Not as supplicants but as citizens: Race, party, and african american politics in Boston, Massachusetts, 1864-1903

Abstract

This project examines African American political culture in Boston, Massachusetts and the intersection of partisan and race-based urban politics from the beginning of Reconstruction in 1864 through the emergence of the Niagara Movement in the early twentieth century. From the 1870s through the 1890s, black Bostonians tested the limits of freedom and gained political ground by shifting support between the Republican and Democratic Parties, advocating independent black politics, and building alliances with Irish-Americans. Controversies surrounding ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, federal protection of civil rights, public accommodations, and anti-lynching campaigns offer a lens through which to understand the shifting public political identity of African Americans in Boston. Emphasizing the relationship between racial and partisan politics reveals the importance of party affiliation in understanding black politics in Boston in the final decades of the twentieth century. It also highlights coalition-building between black and Irish Bostonians and the significant role of black women in electoral politics. African Americans employed versatile and ambitious political strategies to press political parties to take a stand for racial equality. In public meetings and the press, they debated the worthiness of electoral candidates and organized broad constituencies, including Irish immigrants, to push for civil rights. In correspondence to local and national government officials, they condemned racial discrimination and pressed for governmental appointments for black leaders. In novels and periodicals, black women advocated a politics that challenged black male leadership and prioritized racial solidarity over individual success and ambition. In petitions to local councils and state and national legislatures, black Bostonians advocated activist state intervention for the protection of civil rights and condemned inaction in the face of racial violence. By the early twentieth century, though, black Bostonians rejected partisan affiliation and favored unity based on racial pride and solitary. Isolated politically from mainstream party politics, African Americans turned to race-based political organizations including the Niagara Movement and later the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for political action. As the concerns of mainstream party politics shifted away from the interests of African Americans, partisan identity was replaced by a stronger sense of racial nationalism.