Oberlin, Hotbed of Abolitionism PDF Download

Author: J. Brent Morris
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469618273
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Oberlin, Hotbed of Abolitionism: College, Community, and the Fight for Freedom and Equality in Antebellum America

Author: Joseph Brent Morris
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Abolitionists
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation examines the role of Oberlin (the northern Ohio town and its organically connected college of the same name) in the antislavery struggle. It traces the antislavery origins and development of this Western "hot-bed of abolitionism," and establishes Oberlin-the community, faculty, students, and alumni-as comprising the core of the antislavery movement in the West and one of the most influential and successful groups of abolitionists in antebellum America. Within two years of its founding, Oberlin's founders had created a teachers' college and adopted nearly the entire student body of Lane Seminary, who had been dismissed for their advocacy of immediate abolition. Oberlin became the first institute of higher learning to admit men and women of all races. America's most famous revivalist (Charles Grandison Finney) was among its new faculty as were a host of outspoken proponents of immediate emancipation and social reform. From its beginning, Oberlin Institute and the community supported a cadre of activist missionaries who helped spur the abolitionist movement to its greatest period of growth and assisted in the breaking down of racial barriers in an exceedingly intolerant region. The college and town comprised one of the most ideologically influential and tactically successful groups of abolitionists within the antislavery movement. With Oberlin in the vanguard, the West becomes the movement's nerve center by the late 1840s. Oberlin representatives were at the cutting edge of political antislavery organization embodied in the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican Parties, the African American convention movement, and constant facilitators in one of the nation's busiest Underground Railroad "depots." Oberlin was instrumental in developing diversity in antislavery thought, an aspect of the movement that most historians have not explored. Rather than falling into the distinct categories which many scholars place abolitionists (political, radical pacifist, radical militant, clerical, etc.), Oberlin abolitionists took the field as men and women devoted to ending slavery by any means necessary, even if that meant not adhering to ideological consistency or working through unconventional methods. Their philosophy was a composite of various schools of anti-slavery thought aimed at supporting the best hope of success.

Author: John Frederick Bell
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807177849
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Winner of the New Scholar’s Book Award from the American Educational Research Association The abolitionist movement not only helped bring an end to slavery in the United States but also inspired the large-scale admission of African Americans to the country’s colleges and universities. Oberlin College changed the face of American higher education in 1835 when it began enrolling students irrespective of race and sex. Camaraderie among races flourished at the Ohio institution and at two other leading abolitionist colleges, Berea in Kentucky and New York Central, where Black and white students allied in the fight for emancipation and civil rights. After Reconstruction, however, color lines emerged on even the most progressive campuses. For new generations of white students and faculty, ideas of fairness toward African Americans rarely extended beyond tolerating their presence in the classroom, and overt acts of racial discrimination grew increasingly common by the 1880s. John Frederick Bell’s Degrees of Equality analyzes the trajectory of interracial reform at Oberlin, New York Central, and Berea, noting its implications for the progress of racial justice in both the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing on student and alumni writings, institutional records, and promotional materials, Bell interrogates how abolitionists and their successors put their principles into practice. The ultimate failure of these social experiments illustrates a tragic irony of abolitionism, as the achievement of African American freedom and citizenship led whites to divest from the project of racial pluralism.

Author: James Monroe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Abolitionists
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Author: Lost Cause Press
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Abolitionists
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Author: Christi M. Smith
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469630702
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Reparation and Reconciliation is the first book to reveal the nineteenth-century struggle for racial integration on U.S. college campuses. As the Civil War ended, the need to heal the scars of slavery, expand the middle class, and reunite the nation engendered a dramatic interest in higher education by policy makers, voluntary associations, and African Americans more broadly. Formed in 1846 by Protestant abolitionists, the American Missionary Association united a network of colleges open to all, designed especially to educate African American and white students together, both male and female. The AMA and its affiliates envisioned integrated campuses as a training ground to produce a new leadership class for a racially integrated democracy. Case studies at three colleges--Berea College, Oberlin College, and Howard University--reveal the strategies administrators used and the challenges they faced as higher education quickly developed as a competitive social field. Through a detailed analysis of archival and press data, Christi M. Smith demonstrates that pressures between organizations--including charities and foundations--and the emergent field of competitive higher education led to the differentiation and exclusion of African Americans, Appalachian whites, and white women from coeducational higher education and illuminates the actors and the strategies that led to the persistent salience of race over other social boundaries.

Author: Sallie Holley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Author: Stacey M. Robertson
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807899489
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Challenging traditional histories of abolition, this book shifts the focus away from the East to show how the women of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin helped build a vibrant antislavery movement in the Old Northwest. Stacey Robertson argues that the environment of the Old Northwest--with its own complicated history of slavery and racism--created a uniquely collaborative and flexible approach to abolitionism. Western women helped build this local focus through their unusual and occasionally transgressive activities. They plunged into Liberty Party politics, vociferously supported a Quaker-led boycott of slave goods, and tirelessly aided fugitives and free blacks in their communities. Western women worked closely with male abolitionists, belying the notion of separate spheres that characterized abolitionism in the East. The contested history of race relations in the West also affected the development of abolitionism in the region, necessitating a pragmatic bent in their activities. Female antislavery societies focused on eliminating racist laws, aiding fugitive slaves, and building and sustaining schools for blacks. This approach required that abolitionists of all stripes work together, and women proved especially adept at such cooperation.

Author: Robert H. Churchill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108489125
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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A new interpretation of the Underground Railroad that places violence at the center of the story.

Author: Gary Kornblith
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080717016X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Before the Civil War, Oberlin, Ohio, stood in the vanguard of the abolition and black freedom movements. The community, including co-founded Oberlin College, strove to end slavery and establish full equality for all. Yet, in the half-century after the Union victory, Oberlin’s resolute stand for racial justice eroded as race-based discrimination pressed down on its African American citizens. In Elusive Utopia, noted historians Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser tell the story of how, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Oberlin residents, black and white, understood and acted upon their changing perceptions of race, ultimately resulting in the imposition of a color line. Founded as a utopian experiment in 1833, Oberlin embraced radical racial egalitarianism in its formative years. By the eve of the Civil War, when 20 percent of its local population was black, the community modeled progressive racial relations that, while imperfect, shone as strikingly more advanced than in either the American South or North. Emancipation and the passage of the Civil War amendments seemed to confirm Oberlin's egalitarian values. Yet, contrary to the expectations of its idealistic founders, Oberlin’s residents of color fell increasingly behind their white peers economically in the years after the war. Moreover, leaders of the white-dominated temperance movement conflated class, color, and respectability, resulting in stigmatization of black residents. Over time, many white Oberlinians came to view black poverty as the result of personal failings, practiced residential segregation, endorsed racially differentiated education in public schools, and excluded people of color from local government. By 1920, Oberlin’s racial utopian vision had dissipated, leaving the community to join the racist mainstream of American society. Drawing from newspapers, pamphlets, organizational records, memoirs, census materials and tax lists, Elusive Utopia traces the rise and fall of Oberlin's idealistic vision and commitment to racial equality in a pivotal era in American history.