2.14 Black Organizing in the North: Freedom, Women’s Rights, and Education

The free Black population grew in the late 1700s and early 1800s, as some Northern states ended slavery and some enslaved people bought or won their freedom. By 1860, about 11 percent of Black people in the US, roughly one in nine, were free. More free Black people lived in the South than in the North, but in the South they were a tiny minority next to millions of enslaved people.

Free Black people built strong institutions in cities like Philadelphia, New York and New Orleans. Mutual-aid societies collected dues from members and helped them in hard times, such as illness or a death in the family. Those societies also helped pay for Black schools, businesses and independent churches, and they supported Black writers and speakers. Philadelphia's Free African Society (1787) and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded as a separate denomination in 1816, are well-known examples.

In 1831 Maria W. Stewart, a free Black woman in Boston, published a political manifesto, a public statement of her beliefs and goals; no Black woman had done so before. She was also among the first American women of any race to lecture in public about politics, at a time when women speaking in public was widely seen as improper.

In 'Why Sit Here and Die' (1832), the required source, Stewart spoke about free Black women in the North. She argued that their lives of endless domestic and menial work, with no chance to rise, were not far from slavery, and she urged Black women and men to demand better. Her work in the 1830s helped lay the groundwork for the first wave of the American women's rights movement.

Black women activists used speeches, essays and newspapers to make a point many white abolitionists and white feminists missed: Black women faced racism and sexism at the same time. Their experience couldn't be fully explained by race alone or by gender alone.

Women like Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Sarah Mapps Douglass fought for both abolition and women's rights. They helped open the path to the women's suffrage movement. By connecting race, gender and class, they anticipated debates that remain central to African American politics, including the later idea of intersectionality (4.13).