A reminder that pre-Civil War times were tough for Blacks in the north, too
It’s easy to get caught up in the North-South divide when looking at history before and after the Civil War, and this is true when it comes to the plight of the US’ Black population. In the south, of course, slavery dictated the conditions under which these millions of folks lived before Emancipation - and it had a big effect afterward, too.
But in the north, Black Americans had a different set of issues. This is laid out very clearly in Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877, by Eric Foner of Columbia Unversity. Fonter writes this:
If the war opened doors of opportunity for women, it held out hope for an even more radical transformation in the condition of the tiny, despised Black population of the free states. Numbering fewer than a quarter million in 1860, Blacks comprised less than 2 percent of the North’s population, yet they found themselves subjected to discrimination in every aspect of their lives. Barred in most states from the suffrage, schools, and public accommodations, confined by and large to menial occupations, living in the poorest, unhealthiest quarters of cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati, reminded daily of the racial prejudice that seemed as pervasive in the free states as the slave, many Northern Blacks had by the 1850s all but despaired of ever finding a secure and equal place within American life….
The small Black political leadership of ministers, professionals, and members of abolitionist societies, had long searched for a means of improving the condition of Northern Blacks while at the same time striking a blow against slavery. Most embraced what one historian calls the Great Tradition - an affirmation of Americanism that insisted that Blacks formed an integral part of the nation and were entitled to the same rights and opportunities white citizens enjoyed. Free Blacks were advised to forsake menial occupations, educate themselves and their children, and live unimpeachably moral lives, thus “elevating” the race, disproving the idea of Black inferiority, and demonstrating themselves worth of citizenship. (pp 25-26)
The above says a lot about the broader environment Jonathan Jasper Wright lived in. As he passed the age of twenty, he was an educated, literate young Black man, living as a tiny minority among Northeastern Pennsylvania’s overwhelmingly white citizenry - a few of which supported his ambitions, but many more who looked down upon him and his “kind.” Yet Wright held to this Great Tradition through the rest of his life - believing fervently that education was the pathway to equality, and that equality was a fact that must be promoted and fought for within the institutions of the land. This thinking was to inform the next two decades of his life and allow him to make contributions large and small to so many of his race.