. In the mid-1850s, they founded the National Council of Colored People, which in its structure and operations shadowed the U.S. government. The council itself functioned as the elected executive branch, and it set up committees that operated much like the federal departments; complementing the council was a legislative body of elected members representing each state.
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In striking contrast to those affiliated with the Radical Abolition Party, men like Garnet and Crummell began formulating a different concept of Negro nationality. In the late 1840s, both had spent time in England, Garnet as an antislavery lecturer, Crummell as a student
at Cambridge University, where he obtained a doctorate in divinity. But neither ever forgot the self-imposed obligation to help elevate their people, both spiritually and materially. By the early 1850s they were ready to expand their definition of who their people were to include all African-descended populations.

They traveled. Garnet spent three years in Jamaica as a Presbyterian missionary. After receiving his degree, Crummell went to Africa and settled in Liberia, where he worked as a missionary and educator for the next twenty years. With something of the prophet in him, Crummell imagined himself a latter-day Abraham whom God had commanded, as he wrote in a letter, to “get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred, and come into the land which I shall shew thee.”
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They began thinking diasporically. Crummell, like other black intellectuals of his time, subscribed to the concept of Ethiopianism, a cyclical view of African history that decreed that Africa had once been great and though now fallen would one day rise to its former greatness. Translating this philosophy into practical terms, in 1858 Garnet founded the African Civilization Society with the goal of establishing “a grand center of Negro nationality, from which shall flow streams of commercial, intellectual, and political power which shall make colored people respected everywhere.” The society was to help develop cotton production in Africa, which would eventually outstrip that of the United States and thereby undermine the U.S. slave system.
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Their views were controversial. Black leaders accused both Crummell and Garnet of espousing ideas and agendas that were too much like those of the American Colonization Society. In addition, Garnet was charged with hypocrisy for not having followed the path of permanent emigration himself. “Our friend Garnett [
sic
],” George Downing snidely noted, “left his country for Europe, afterward left Europe with his family for the West Indies, which was to have been his future home; afterward returned to his native home and settled himself down; and now we find him engaged in what I call a wild goose chase in Africa.”
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Ironically, Garnet’s and Crummell’s attitudes remained peculiarly American. Yes, they wanted blacks in Africa and the diaspora to achieve through their own efforts without any interference from whites, but neither man could shake off the idea that these efforts would come primarily,
maybe even exclusively, from blacks living in the United States. Given Africa’s current degraded state—its heathenism, lack of education, lax morals, and poor work ethic—the continent could not redeem itself, but needed to rely on civilizing forces from the West: first Christianity, whose churches would convert heathen Africa, and second, Yankee entrepreneurship, consisting of business skills acquired in the harsh competitive climate of the United States.
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Baldly put, Garnet and Crummell both subscribed to what could be called U.S. black exceptionalism: the notion that all blacks are equal except those from the United States who are superior. Despite their enslavement, or maybe even because of it, U.S. blacks had achieved in ways that other African-descended peoples had not, acquiring Christianity, education, and entrepreneurial know-how. As a result, Garnet and Crummell envisioned Africa and the diaspora more as a field of endeavor for U.S. black men to prove their superiority rather than an opportunity for worldwide collaboration among black peoples.

Peter was not present in any of these organizations or debates. His move to Williamsburgh, his poor health, the demands of a new family, and his financial struggles undoubtedly curtailed his activism. But Philip was absent as well, apparently limiting his participation in black public affairs to one single organization: the New York Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children.

Black New Yorkers had not forgotten their community’s earlier admonition that at times “we think it good policy to have separate institutions.” Discovering that even among white friends the rule of whimsy often obtained, they were prepared to heed the warning.

Take the
Tribune
editor, Horace Greeley. In contrast to the arch-conservative James Gordon Bennett who ran the
Herald
, Greeley was considered a liberal reformer. Black New Yorkers, however, came to question many of his political stances. He hated the abolitionist agitation of the Tappans. He equivocated on the Fugitive Slave Law. He
dragged his heels on the issue of slavery, clinging to the belief that, under pressure from free labor and markets, slavery would eventually disappear. Worst of all were Greeley’s choices for president, all conservative Whigs: Henry Clay, Zachary Taylor, and Winfield Scott. When Greeley announced for Scott during the 1852 elections, James McCune Smith printed a vitriolic ad hominem attack in
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
, charging him with being nothing more than a “flagrant prostitute.”
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Even more painful were betrayals by white abolitionists. These friends, black New Yorkers complained, sat next to them year after year at antislavery meetings but slammed the door in the face of black youth seeking employment. If he was indeed the young man to whom John Rankin had refused to lend five hundred dollars to start his business, Philip would have experienced such betrayals firsthand. White abolitionists had no good answers to such accusations. When Arthur Tappan was charged with not hiring colored men in his store, his feeble reply was that the one person he had offered the job to was “not qualified.” When his brother was asked why he had not given the captaincy of a ship sailing to Africa to a black, his hollow excuse was that he did not own the ship but had merely chartered it. White abolitionists still did not realize that blacks were no longer satisfied with mere expressions of support. “Since 1826 down to now,” one black leader noted cynically, “those who professed to be the strongest abolitionists have refused to render the colored people anything else but sympathy.”
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So black New Yorkers understood that “separate institutions,” like the New York Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children, remained a necessity.

Dismayed by the degree to which the Public School Society had allowed the city’s colored schools to deteriorate, in 1847 a number of graduates from the Mulberry Street School—Peter, his two brothers-in-law Edward Marshall and Albro Lyons, James McCune Smith, and others—along with community elders like William Powell and John Peterson, had come together to form the Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children. Encouraged perhaps by his mentor, Smith, or his future brother-in-law, Peter, Philip joined them shortly thereafter. At twenty-five, he was already fully committed to a cause to which he would devote his entire life.

At the annual meeting of officers in 1851, Philip was elected secretary, a position he would hold well into the mid-1860s, if not later. He served with some of the community’s most prominent leaders: William Powell was the society’s president and James McCune Smith its treasurer; the board of trustees included Henry Scott, Samuel Cornish, Albro Lyons, Patrick Reason, and Charles Ray, who soon replaced Powell as president.

Whereas white trustees were able to preserve a written record of the early African Free Schools in the archives of the New-York Historical Society, New York’s black community lacked such resources. Evidence about the Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children is scant. According to its acts of incorporation, its initial mission was to create separate schools for black children. Soon a second was added: the establishment of normal schools for the training of black teachers. “Education,” exclaimed one member, “is one of the most important and laudable attainments which the human mind can be possessed of; and why not make public teachers professors? … It is now high time that we show [whites] that we can think for ourselves as well as they can do.”
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Although Smith groused that Horace Greeley was nothing but a “flagrant prostitute,” we need to thank the
Tribune
editor for his assiduous coverage of black education throughout the 1850s. It appears that the Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children never established a normal school. In 1850 it ran two schools, one located in the basement of St. Philip’s Church and a second on Thomas Street. The roster of teachers replicated that of the public schools: John Peterson, his daughter Rebecca, and the rest of their male and female colleagues. The curriculum consisted of reading, arithmetic, grammar, drawing, and needlework—a far cry from the cosmopolitan education offered at the Mulberry Street School. Attendance remained low.
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The situation of public colored schools was still dire when the Public School Society was absorbed into the newly formed New York Board of Education in 1853. Attendance dropped from a high of sixteen hundred students in 1834 to a mere nine hundred. “It is evident,” a New York State Assembly document concluded in 1859, “that the colored children are painfully neglected and positively degraded. Pent up in filthy neighborhoods,
in old and dilapidated buildings, they are held down to low associations and gloomy surroundings.” Some months later, as officers of the Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children, Philip and Charles Ray wrote a report of their own to the commissioners of education. Agreeing with the state assembly’s assessment, they argued that the poor condition of black schools was all the more unjust since black New Yorkers paid their fair share of school taxes, and a greater percentage of their children went to school that did white children. The request that followed was a carefully calculated political and rhetorical maneuver reflecting Philip’s cautious and temperate nature. Although he and Charles Ray undoubtedly knew the idea was far-fetched, they began by suggesting that New York look to Boston’s recent decision to integrate its public schools. Then they backtracked. Turning pragmatic, they requested that “if in the judgment of your honorable body common schools are not thus common to all,” the commissioners might see fit to erect two new buildings where “the children will be taught with far less expense in two such school-houses than in the half dozen hovels into which they are now driven.”
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Despite the dominance of the all-powerful Board of Education, the Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children refused to disband. Instead, it devised a means to continue overseeing and encouraging the education of black children. In 1855, it instituted an annual Ridgeway Prize, named after Englishman Charles Ridgeway, a hairdresser at the Irving House who bequeathed $650 to the society at his death. Philip and James McCune Smith were two of the three-member Prize Committee. They must have observed the annual ceremonies with pride as students sang and recited, administrators gave speeches, ministers delivered sermons, and prizes were distributed: a gold medal for mathematics; silver for general scholarship; books for the best reader and writer, as well as for best declamation, painting, and drawing. Some of the awardees, with names like Vogelsang, Zuille, Peterson, Hamilton, Williams, were clearly children of the elite. But there were other names I didn’t recognize—Wilkins, Stanley, Stokely, Remson.
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Who were these children? What happened to them in later life?

In 1886 the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
published an article about prominent blacks in Brooklyn that had this to say about “Druggist White”: “He is beginning to take greater interest in his race and his friends are stimulated by his progressive spirit.”
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The imputation was clear: in earlier years Philip had been
less
interested in his race and his spirit had
not
been progressive. I was confused. Clearly, in the 1850s Philip had devoted himself to the cause of black education, but it’s also true that he had not participated in other political or social reform organizations. The ever-independent Philip, I discovered, was charting his own path, making choices that at first glance might seem inconsistent and contradictory. Indeed, even as he worked within a separate black educational institution, Philip was fighting to gain St. Philip’s admission to New York state’s Episcopal Diocesan Convention, that is, to have a black parish accepted as an integral part of a white religious institution.

It was Philip’s position as vestryman that gave me insight into the
Daily Eagle
’s comment. The vestry minutes tell the story of Philip’s rise to prominence at St. Philip’s: first elected to the vestry in 1850, Philip held that position until 1854 and, with the exception of a couple of years, from 1865 to 1875. After that, he served intermittently as warden until 1880, and then was elected senior warden every year from 1884 until his death in 1891.

So Philip was a vestryman in 1852 when a fugitive slave named Preston was captured and remanded into slavery. As in the Hamlet case, black New Yorkers sprang into action, requesting that notices for a mass meeting be read aloud in the city’s black churches. Smith approached St. Philip’s white minister, Reverend William Morris, who, George Downing fumed in a letter to
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
, responded that it was “our duty to obey the Fugitive Slave Law”: