Preview the Forthcoming Issue – December 2024
This is a special issue on Black Internationalism organized and edited by Brandon Byrd.
Introduction – Brandon Byrd
This introductory essay offers a historical and historiographical framework for this special issue. Assessing parallel trends in the fields of United States and African American History, it contends that scholars can and should seek out the nexus of the former’s “transnational turn” and what Robin D.G. Kelley has called the “global vision” of the latter. It explains how the articles of this special issue contribute to that goal through their collective assessment of Black internationalism in the Age of Emancipation, a period that began with the Atlantic revolutions of the late-eighteenth century, included the United States’ Civil War and Reconstruction eras, and culminated at the end of the nineteenth century with the final abolitions of American slavery and the emergence of new European and U.S. imperialisms.
Bianca Dang – “‘I Don’t Know What Will Be My Lot’: Transnational Migration and Unfree Labor in Early America”
Focused on migration between Hispaniola and Pennsylvania from the 1790s to the 1820s, this article demonstrates how the anti-Black logics of slavery continued to subjugate Black laborers during the era of emancipation. It contends that Black unfreedom was reconstituted both alongside and, at times, as a result of Pennsylvania’s 1780 Gradual Abolition Act. This essay documents how Black migrants, especially children and youths, were impacted by the racialized indentured labor regime stimulated by the act. This article employs a transnational analysis of Pennsylvania’s gradual abolition policies to highlight how foreign enslavers could impact the emancipatory reach of domestic legislation.
Samantha Payne – “The International Dimension of Freedom: Revisiting Black Grassroots Activism during U.S. Reconstruction”
This essay argues that many African Americans considered the extension of abolition-democracy throughout the Caribbean to be both a moral imperative and an essential correlate of meaningful domestic freedom. During Reconstruction, they were able to take advantage of revolutionary circumstances to press their claims. They sought to leverage their newfound political power to direct U.S. foreign policy—including the U.S. military—to extend abolition-democracy throughout the Caribbean. Their activism, focused on securing independence for the Cuban Republic, took place through a set of institutions and practices including the Union League, petition drives, legislative proposals, mass assemblies, and political conventions. This grassroots movement collapsed only in the face of sustained opposition from racist Republican elites. This defeat paved the way for the emergence of a new strain of African American internationalism that accommodated and occasionally endorsed U.S. imperialism—although a widespread opposition to U.S. overseas empire endured.
Christina C. Davidson – “In the Shadow of Haiti: US Black Internationalism in the Dominican Republic, 1860-1904”
This article examines nineteenth-century African Americans’ perspectives of the Dominican Republic in comparison to Haiti. As independent Black republics in the US purview, Hispaniola’s two nations seemed fit for African American emigration, Black Protestant evangelization, and Black US diplomatic representation. Yet, while historians have examined African Americans’ ideas about Haiti, scholarly attention on the Dominican Republic has been limited to Frederick Douglass’s diplomatic roles in 1871 and 1889-1891. Moving beyond Douglass, this article analyzes the viewpoints of other Black Americans who wrote about the Dominican Republic from the 1860s to 1904. It especially analyzes the perspectives and actions of US Black foreign service officers appointed to Santo Domingo beginning in 1882. By doing so, this article shows that African Americans sometimes subsumed Dominican affairs under Haiti and at other times used the Dominican Republic as a foil to Haiti, marking the Dominican Republic’s distinct significance to Reconstruction-era US Black internationalism.
Guy Emerson Mount – “‘Shall I Go?’: Black Colonization in the Pacific, 1840-1914”
This paper explores the development of mass Black migration plans to Hawai’i and the Philippines both before and after emancipation. Through a transnational archival collection it analyzes the political, intellectual, social, and material conditions that Black activists and white statecrafters faced in their attempts to secure state funding for Black migration within an ever-expanding U.S. empire. From Northern white abolitionist cotton planters in Hawai’i to radical Black socialists employed by the U.S. state in the Philippines, the complexities of Black colonization in the Pacific offer a fresh look at a Civil War Era and a Black internationalism largely fixated on the Atlantic World. In the end, this paper argues that colonization in the Black Pacific reveals a deep and abiding dialectic between U.S. slavery and its overseas empire–a relationship too often obscured by the existing historiography.
