| Original Full Text | Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont CGU Theses & Dissertations CGU Student Scholarship 2024 Treading Our Path Through the Blood of the Slaughtered: Race and Martyrdom in America, 1830-1968 Katherine J. Veach Claremont Graduate University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd Part of the African American Studies Commons, American Studies Commons, and the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Veach, Katherine J.. (2024). Treading Our Path Through the Blood of the Slaughtered: Race and Martyrdom in America, 1830-1968. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 821. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/821. This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the CGU Student Scholarship at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in CGU Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact scholarship@claremont.edu. Treading Our Path Through the Blood of the Slaughtered: Race and Martyrdom in America, 1830-1968 by Katherine J. Veach Claremont Graduate University 2024 © Katherine J. Veach, 2024 All rights reserved Approval of the Dissertation Committee This dissertation has been duly read, reviewed, and critiqued by the Committee listed below, which hereby approves the manuscript of Katherine J. Veach as fulfilling the scope and quality requirements for meriting the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Religion. Matthew Bowman, Chair Claremont Graduate University Associate Professor of Religion and History Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies Daniel Ramírez Claremont Graduate University Associate Professor of Religion Kevin Wolfe Claremont Graduate University Assistant Professor of Religion Horton Chair of Religion and Africana Studies Abstract Treading Our Path Through the Blood of the Slaughtered: Race and Martyrdom in America, 1830-1968 by Katherine J. Veach Claremont Graduate University: 2024 The United States has a longstanding practice of ascribing the language and imagery of martyrdom to political and cultural figures, resulting in a variegated canon of American martyrs outside the strict bounds of religious tradition. As a contribution to religious studies, American studies and African American studies, this dissertation identifies and examines the language, imagery and trajectory of the strain of American cultural martyrdom I term “Black American martyrdom.” I trace the genealogy of Black American martyrdom from the 1830s, when martyrdom rhetoric flourished among the zealous Northeastern immediate abolitionists, to the 1960s, when Martin Luther King, Jr. influentially cast civil rights martyrs as key players in a great cosmic melodrama. Through examining the martyrdom language and imagery of antebellum abolitionist newspapers and oratory, nineteenth-century Black historiography, and the Black press of the twentieth century, I argue that Black American martyrdom is best understood as a rhetorical category concerned with the pursuit of racial justice and that it provides a new lens for understanding the dimensions and voices of the long Black freedom struggle. The story that emerges is one of deep creative agency among racial justice activists, and analysis of the rhetoric of martyrdom within this activism provides new ways of examining questions of identity, race, citizenship and Americanness. Furthermore, I argue that the intentional rhetoric of Black American martyrdom provides the foundation for the wider concept of American cultural martyrdom – and its attendant understanding of privilege, power and identity – suggesting that the work of activists for racial justice has influenced broader American discourse more substantially than previously understood. v Acknowledgements I extend my deepest gratitude to my outstanding dissertation committee for their expert guidance and unfailing support, as well as to my friends, colleagues and students at Harvard College and Kirkland House, all of whom cared about this project, asked me probing questions, and encouraged me endlessly. I’m particularly grateful to my committee chair, Matthew Bowman, who responded quickly to every message and continually challenged me to do my best work; to my husband, Jack Huguley, whose love, support and keen insights kept me ever on the right path; and to Laura Hess, who encouraged me – insistently but kindly – to finish what I started. vi Table of Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Existing Scholarship on Martyrdom in America ........................................................................................ 8 The Defining Characteristics of Black American Martyrdom .................................................................... 9 This Project’s Contributions to Understanding Race, Religion, Politics and Identity in America ........... 13 Deepening Scholarly Understanding of the History of Racial Justice Activism....................................... 17 Chapter Overview ................................................................................................................................... 20 Chapter 1: Suffering, Race and the Ethic of Abolitionist Martyrdom .................................................. 25 The Religious and Cultural Context of the Rise of Abolitionist Martyrdom ........................................... 27 Black Suffering in Walker’s Appeal ......................................................................................................... 31 White Abolitionist Engagement with Black Suffering ............................................................................. 33 Garrison, Abolitionism’s Protomartyr ..................................................................................................... 35 The Growth of the Antebellum Ethic of Martyrdom .............................................................................. 40 (Non)Violence, Suffering and Death: Lovejoy, Brown and Lincoln’s Effects on Abolitionist Martyrdom .......................................................................................................................... 47 The Canon of Abolitionist Martyrs Grows .............................................................................................. 57 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 60 Chapter 2: Black Americans and Antebellum Martyrdom: Maria W. Stewart, Colored Conventions & Crispus Attucks ............................................................................................ 64 The Martyrdom Rhetoric of Maria W. Stewart ....................................................................................... 66 From Suffering to Martyrdom in the Colored Conventions Movement ................................................. 69 Black Recognition of White Abolitionist Martyrdom, 1837-1846........................................................... 76 The Resurrection of Crispus Attucks: Black/American/Martyr ............................................................... 80 Conclusion: The Martyrs of Harper’s Ferry ............................................................................................. 91 Chapter 3: The Valor and Value of Black Americans in the Historiography of the Late Nineteenth Century ....................................................................... 95 Scholarly Assessments of Martyrdom Rhetoric in the Late Nineteenth Century ................................. 102 The Rhetoric of Rebellion: Denmark Veazie and Nat Turner ................................................................ 105 Toussaint L’Ouverture: [Black] Soldier, [Black] Patriot, [Black] Martyr ................................................ 110 The Martyrs of the Civil War Era ........................................................................................................... 117 The New Martyrs of the Late Nineteenth Century ............................................................................... 120 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 123 vii Chapter 4: “Crucified Upon the Cross of Race Passion”: Black Activism & Martyrdom in the Early 20th-Century Black Press ........................................................................................................................ 125 The Early 20th-Century Black Press ...................................................................................................... 127 Martyrdom in the Early Twentieth Century Black Press ....................................................................... 132 “Crucified Upon the Cross of Race Passion”: The Houston Riot of 1917 .............................................. 137 “I Think We Ought to Start Something”: The NAACP and the Creation of the “Houston Martyrs” ..... 148 Martyrdom & the Rise of Postwar Radicalism ...................................................................................... 156 The Ambiguity of Lynch Martyrdom ..................................................................................................... 165 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 167 Chapter 5: “A Time for Martyrs”: Martyrdom in the Black Freedom Struggle, 1952-1968.................. 168 The NAACP’s Rhetoric of Respectable Martyrdom, 1952-1963 ........................................................... 171 Harry T. Moore, the “Martyr of Florida” ........................................................................................... 172 Medgar Evers, “Martyr in the Crusade for Human Liberty” ............................................................. 182 The Melodramatic Martyrdom of Martin Luther King Jr. ..................................................................... 191 The Formula of the Kingian Martyr Eulogy ....................................................................................... 198 Conclusion: Black American Martyrdom at the Mountaintop .............................................................. 207 Conclusion: Martyrs and Race in America: Rethin(King) American Martyrdom ................................. 210 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................. 223 1 Introduction The United States has a widely accepted – if little understood – practice of bestowing the title of “martyr” to political or cultural figures outside the bounds of strictly religious traditions, often in settings overtly connected to American identity and values. This tendency has resulted in the rhetoric and reverence of martyrdom being attached to a canon of individuals including Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy; martyrs to social causes like John Brown, Martin Luther King Jr. and Matthew Shepard; and even celebrities who died tragically or prematurely, such as Elvis Presley and Tupac Shakur.1 Despite a steady decline in the percentage of the U.S. population that claims religious affiliation and an even starker drop in those who describe themselves as Christian,2 the religious language of martyrdom is still regularly utilized in political and cultural discourse, whether in the debate around keeping Donald Trump off of a state’s primary ballot3 or the dialogue around the contested claims of martyrdom for both George Floyd, an unarmed Black4 man killed by police on May 25, 2020, and Ashli 1 The only book-length treatment of American martyrdom to date, Eyal Naveh’s Crown of Thorns: Political Martyrdom in America from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: NYU Press, 1990), focuses particularly on political martyrdom in America and discusses Lincoln, Kennedy, Brown and King at length. Additionally, Scott W. Hoffman has written on King’s and Shepherd’s martyrdom in “Holy Martin: The Overlooked Canonization of Martin Luther King Jr.” (Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Vol. 10, no. 2, Summer 2000: 123-148) and “‘Last Night I Prayed to Matthew’: Matthew Shepard, Homosexuality and Popular Martyrdom in Contemporary America” (Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Vol. 21, no. 1, 2011: 121-164). Hoffman’s unpublished dissertation, “Haloed by the Nation: Popular Martyrdom in Contemporary America” (Ph.D. dissertation, Purdue University, 2005) also includes a chapter on Elvis as a martyr. Shakur, a hip-hop artist killed in a drive-by shooting in 1996, has been consistently cast as a martyr to the street life he rapped about by fans, music critics, and journalists. For example, music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine called Shakur “the unlikely martyr of gangsta rap, and a tragic symbol of the toll its lifestyle exacted on urban Black America”: Stephen Thomas Erlewine, “2Pac,” in All Music Guide: The Definitive Guide to Popular Music, 4th ed., edited by Chris Woodstra, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Vladimir Bogdanov (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2001), 496. 2 Pew Research Center, “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace,” 17 October 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace. 3 Jack Healy, Anna Betts, Mike Baker and Jill Cowan, “Would Keeping Trump Off the Ballot Hurt or Help Democracy? Some critics say the battles over the former President’s ballot status are turning him into a martyr and eroding faith in American elections,” New York Times, 30 December 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/30/us/trump-maine-democracy.html. 4 Following the 2020 style update of the New York Times, I use and capitalize “Black” when referring to people and cultures of African origin. This choice conveys the specific shared historical and cultural identity contained in the people, movements and institutions that are examined in this dissertation. I also follow the Times 2 Babbit, a member of the crowd that breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and was killed by a member of the U.S. Capitol Police.5 These American martyrs, religiously informed yet not relegated primarily or solely to the religious sphere, are prime examples of the curious mixture of the secular and the sacred in American politics and society. Their martyrology is rhetorical, but it is not mere rhetoric; these martyrs are motivational, revered individuals that transcend divisions between church and state to make and support claims about American identity, values and priorities. America understands its history and itself through those it deems its martyrs. Yet scholarly output on American cultural martyrdom is sparse, and no one attempting descriptive work seems to know quite what to do with its language and imagery. Absent the doctrinal oversight of religious orthodoxy, cultural martyrdom is necessarily a matter of interpretation at all stages. The very term “martyrdom” is itself a tricky subject: Scholars agree that it is “a slippery term that is hard to define”6 and is ultimately subjective and perspectival – a “social honorific” rather than a “clearly defined scientific concept.”7 It is also multivalent, discussed as religious, cultural, political, or a mixture of any or all of these. A useful definition of martyrdom must be both specific enough to give the term real meaning and capacious enough to accommodate the myriad claims of martyrdom across contexts, eras, cultures and settings. But in practice, most of the definitions and descriptions of American martyrdom have been created post facto to describe a set of figures that have emerged as in choosing to retain lowercase treatment of “white.” Nancy Coleman, “Why We’re Capitalizing Black,” The New York Times, July 5, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black.html; Dean Baquet and Phil Corbett, “Uppercasing ‘Black,’ accessed May 6, 2022, https://www.nytco.com/press/uppercasing-black/. 5 See, e.g., Paul Schwartzman and Josh Dawsey, “How Ashli Babbitt went from Capitol rioter to Trump-embraced ‘martyr,’” Washington Post, July 30, 2021, https://www-washingtonpost-com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/dc-md-va/2021/07/30/ashli- babbitt-trump-capitol-martyr/; Micha Green, “Unintentional martyr: How George Floyd’s death revolutionized the BLM movement,” Afro News, July 3, 2020, https://afro.com/unintentional-martyr-how-george-floyds-death-revolutionized-the-blm-movement/. 6 Jolyon P. Mitchell, Martyrdom: A Very Short Introduction, 1st. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2. 7 Samuel Z. Klausner, “Martyrdom,” in The Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, ed. Robert Wuthnow, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2007), 585. 3 recognized martyrs across contexts, identities and causes, requiring increasingly expansive definitions of American martyrdom to accommodate all of its instances, even within the context of a single cause or issue. See, for example, the canonization of civil rights martyrs by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. The monument and interpretive center, opened in 1989, memorializes as martyrs 40 “individuals who lost their lives in the struggle for freedom during the modern Civil Rights Movement” and, pointing to the instrumental and motivational power of martyrdom, both “honors the martyrs of the movement and inspires visitors to continue the march for racial equity and social justice.”8 The criteria for inclusion on the memorial are quite broad, describing the martyrs, who range from relatively unknown figures to the likes of Emmett Till and Martin Luther King Jr., as “activists who were targeted for death because of their civil rights work; random victims of vigilantes determined to halt the movement; and individuals who, in the sacrifice of their own lives, brought new awareness to the struggle” in the years between 1955 and 1968.9 In a departure from the volition overwhelmingly central to Christian martyrology, the deaths deemed by the SPLC as martyrdoms to the civil rights movement did not necessarily require intention or even effort on behalf of the cause; instead, it was enough that their deaths moved the needle on activism for racial justice. Pushing even further beyond these already capacious criteria, the SPLC in 2005 expanded their memorialization of movement deaths via the “Wall of the Forgotten,” which lists 74 further names of people killed between 1952 and 1960 “under circumstances suggesting they were victims of white supremacist violence.”10 Here again there is no requirement of volition, or even of proven white supremacist intent, for these figures to join those remembered as martyrs to the cause of civil rights. 8 “Civil Rights Martyrs,” Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed 28 December 2023, https://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/civil-rights-memorial/civil-rights-martyrs. 9 Ibid. 10 “The Forgotten,” Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed 28 December 2023, https://www.splcenter.org/forgotten. 4 This example of the figures memorialized by the SPLC highlights the ways that American martyrdom both conforms to and transforms traditional tropes of Christian martyrology, casting aside the volition central to most classic martyrologies in favor of the instrumental value of a martyrdom. Additionally, those memorialized in Montgomery illustrate the tendency in the construction of American martyrdom to gather figures described as martyrs and then induct the criteria for martyrdom, leading to an increasingly commodious canon of martyrs but not necessarily to a clearer understanding of the contours of martyrdom in America. As a result, normative arguments about who is and isn’t an American martyr – rather than attempts to determine what American martyrdom is – dominate discussions of the topic, and they are rife with complications. For example, while conservative commentator Candace Owens has repeatedly insisted that George Floyd was not a martyr,11 responding to Owens, Marc Lamont Hill offers a counterclaim that Floyd, whom he agrees was “no hero,” had been made a martyr by “our digital age.”12 Neither Owens nor Hill offers a description or definition of martyrdom to validate their claim, but one may infer that Owens sees martyrdom as a prescriptive state of being (and perhaps one explicitly religious), whereas Hill sees it as a rhetorical category that does not rely on religious doctrine. Descriptive scholarship is sorely needed if scholars of religion, history and American studies – to say nothing of political and cultural commentators – are to grapple confidently with the meaning, rhetoric and value claims of American martyrdom, and, indeed, if such normative debates are to be productively managed and grounded in shared understanding. 11 Candace Owens, Facebook Live, “Confession: I DO NOT support George Floyd and I refuse to see him as a martyr. But I hope his family receives justice,” 3 June 2020, https://www.facebook.com/realCandaceOwens/videos/273957870461345/, accessed 24 January 2024. See also The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM, directed by Candace Owens (Daily Wire, 2022). 12 Marc Lamont Hill and Todd Brewster, Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media and the Fight for Racial Justice (New York: Atria Books, 2022), 62. 5 It seems clear that drawing useful general post facto conclusions from the tapestry of instances of American martyrdom is not the most useful approach to understanding this phenomenon, so I suggest instead starting with a closer look at an individual strain of American martyrdom. Tracing the evolutionary history of a specific and historically-situated idea and its influence can better ground larger discussions of American martyrdom while simultaneously reinvigorating historical analysis of surrounding figures and contexts. This project aims to contribute to scholarship – and to setting the terms for a better-informed conversation about American martyrdom – by tracing the history of what I have termed Black American martyrdom, a specific strand related to racial justice in the United States that I periodize as flourishing between 1830 and 1968. I suggest this martyrdom is a rhetorical category concerned with the pursuits of Black rights and freedom that ultimately centers on the simultaneous performance of Blackness and Americanness and is itself constitutive to these identities. I contend that this strand of martyrdom has a distinct logic, vocabulary and history, and that it represents a long and intentionally cultivated presence within activism for racial justice that has shaped larger understandings of American martyrdom – and indeed American values and identity – to a far greater degree than previously acknowledged. While this particular strain of martyrdom does not explain all dimensions of secular American martyrdom writ large, nor does it mean that every publicly grieved Black death is an instance of this strand of martyrdom, fully recognizing and contextualizing Black American martyrdom’s origins, evolution and influence allows for a deeper understanding of both U.S. history and of present-day debates about who can and cannot be a martyr – and, implicitly or explicitly, who is and isn’t valued – in America. To begin this work, I ground my understanding of martyrdom in the descriptions offered by Elizabeth Castelli and Paul Middleton, both of whom view martyrdom as a rhetorical strategy surrounding suffering and death rather than a category of death itself. Middleton focuses on the instrumentality of the rhetoric of martyrdom in defining and reinforcing identity, observing, “Martyrdom 6 is what martyrdom does; a narrative that creates or maintains group identity, by holding up an ideal representative of the community, who chose to or is made to die for its values,”13 while Castelli points to the intentionality and effort behind claims of martyrdom, noting that it is “the product of interpretation and retelling,” a phenomenon that is “rhetorically constituted and discursively sustained.”14 This understanding of martyrdom as an intentional, curated and motivating rhetoric underlies this dissertation’s exploration of its origin, evolution and impact on questions of identity, Americanness and value in the discourse of the United States. Building on Castelli’s and Middleton’s conceptions of martyrdom, I understand the rhetoric of martyrdom, at its most basic, to be the creation and nurturing of story as argument. Martyrdom is a performance, whether it was intended to be so by the martyr or not, and the creation and socialization of a martyr requires an interpreter who declares a suffering or death to be a martyrdom and argues for what it should mean to its audience. Thus, narrative detail, rhetorical structure and the ideology of the person championing the martyrdom are key to making meaning out of the martyrdom. It is important to note here that not every martyrdom is the result of a careful, coordinated rhetorical effort to advance a particular agenda or set of goals; the power of martyrdom is its pathos, and thus some acclaimed and familiar martyr figures have arisen organically from a deep well of feeling but have not been implemented as readily in activist rhetoric.15 The project is primarily interested in examining the consistent, organized efforts to use the rhetoric of martyrdom to further activist goals in the pursuit of 13 Paul Middleton, “What Is Martyrdom?,” Mortality 19, vol. 2 (2014): 130. See also Paul Middleton, “Creating and Contesting Christian Martyrdom,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Christian Martyrdom, ed. Paul Middleton (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2020), which makes the same argument, focusing on the contested nature of martyrdom and how martyrs help to reinforce identities and borders. 14 Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 173. 15 Emmett Till, who was lynched in 1955, is such an example. The brutality of Till’s death was shocking, and his mother, Mamie Bradley, worked tirelessly to create what Philip C. Kolin calls “the theology of her son” (Philip C. Kolin, “Sacred Vision and Dramatic Space: Voices, Time, and History in the Face of Emmett Till,” Southern Quarterly Vol. 45, Iss. 4 (Summer 2008), 81), but Till was not utilized as a martyr figure by activist figures or groups until well after his death. 7 racial justice in the United States, so it accordingly focuses on the analysis of the written and spoken word designed to be shared with large audiences, paying careful attention to how the rhetoric of martyrdom interacts with a figure’s or organization’s greater ideology and mission. While tropes of Black martyrdom in fiction have been studied, most prolifically within Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin,16 I focus on the language and imagery of martyrdom as portrayed primarily in the nonfiction print sources that largely spoke to Black Americans and their allies in the pursuit of Black freedom: antebellum abolitionist newspapers and oration, the Black historiography of the late nineteenth century, and the Black activist organizations and press of the twentieth century. The evolution of the rhetoric and figures of Black American martyrdom across these sources and eras demonstrates that martyrdom has consistently been invoked in efforts to establish, define and critique the relationship between Black Americans and their nation – but also that martyrdom has been invoked to advocate for many different understandings of what that relationship should look like. Rooted in the soil of immediatist abolitionism, which opposed the colonization movement that sought to return Black Americans to Africa and embraced nonviolent moral suasion, the history of this strain of martyrdom began with efforts to claim Black Americans’ worthiness of equal rights and citizenship and over time evolved into powerful commentary on how the United States was failing its Black citizens. Throughout this history, martyrdom was a useful rhetorical tool wielded creatively and innovatively by Black Americans working to self-define and advocate for their race’s rights and role in the United States. 16 See e.g., Adena Springarn, Uncle Tom: From Martyr to Traitor (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018); Sarah N. Roth, “‘Patient Sufferer, Gentle Martyr,’” in Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 120-141; Marianne Noble, “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 126-146. Rebecca Ann Wanzo offers a wider view of sentimental politics that reads beyond Uncle Tom in Ch. 1 of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009), 15-38. 8 Existing Scholarship on Martyrdom in America As noted above, scholarship on martyrdom in America is limited. While scholars have fruitfully explored instances of specifically religious martyrdom within North America in several studies,17 treatments of American cultural martyrdom as a whole are scant and mostly limited to case studies focusing on individual martyrs and martyrdoms.18 Eyal Naveh’s 1990 Crown of Thorns: Political Martyrdom in America from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King Jr. remains the only book-length treatment of the phenomenon of secular American martyrdom, which Naveh refers to as “political martyrdom.” Naveh, who studied under Robert Bellah and whose text predictably follows the earliest tendencies of civil religion discourse, seems to imagine American political martyrdom as having organically emerged as a byproduct of an immanent American civil religion, rather than as an intentionally constructed rhetorical category actively engaging with U.S. cultural discourse. His specific and intentional focus on high-profile figures and the lasting power of martyrdom also leaves out the 17 Several instances of North American religious martyrdoms predating the founding of the United States have been explored in the literature. On the “North American Martyrs,” the eight Jesuits killed in Canada amid warfare by the Iroquois and Huron peoples, see Emma Anderson, The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). For a discussion of the Catholic missionizing in the American southwest and martyrdom as an act of colonial aggression, see Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), especially 129-131. For an overview of the concept of martyrdom among 17th-century New England Protestants, see Adrian Chastain Weimer, Martyrs’ Mirror: Persecution and Holiness in Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Mormon tradition has engaged with martyrdom, as well, regarding the 1844 assassination of Joseph Smith; for an overview of the historiography, see Dean C. Jessee, “Return to Carthage: Writing the History of Joseph Smith’s Martyrdom,” Journal of Mormon History 8 (1981): 3-19. 18 Three book-length studies of dimensions of American martyrdom have been published in the last decade: Mitchell Kachun, First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Brett Krutzsch, Dying to Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); and John Fanestil, One Life to Give: Martyrdom and the Making of the American Revolution (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2021). Unpublished dissertations and theses include Maximilian Martini, “Abolitionism and the Logic of Martyrdom: Death as an Argument for John Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass” (M.A. thesis, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 2017); Adam Joseph Gomez, “The Nation Invisible: American Civil Religion and the American Political Tradition, 1838-1925” (Ph.D. diss., San Diego State University, 2010); Brian Allen Santana, “Slavery and Suffering: William Lloyd Garrison and American Abolitionism in Memory and Literature” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 2012). 9 many more ephemeral – yet significant – instances of recognized martyrdom in America.19 The only other published work to attempt to examine the big picture of American cultural martyrdom is Scott W. Hoffman’s brief essay, “Martyrdom in Modern America,” in 2020’s Wiley Blackwell Companion to Christian Martyrdom. There, Hoffman attempts to draw general conclusions from the disparate cases of King (1968), Shepard (1998) and high schooler Cassie Bernall (1999). He ultimately argues that the phenomenon of American martyrdom allows outsiders to critique power and claim space within greater U.S. discourse – a reasonable and defensible observation, but an arguably facile one.20 This dissertation’s approach to tracing the history and influence of a specific strain of American martyrdom, rather than tackling the whole phenomenon at once, is undertaken in an attempt to put a finer point on what we can discern about the topic by rejecting inductive attempts to make sense of the collection of Americans hailed as martyrs across issues, eras and contexts. The Defining Characteristics of Black American Martyrdom My examination of Black American martyrdom suggests several distinguishing characteristics of this particular strain of American cultural martyrdom. First, I argue that while this tradition of martyrdom relied upon a common Protestant view of religious martyrdom shared by the majority of Americans between the 1830s and 1960s, it is not neither solely religious nor dependent upon an inflexible religious structure. Contra Naveh, it is also not primarily or only about the deaths of high-status individuals.21 Furthermore, while it has always been concerned with the pursuit of racial justice, it has not always been exclusively Black – nor is every Black American who suffers or dies necessarily a 19 Eyal Naveh, Crown of Thorns: Political Martyrdom in America from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: New York University Press, 1990). 20 Hoffman, “Martyrdom in Modern America,” 454-468. In this recent discussion of American martyrdom, Hoffman makes a different argument than Naveh, contending that American martyrdom exists to inspire social action. 21 This is not to say that such high-status martyr figures are completely untouched by influences of Black American martyrdom – certainly Black Americans have understood the deaths of Lincoln, Kennedy and King within the context of Black American martyrdom – but this strain of martyrdom is not centered on high-profile figures. 10 “Black American martyr.” As Chapter 1 argues, I trace the origins of Black American martyrdom to the specific voices and rhetoric of the 19th-century immediatist abolitionists who were seeking the dual aims of immediate emancipation and racial equality.22 Although the earliest form of this martyrdom was first nurtured by white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison – and indeed initially almost exclusively recognized white, male martyrdom – Chapter 2 details how Black activists quickly moved to claim martyrial power as an argument for their American identity and citizenship rights in the antebellum period, demonstrating a previously unexplored instance of the creative agency of antebellum Black activists. Perhaps the most important dimension of Black American martyrdom is its ability to be capacious, adaptive, flexible and responsive – all without losing its meaning and significance. Across decades of activism for racial justice, figures from the Black American martyr tradition became the multitool of the activist toolkit, protean but powerful figures whose significance could transcend history but whose story could be adapted to fit exactly what the moment required. This martyrdom is simultaneously self-referential and innovative, reflecting new imaginations of what Black Americans were capable of – and, eventually, what they were owed by their country. From the antebellum era onward, Black Americans’ agentic and creative willingness to claim this status for their race and to tirelessly advocate for what the sacrifices of Black martyrs suggested about their abilities and morals helped to craft the lasting image of a Black American citizen and his or her rights. Additionally, the interpretability inherent to this tradition allowed for the creation of shared figures and bonds even between activists whose ideals and tactics were fundamentally opposed, muting some differences under 22 The emancipatory goals of immediatist abolitionists are well documented, but Paul Goodman also stresses their clear and systemic commitment to racial equality from the earliest days of the movement: “Abolitionists expected those who joined their movement to accept and advance the principle of racial equality, regardless of the walk of life, social stratum, and religious background from which they came. The constitutions of antislavery societies in the early years specified that racial equality was second only to immediate abolition as an organizational objective.” Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), xix. 11 a powerful cloak of reverence for a martyr to the struggle for equality, as discussed in Chapter 2. In another demonstration of this phenomenon’s elasticity, at different times in its history, this strain of martyrdom has encompassed both death and non-fatal suffering, broadening the circle of who could be martyred to a racist America and harnessing a greater range of figures used for rhetorical influence. For a minoritized activist effort, this kind of flexibility and capacity maximized the possibility of the impact of limited resources. This wide appeal to martyrdom also allowed Black Americans and their allies to build consensus and community identity across real instances of difference, all in the name of advocacy for racial equality. Furthermore, this strain of martyrdom is fundamentally a response to the ever-present reality of racist violence in America. Without the United States’ history of severe and pervasive racialized violence, this strain of martyrdom simply would not exist. For the nineteenth-century reformers who first nurtured Black American martyrdom, the struggle over the meaning of America’s foundational ideals was set amid a context of the distinctively harsh treatment of both free and enslaved Black Americans and a religious and philosophical commitment to nonviolence. As Paul Goodman notes, abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic agreed that racial prejudice was “more intensive and pervasive” than anywhere else in the world, contributing to the U.S. abolitionists’ sense of urgency in acting to end slavery and promote racial equality.23 Within this context, martyrdom offered a particularly fertile and potent means for addressing the chasm between the halcyon promise of America and the reality many of its citizens faced – all without resorting to meeting violence with violence. Suffering and death in the service of a particular understanding of the foundational truths of the nation – particularly in a world suffused with the threat and reality of violence – argued powerfully for the martyr’s perspective about the meaning of these ideals, even as it implicitly condemned the 23 Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 235. 12 opposing side for its role in the martyr’s suffering. The racist violence continued through a bloody Civil War and the lynch mobs and racial terror of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the rhetoric of martyrdom continued to be a useful strategy for both coping and for arguing for racial justice. As discussed in Chapters 3 through 5, Black activists for racial justice of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries interpreted and reinterpreted martyrdom through various historical contexts, building out a distinct vision for the meaning and impact of suffering and death resulting from American racism and racial violence in ways that complemented and supported the growing influence of racial uplift, the Black press and the organizing and protest of the long Black freedom movement. Finally, as may be inferred from the criteria outlined above, the tradition of Black American martyrdom is a unique phenomenon born of the singular American political and racial environment. While tenets of nonviolence and political martyrdom have been both imported to, as in Gandhi’s influence on the nonviolent organizing of the Black freedom struggle,24 and exported by America, the specific relationship of race, politics and religion in the history of the United States has resulted in the creation of a strain of secularized martyrdom that has no parallel elsewhere. This follows from what Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin have termed “Americanism,” a “quasi-religious ideal” that differs from the patriotisms of other nations because it “has been rooted less in a shared culture than in shared ideals.” They argue that Americanism has served to both divide and unify the nation around questions of how to define and apply these foundational ideals, and they see at the root of Americanism a “synthesis of evangelical Protestantism and republicanism.”25 The Black American martyrdom that was born in the antebellum period and nurtured through the 1960s represented the efforts of Black Americans and their allies to appeal to an inclusive version of these ideals within a context of evangelical Protestantism and 24 See, e.g., Sarah Azaransky, This Worldwide Struggle: Religion and the International Roots of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 25 Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin, “Introduction,” in Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal, ed. Kazin and McCartin (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 1-2. 13 republican ideology, first by venerating Black Americans who cared enough for them to give up their lives, and later to argue that racist violence and de jure and de facto segregation constituted the most egregious betrayals of those shared national and foundational ideals. The distinct American history – and Americanism – that rooted and developed Black American martyrdom led to a tradition that must be examined and understood on its own before we can export any wider ideas or conclusions about its meaning and impact. This Project’s Contributions to Understanding Race, Religion, Politics and Identity in America In addition to the work to create a theoretical foothold for the understanding of American martyrdom and the historical contextualization of the strain of Black American martyrdom, this dissertation aims to contribute to scholarship in two additional ways. First, the longitudinal study of this activist rhetoric contributes to a deeper understanding of the relationship between race, religion and politics across time and space, offering new ways to think about meaning, identity, intention and consensus building through history. Second, I aim to provide additional depth and sharpness to the picture of American activism for racial justice through the centuries, and in particular, to illuminate new dimensions of Black agency and self-definition that have been overlooked in scholarship. Examining the Place of Religion in American Politics and Culture I contend that the history of Black American martyrdom sheds light on its dual religious and political nature – and, indeed, suggests how we might better understand the relationship between religion, race, culture and politics in American history and the American present. Beginning in the latter half of the 20th century with the work of Bellah,26 civil religion was the primary lens used to grapple with questions of the relationship between religion and politics, but over time, critiques have arisen that the dominant civil religious consensus to which America defaults – an assumed set of white, primarily 26 Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, 1967, 1-21. 14 Protestant cultural values – frequently excludes the perspectives of those situated outside of this norm.27 More recent attempts to engage with civil religion have posited both the intentionality behind the construction consensus via civil religious expressions28 and the reality of multiple civil religions.29 Several scholars have done foundational work in this vein by exploring the dialogue between divergent civil religions, and the competing civil religions they evaluate are often split along racial lines.30 I suggest that part of the value of tracing the long history of Black American martyrdom is that doing so highlights the thread of religion – not civil religion – present and sustained within this tradition. Because this strain of martyrdom descended from the Garrisonian immediatists, whose crusade explicitly blended their religious beliefs with their desired social and political outcomes, it is underpinned by the Protestant doctrine(s) of this group of reformers. Black American martyrdom, then, 27 Charles H. Long argues that the Eurocentrism inherent to Bellah’s initial conception of civil religion explicitly excluded Black and Native voices (Long, “Civil Rights – Civil Religion: Visible People and Invisible Religion,” in American Civil Religion, Richey and Jones, 212). Vincent Harding’s 1968 Black Power and the American Christ sees the rise of the Black Power movement as an explicit response to this exclusionary vision of American consensus. Harding, “Black Power and the American Christ,” in The Black Power Revolt, ed. Floyd B. Barbour (Boston: P. Sargent Press, 1968), 87. Lori Latrice Martin avers that civil religion and whiteness are inseparable and notes that most scholarship on civil religion lacks a consideration of the relationship between civil religion and race (“American (Un)civil Religion, the Defense of the White Worker, and Responses to NFL Protests,” in The Religion of White Rage: White Workers, Religious Fervor, and the Myth of Black Racial Progress, ed. Stephen C. Finley, Biko Mandela Gray and Lori Latrice Martin (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2020): 73-84). 28 Wendy L. Wall uses the language of “consensus” and the “American way” to describe the ways in which powerful people and institutions intentionally created an American consensus. This “American Way” addressed levels of diversity, but it often elided racial diversity in favor of promoting inter-religious harmony. Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the ‘American Way’: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5-8, 283-284. See also Kazin and McCartin, Americanism, 10. 29 Martin E. Marty’s influential “Two Kinds of Two Kinds of Civil Religion” (1974) suggests the possibility of a multiplicity of civil religions, going so far as to say that there could be an “infinite number of apprehensions of civil religion” resulting in “as many civil religions as there are citizens.” Marty concedes that, in practice, there are not nearly so many civil religions, but notes that communities, “be they religious, ethnic, or oriented around interest groups – can creatively refract generalized civil religion through specific prisms” and “can contribute to people’s identity and power, their search for meaning and belonging.” Marty, “Two Kinds of Two Kinds of Civil Religion,” in American Civil Religion, ed. Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 143, 156. See also David Howard-Pitney, “‘To Form a More Perfect Union’: African Americans and American Civil Religion,” in R. Drew Smith, ed., A New Day Begun: African American Churches and Civic Culture in Post-Civil Rights America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 89-112. 30 Andrew Manis, Southern Civil Religions in Conflict: Civil Rights and the Culture Wars (Revised Edition) (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2002); Arthur Remillard, Southern Civil Religions: Imagining the Good Society in the Post-Reconstruction Era (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011; Charles R. Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (2009 edition; Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009). 15 is fundamentally a vision of Protestant martyrdom that is not overtly connected to specifically Roman Catholic ideas, and it self-consciously commingled the religious and the political in the pursuit of the perfectionist goal Douglas M. Strong describes as “helping to fulfill God’s design for a ‘perfect state of society.’”31 God’s design encompassed American ideals; Goodman highlights the immediatists’ dual faith in God and in America, noting that they were “serious Christians” who “grounded their belief in human equality in faith” but who were also simultaneously “serious republicans” who “took the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence as another absolute command. These beliefs and obligations, they believed, formed the foundation of a distinctive American national identity.”32 Thus, the Protestant-coded martyrs created by abolitionists were simultaneously martyrs to Christianity and to a nation whose failure to live up to its foundational ideals was harming many of its citizens. As Black Americans took creative control of this strain of martyrdom in the 1850s, it continued to be suffused with the theological ideas of the Garrisonians and with African American religious concepts, collectively termed “Afro-Protestantism” by Frances Smith Foster, who contends that the Afro-Protestant church “became the most powerful political, social, and financial organization in nineteenth-century African America.”33 For much of the twentieth century, the religious zeal underpinning this tradition of martyrdom was lessened, supplanted by a more moderate view of religion represented by the 20th century American consensus and an increasing tendency in the early 20th-century academy to separate the religious and the intellectual. But when the rhetoric of martyrdom was forcefully wielded by the Kingian branch of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, it returned to its 31 Douglas M. Strong, Perfectionist Politics: Abolitionism and the Religious Tensions of American Democracy (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 1. 32 Goodman, Of One Blood, 246. 33 Frances Smith Foster, “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African-American Print Culture,” American Literary History 17 (no. 4): 728. See also Foster and Chanta Haywood, “Christian Recordings: Afro-Protestantism, Its Press, and the Production of African-American Literature,” in Religion & Literature, Vol. 27, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 15-33 (esp. 20) . C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya similarly center the Black church as the cornerstone of Black American culture in their influential study, The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990). 16 theologically animated, cosmologically progressive roots, its role in the modern civil rights movement paralleling – more than a century later – its place in the activism of the immediatist abolitionists. Of course, scholars – starting with Charles Long’s 1971 essay “Perspectives for a Study of Afro-American Religion in the United States”34 – have critiqued the assumption of a singular “Black church” that flattens difference and tends to skew normative. But while such critiques are important for examining scholarly hermeneutics, there is certainly a historical value in understanding the interplay between race, religion and citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Josef Sorrett argues this forcefully in his recent book, Black Is a Church: Christianity and the Contours of African American Life, which suggests that “the modern secular notion of ‘the black’ is, in fact, a religious idea, the product of a distinctly Christian genealogy” and that “blackness, more simply, is a Protestant formation.”35 This dissertation’s analysis of the history, development and influence of Black American martyrdom supports such an understanding of the constitutive relationship between Protestant Christianity and racial and national identity in Black America. Going one step further, I suggest that specifically Black American martyrdom catapulted to the fore of America’s understanding of the broader nature of American martyrdom with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Because of King’s status as America’s preeminent martyr, the popular understanding of American martyrdom writ large, even outside issues specifically connected to race, has thus been overwhelmingly influenced by the characteristics and precepts of Black American martyrdom developed via the intentional, innovative and creative efforts of activists for Black freedom dating back to the antebellum period. If Black is a church, then the America that sees itself in its martyrs is far more of a Black church than it may realize. 34 Charles Long, “Perspectives for a Study of Afro-American Religion in the United States,” Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group, 1999), 187-198. 35 Josef Sorrett, Black Is a Church: Christianity and the Contours of African American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 19. 17 Deepening Scholarly Understanding of the History of Racial Justice Activism Additionally, this project is intended to sharpen the picture of activism for racial justice in America, and my research complicates some perspectives on issues like interracial cooperation and the role of violence in the pursuit of Black freedom. For example, for much of the twentieth century, historians tended to view the Garrisonian abolitionists’ impact on American culture as negligible and their mental state precarious and fanatical – even today, the only book-length treatment of abolitionist martyrdom is Hazel Wolf’s 1952 On Freedom’s Altar: The Martyr Complex in the Abolition Movement, a psychohistorical overview of the group’s commitment to their cause.36 The 1965 essay collection The Antislavery Vanguard, conspicuously situated at the height of the civil rights movement’s Montgomery-to-Memphis arc, did some work to rehabilitate these reformers’ image and their efficacy, with Howard Zinn asserting that “few groups in American history have taken as much abuse from professional historians as that mixed crew of editors, run-away slaves, free Negro militants, and gun-toting preachers known as the abolitionists.”37 But even as Zinn and others have argued for the significance and moral clarity of these reformers, more recent scholarship on nineteenth-century America has trended away from discussions of the Garrisonian abolitionists in favor of attempts to recover marginalized voices. Manisha Sinha describes the fight to end slavery as a “radical, interracial movement,” arguing that “slave resistance, not bourgeois liberalism, lay at the heart of the abolition movement.”38 Other studies have highlighted the ways in which white activists, even when attempting to advocate for Black Americans, have 36 Hazel Wolf, On Freedom’s Altar: The Martyr Complex in the Abolition Movement (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952). 37 Howard Zinn, “Abolitionists, Freedom Riders, and the Tactics of Agitation,” in Martin Duberman (ed.), The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 417. See also James B. Stewart, “The Aims and Impact of Garrisonian Abolitionism, 1840-1860,” Civil War History 15, no. 3 (September 1969), 197. Henry Mayer’s All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998) also seeks to reframe Garrison after a long line of more skeptical biographies. 38 Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 1. 18 contributed to marginalizing them: In one of the only scholarly treatments of white Northeastern abolitionist martyrdom, Mark J. Miller argues that white abolitionists centered themselves and their identities in their movement by developing a martyrology that allowed them to “ventriloquize a suffering black voice” in an attempt to “harness black suffering for white publicity by emphasizing white male rights and silencing the black voice.”39 But I suggest that a closer look at even the most white-coded activism demonstrates the richly creative agency of Black activists, who both promoted and subverted the ideas and rhetoric of radical white reformers like Garrison in ways that are easily overlooked if scholars restrict their view of antislavery efforts to non-elite actors. It is certainly true that though there was an interracial dimension to abolition, activists were still primarily working within the white supremacist, patriarchal structure of American society and often reifying those systems at the expense of the less powerful, as several scholars have argued.40 But the ideological stream of Black American martyrdom – and the Black creativity and agency it represents – is a stellar example of an intellectual artifact that, though rooted in a space of predominant whiteness, was adapted and nurtured into a key component of Black activism and notions of racial and national identity. Properly understanding this dimension of Black Americans’ early relationship to questions of identity, nationality and citizenship suggests a continuity in Black 39 Mark J. Miller, Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 104-105. 40 This is a central tenet of Kevin K. Gaines’s work on racial uplift, which argues that uplift ideology reinforced racist and sexist notions instead of encouraging class and gender unity. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). James and Lois Horton make a similar argument about questions of Black manhood in the nineteenth century, arguing that Black men responded to accusations of inferiority by asserting their manhood – but that had the effect of women being forced to “affirm their own inferiority in order to uphold the superiority of their men.” James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, “Violence, Protest, and Identity: Black Manhood in Antebellum America,” in Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 96. 19 thought and racial justice activism supportive of an even longer periodization for the Black freedom movement than has been historically considered.41 Additionally, the period studied in this dissertation is bookended by activist groups well-known for their embrace of nonviolence – the Garrisonian abolitionists and the Kingian civil rights movement. But as recent scholarship has suggested, the historical picture of commitment to nonviolent resistance is more complicated and even includes the occasional embrace of violent means as necessary to achieve movement goals.42 I suggest that the shared language and fundamental interpretability of martyrdom helped sustain these movements amid deep ambivalence – or even disagreement – about the role of violence in Black activism. Garrison and several of his acquaintances and allies, including David Walker and Maria W. Stewart, certainly differed over views of whether violence was necessary as a means to 41 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall influentially suggested the “long civil rights movement” of the 1930s to 1970s that extended beyond the “Montgomery to Memphis” strain helmed by King and the SCLC and was equally concerned with economic justice and legal equality in “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005), 1233-1263. Since then, scholars have generally heeded the call to imagine a longer periodization of the movement and to consider additional voices in the struggle for racial justice, though dissent exists. See, e.g., Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History 92, no. 2 (2007), 265-288, which raises concerns that a long-movement approach mutes significant distinctions among activists, regions, eras and approaches to reform. 42 Stanley Harrold has written extensively about the intersection of violence and nineteenth-century anti-slavery movements; The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001) suggests that 1840s addresses by abolitionists suggest their recognition of the agency of the enslaved and the potential usefulness of violence. John Stauffer’s The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) examines the lives and friendship of four interracial abolitionists and assesses how they came to accept the necessity of violence in achieving slavery’s end. Kellie Carter Jackson looks at how many Black abolitionists came to see violence as necessary in Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). And even the pacifist Garrison came to tolerate violence as a means to the end of slavery, as Harrold and McKivigan argue in the introduction to Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 15-16. The nonviolent resistance of the 20th-century civil rights movement has also come under scrutiny by scholars in the 21st century, with several studies underscoring the role of armed self-defense as a complement to nonviolent protest. Examples include Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Jenny Walker, “A Media Made Movement? Black Violence and Nonviolence in the Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement,” pp. 41-66 in Media, Culture and the Modern African-American Freedom Struggle, ed. Brian Ward (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2001); Christopher B. Strain, Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2005). 20 end slavery,43 but as Patrick T.J. Brown and others argue, many Black abolitionists did not let such differences in approach compromise their partnership with Garrison, valuing their relationship to him both personally and practically.44 Indeed, the tension between self-defensive violence and martyrdom was discussed prolifically among Garrisonian circles with the 1837 death of Elijah Lovejoy, who was immediately and widely hailed as a martyr, but who met his death with a pistol in his hand. Garrisonian-affiliated orations in honor of Lovejoy engaged in some slick rhetorical sleight of hand to de-emphasize his armed self-defense and emphasize the sacrality of his death as a “witness for the truth.”45 The interpretability of shared martyr language and imagery, alongside the sacrality it bestowed to the cause, helped paper over differences of opinion about violent action; after Lovejoy, sacrifice on behalf of the cause trumped tactics in the martyrology of the abolitionists. Such a view was particularly useful to Black activists, who were able to maintain their agency while allowing the language of sacrifice and martyrdom to dampen their frequent differences in opinion with some white abolitionists over the tactical necessity of violence. This dissertation’s attention to such nuance in interracial efforts for racial justice in the 19th and 20th centuries newly illuminates the ways in which Black activists have exercised agency, subtly subverted expectations, and claimed their rights for themselves and their community via the long Black freedom movement. Chapter Overview ● Chapter 1: Suffering, Race and the Ethic of Abolitionist Martyrdom: This chapter examines the origins of Black American martyrdom and argues that this strand began in 1830 with William 43 See Horton and Horton, “Violence, Protest and Identity,” 85-90; Stanley Harrold, “Violence and Nonviolence in American Abolitionism,” in John McKivigan and Peter Hinks, eds., Abolition and Antislavery: A Historical Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2015), 350-351. 44 Patrick T.J. Brown, “‘To Defend Mr. Garrison’: William Cooper Nell and the Personal Politics of Antislavery,” New England Quarterly 70, no. 3 (September 1997), 416; Marilyn Richardson, ed., Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Political Writer (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 25. 45 e.g., Beriah Green, The Martyr: A Discourse in Commemoration of the Martyrdom of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy (New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1838), 7-8. 21 Lloyd Garrison’s embrace of martyrdom rhetoric to describe himself and other white abolitionists’ sacrifices on behalf of the enslaved. Garrisonian abolitionist martyrdom relied on some key facts: the pervasive reality of racist violence, both within slavery and towards free Black Americans; immediatist abolitionism as a personal, immediate conversion within the context of evangelical Christianity and perfectionist theology; and the need for a virtuous response to the reality of violence that could unite different perspectives on self-defensive or aggressive violence in the pursuit of emancipation. The martyrdom of this period and location was raced and gendered, with white men emerging nearly exclusively as martyrs, and the rhetoric of white suffering and Black suffering differed accordingly. ● Chapter 2: Black Americans and Antebellum Martyrdom: Maria W. Stewart, Colored Conventions & Crispus Attucks: This chapter explores the use of martyrdom language by antebellum Black activists, arguing that Black abolitionists connected with Garrison were demonstrably inspired by his use of the trope of martyrdom and that they quickly adapted Garrisonian abolitionist martyrdom by applying it to exemplary Black Americans. These antebellum Black activists innovated in describing members of their race not just as victims or sufferers, but martyrs whose trials simultaneously proved their deep and abiding belief in the foundational ideals of America and their personal excellence, which itself reflected positively on the race. In the hands of these innovators, Black American martyrdom became a strong argument for Black Americans’ eligibility for citizenship, their suffering freed from themes of abjection and invested anew with understandings of volitional action and a strengthening sense of the capabilities of the race. The promotion of Crispus Attucks as the first [Black] American martyr was a particularly impactful rhetorical innovation that had a lasting impact on notions of valor and manhood in Black America and served as a longstanding reference point in the long Black freedom struggle, and this chapter argues that the creation of Attucks as a martyr relied 22 on both the Garrisonian abolitionist martyrdom tradition and the creative agency of Black abolitionists. ● Chapter 3: The Valor and Value of Black Americans in the Historiography of the Late Nineteenth Century: This chapter evaluates the usage of martyrdom in Black historiography from the Civil War to the turn of the 20th century. It suggests that authors of this period showed two main tendencies: First, building on Nell’s creation and promotion of Attucks as the quintessential American (but, importantly, Black) martyr, they invested the stories of historical Black heroes with new martyrdom language and built out those stories in ways that set these figures apart as exemplary Black people within the emerging context of uplift ideology. Second, amid the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of anti-Black violence, they began to cast as martyrs those Americans who were suffering in Jim Crow America. While the latter decades of the nineteenth century are also marked by descriptions of aspirational and uplifting martyrdom, they increasingly sow the seeds of the idea of martyrdom as the result of racist violence and the unjust denials of Black Americans’ earned and owed rights, a perspective that grew even more influential in the twentieth century. ● Chapter 4: “Crucified Upon the Cross of Race Passion”: Martyrdom in the Twentieth-Century Black Press: This chapter traces the development of Black American martyrdom rhetoric from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, utilizing the increasingly powerful Black press as a site for charting its evolution. It argues that Black American martyrdom retained some significant connections to its roots in the antebellum period and functioned for a time as a rhetorical bolster for uplift ideology, but as the century wore on, martyrdom shifted from exemplary personal piety and sacrifice to an increasingly activist illustration of the unjust suffering of Black Americans within an unjust society. A brief case study of the creation of the concept of the “Houston Martyrs” by the NAACP as it worked for clemency 23 for a group of Black soldiers harshly punished for a 1917 uprising in Texas illustrates this period as the site of significant and intentional construction of martyrdom rhetoric in the service of claiming rights and equality for Black Americans, and it underscores the growing power of the rhetoric in the work of the NAACP as well as the increasing centrality of both national organizations and the Black press in the promotion of rights activism and the continuing refinement of Black American identity. ● Chapter 5: “A Time for Martyrs”: Martyrdom in the Black Freedom Struggle, 1952-1968: This chapter assesses the role of martyrdom in the increasingly visible movement for civil rights of the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that the Black American martyrdom of this era can be described in two waves. The first is the continuation of the ideology of martyrdom promulgated by the NAACP between 1952 and 1963, which relied on assimilationist ideals and respectability politics to add activism as another dimension of Black American excellence and to argue for the continuing relevance of the NAACP amid challenges by organizations participating in direct action. The second is the melodramatic martyrdom championed by King beginning in 1963, which dramatically expanded the criteria for martyrdom and was less concerned about individual characteristics and more about utilizing martyrs ranging from children to Presidents as the stars of King’s cosmologically staged morality play. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that the rapid evolution of Black American martyrdom during this period, a time when high-profile deaths were frequent, has resulted in today’s capacious understanding of qualifications for “civil rights martyrdom.” ● Conclusion: Rethin(King) American Cultural Martyrdom: The conclusion suggests how this project’s conception of Black American martyrdom and its evolution over time may be used to better understand American martyrdom rhetoric as adopted by various groups in the years after the death of King and his elevation as America’s preeminent martyr figure. It argues that the 24 broad concept of American martyrdom – and its attendant understanding of privilege, power and identity – is fundamentally rooted in the Black American experience, suggesting that the work of activists for racial justice has influenced broader American discourse more broadly than previously understood. 25 Chapter 1 Suffering, Race and the Ethic of Abolitionist Martyrdom Writing in 1838, English sociologist Harriet Martineau wrote of the “greatest people now living and moving” in the world: the American abolitionists, whom she glowingly describes as the “spiritual potentates of our age” with holy faces that shone “so little lower than the angels.” Martineau’s 84-page encomium to the sacrifices of the anti-slavery activists, The Martyr Age of the United States, returns time and again to the subject of their willing suffering on behalf of the enslaved, painting a picture of the movement as the pinnacle of active holiness on earth.46 What is particularly striking about this epochal “martyr age” is that the trope of abolitionist martyrdom she describes had been established in less than a decade. The author herself points this out, highlighting how quickly abolitionism had progressed from what she terms “external quiet on the subject of slavery in the United States”47 to this era of reformers whose self-sacrifice has elevated them so greatly as Christians and “true republicans.”48 Martineau’s text found an eager reading public on both sides of the Atlantic and remained popular during the antebellum period,49 helping both to promote and to reinforce this trope of the holy suffering of American abolitionists as they worked to redeem America from the national sin of slavery. While Martineau sees the instantaneity of the “martyr age” as a spiritual outpouring, I suggest that antebellum abolitionist martyrdom arose from the very particular efforts of a very particular man: 46 Harriet Martineau, The Martyr Age of the United States (Boston: Weeks, Jordan & Co., 1839), 83-84. Martineau’s work originally appeared in the London and Westminster Review of December 1838. 47 Martineau, Martyr Age, 5. 48 Martineau, Martyr Age, 82. 49 A note in the front matter of the 1839 publication explains that the publication of the standalone text was “[i]n consequence of the repeated demands” for the edition of its original publication, demonstrating its reach and impact in abolitionist circles. Archival holdings bear out this claim, as several letters from the period demonstrate that abolitionist women, in particular, were discussing the text with each other, even years after its publication. For example, an 1845 letter from Anne Knight of England to Maria Weston Chapman asks the recipient if she has a copy of the “Martyr Age,” lamenting that she lent her copy while in Paris and it has not been returned. Knight calls it “a thrilling little book.” Knight, Anne, and Maria Weston Chapman. "Letter from Anne Knight, Moore's 5 Queen Street Place, Southmarkbridge, to Maria Weston Chapman, 14/10 [18]45." Correspondence. Moore's 5 Queen Street Place, Southmarkbridge, [October 14, 1845]. Digital Commonwealth, https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/qz20th43w (accessed August 21, 2023). 26 William Lloyd Garrison, the white Boston radical pacifist and abolitionist whose conversion to immediatist abolition in 1829 precipitated the rapid development of his specific form of Northeastern antislavery activism. This chapter argues that while pervasive violence and suffering were the backdrop and impetus for abolitionist reform broadly, responses to this suffering – informed by identity, positionality, religious doctrine and more – differentiated strains of abolitionism. I contend that the martyrdom Garrison embraced for himself beginning in the early 1830s resulted from the juxtaposition of his radical pacifism with the reality of racist violence. In such a situation, the volitional action of self-sacrifice repudiates the temptation to meet violence with violence. Animated by an evangelical Protestant zeal steeped in pacifist and perfectionist doctrine, Garrison’s investment of meaning into his own suffering on behalf of the enslaved underscored his work toward perfect holiness even as he refused to entertain notions of violence or aggressive self-defense.50 Importantly, though, the suffering of Garrisonian martyrdom was always distinguished from the suffering of the enslaved. Though by 1838 Martineau describes the abolitionists of the “martyr age” as “men and women of every shade of color, of every degree of education, of every variety of religious opinion, of every gradation of rank,”51 Garrison’s self-identification with martyrdom and its rhetoric of volitional and self-sacrificial suffering resulted in it quickly becoming the nearly exclusive domain of white men. Thus did the trope of abolitionist martyrdom, begun with Garrison’s personal commitment to sacrifice and suffering on behalf of the enslaved, grow to describe the efforts of other primarily white 50 Dan McKanan argues that Garrison’s religious identity has “always posed a special challenge for scholars” and ultimately argues that Garrison “believed that all people deserved the same respect as God, and that all people possessed the divine power to create a society in which respect was universal,” a doctrine most apparent in his doctrine of “nonresistant pacifism.” Whatever combination of religious belief animated Garrison, it clearly motivated his actions to affect worldwide change in order to align with heavenly standards. Dan McKanan, Identifying the Image of God: Radical Christians and Nonviolent Power in the Antebellum United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 69, 76. 51 Martineau, Martyr Age, 3. 27 male abolitionists, resulting in a distinct, if understudied, movement reinforced by the high-profile deaths of Elijah Lovejoy, John Brown and Abraham Lincoln.52 While subsequent chapters of this project describe the ways in which Black activists of the nineteenth and twentieth century laid claim to – and adapted – the self-sacrificial American martyrdom pioneered by Garrison, this chapter examines its earliest foundations, describing how an ethic of abolitionist martyrdom grew from Garrison’s personal experiences to a wider calling among immediatist abolitionists and an effective, if gendered and raced, rhetorical tool in the fight to end slavery in America. To support this argument, this chapter lays out the religious and cultural context for the rise of abolitionist martyrdom, outlines the distinction between abolitionists’ understanding of Black suffering and largely white martyrdom by comparing the writings of Garrison and Black abolitionist David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), and charts the spread of the ethic of martyrdom among Northeastern immediatist abolitionists. Ultimately, I contend that while the suffering of Garrisonian martyrdom was a phenomenon with a distinct and legible logic that defaulted to its representatives being elite white men, it nevertheless did not disclose the option for Black activists to read themselves into this martyrdom, eventually co-opting its claims about authority, identity, and power via the creation of the long tradition of Black American martyrdom. The Religious and Cultural Context of the Rise of Abolitionist Martyrdom Garrisonian martyrdom was born into a period that nurtured the rise of several types of reform in America. As Ronald Walters argues, the context for this swell of antebellum reform was both theological and socio-economic: As responsibility for reform shifted from the elite to the growing middle 52 There is yet no definitive treatment of the phenomenon of abolitionist martyrdom. Hazel Wolf’s On Freedom’s Altar: The Martyr Complex in the Abolition Movement is still the only book-length study, and Wolf looks at the phenomenon via a psychohistorical lens; more recent authors, such as James Brewer Stewart, have a tendency to describe with scare quotes abolitionist “martyrs.” Wolf, On Freedom’s Altar: The Martyr Complex in the Abolition Movement (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952); James Brewer Stewart, Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 16. 28 class, Americans – largely informed by evangelical Protestantism – “insisted that change could be total, for people and society, and that it began with the individual, no matter how lowly.”53 Additionally, the evangelical Christian doctrine of perfectionism, which held that individuals could achieve perfect holiness while on earth, posited that social action would necessarily follow personal religious commitment, and this link between individual salvation and voluntarist collective reform efforts was central to the beliefs and actions of many abolitionists.54 In particular, the immediatism promulgated by Garrison and his followers underscored this dual commitment to personal salvation and social reform. Robert Abzug highlights the speed with which Garrison converted from a gradualist to an immediatist abolitionist,55 and as William M. Wiecek observes, Garrison’s immediatism was thoroughly theologically informed and underpinned by an evangelical Christian zeal and a perfectionist doctrine that both required right actions to reform society and, over time, saw fewer and fewer distinctions between religious and political matters.56 Anne Loveland concurs, arguing that immediatism was as much about immediate repentance for the sin of slavery as it was for the timeline in which it should end: “Immediate repentance and abandonment of the sin of slavery was the common creed of early abolitionists, who derived the doctrine and methods of immediatism from evangelicalism and who prosecuted the antislavery movement as a religious and 53 Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers: 1815-1960 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 3,16. 54 Raymond James Krohn, “Perfectionism,” in the Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895, ed. Paul Finkelman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009 (https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780195167771.001.0001/acref-9780195167771-e-0444). Gilbert H. Barnes notes the thoroughgoing and pervasive evangelical commitment of early abolitionists in The Antislavery Impulse, 1830-1844 (New York: Appleton-Century, 1933). Douglas M. Strong’s Perfectionist Politics: Abolitionism and the Religious Tensions of American Democracy (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999) further connects the doctrine of perfectionism to widespread ecclesiastical reform and the hope for widespread political reform via the creation of the Liberty Party in 1840. 55 Robert H. Abzug, “The Influence of Garrisonian Abolitionists’ Fears of Slave Violence on the Antislavery Argument, 1928-1840,” The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 55, no. 1 (January 1970), 15. 56 William M. Wiecek, The Sources of Anti-Slavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760-1848 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 230-233. 29 moral enterprise.”57 For such reformers, abolition was a kind of calling that “proved one’s benevolent affections and in which one might work for both the glory of God and the welfare of mankind.”58 And as David Brion Davis notes, citing speeches and letters dating to 1832, the rise of immediatism went beyond a strategic shift. It was deeply personal, a “sign of an immediate transformation within the reformer” him- or herself, and was understood by the convert to immediatist abolition as “an upswelling of personal moral force which, with the aid of God, would triumph over all that was mean and selfish and worldly.”59 In this context, immediate abolitionism required a deeply personal religious commitment to strong action, and, as Paul Goodman argues, a dual belief in the end of slavery and in racial equality.60 Though these abolitionists were predominantly white, Goodman sees Black activism at the very roots of the spread of immediatist abolitionism. He contends that as Black activists rejected colonization and insisted on their inherent equality as Americans, the “virtue of their personal example” via their patriotism, piety and achievement resulted in free Black Americans having convinced “a small but prophetic vanguard of white men and women to repudiate colonization and embrace immediate emancipation and racial equality.”61 This turn of events created a biracial movement, but it did not itself dismantle the cultural structures of patriarchal racism – Black abolitionists working alongside white activists still had to navigate such hurdles, even within circles committed to justice. Lurking in the background for all abolitionists was the immutable reality of violence that threatened all Americans, white and Black, free and enslaved. Most obviously and perniciously, violence threatened and delivered by Southern slaveholders and overseers compelled compliance from the 57 Anne C. Loveland, “Evangelicalism and ‘Immediate Emancipation’ in American Antislavery Thought,” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 32, no. 2 (May 1966), 174. 58 Loveland, “Evangelicalism and ‘Immediate Emancipation,’” 180. 59 David Brion Davis, “The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review Vol. 49, no. 2 (September 1962): 228. 60 Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 1-3. 61 Goodman, Of One Blood, 3. 30 people they enslaved, creating what John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold term “a violent atmosphere” that “encouraged acceptance of violence within southern culture,”62 but other forms of violence connected to the system of slavery menaced Americans, as well. Abzug has argued that Garrison’s initial turn to immediatism was largely influenced by the potential for a violent uprising by the enslaved, with a resultant race war seen as retribution for the sins of America.63 And as Eddie Glaude has noted, both religion and violence have been central to Black American struggles for freedom and equality. He observes that all nineteenth-century Black Americans lived with the daily reality of racist violence, writing, “The specter of violence and its relation to death and suffering are crucial to understanding distinctive tropes and metaphors in the political rhetoric of early nineteenth-century black Americans. The economies of violence surrounding black subjugation in the nineteenth century affected all persons marked as black, slave or free.”64 As these scholars have demonstrated, all Americans were threatened by the violence connected to slavery; I suggest that the pervasive reality of violence required all reformers to engage with it in one way or another. Some, like Walker, embraced militant response to violence early on, and others, like Garrison, championed nonviolent resistance. But it is important to note that over the decades, the grinding reality of violence directed towards Black Americans and abolitionists introduced, even for some of the least violent among them, some ambivalence to means of resistance: James Brewer Stewart observes that as the antebellum years wore on, even pacifist abolitionists were more and more willing to reconsider militancy in both word and deed as proslavery 62 John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold, “Introduction,” Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America, ed. McKivigan and Harrold (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 3. 63 Abzug, “Influence,” 16-17. 64 Eddie Glaude Jr., “Religion and Violence in Black and White,” in John D. Carlson and Jonathan H. Ebel, eds., From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence, and America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 130. 31 response to their aims grew more virulent.65 That martyrdom should be a response to a religious impulse to society-bettering action within a culture of systemic violence and suffering is not particularly surprising, but the deftness, speed and consistency with which antebellum abolitionists, both Black and white, marshaled the rhetoric and imagery of martyrdom to their cause is both noteworthy and nearly entirely unremarked upon in scholarship. Black Suffering in Walker’s Appeal Responses to suffering differentiated strains of abolitionism, and one early call to action in response to the wholesale suffering of the enslaved is Black abolitionist David Walker’s highly influential 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Walker’s Appeal is a fiery jeremiad that imparts a new vision for America as a response to the suffering inherent to the experience of Black Americans – and he wanted those suffering to take action. Glaude sums up Walker’s beliefs thus: “It was the duty of every black Christian to fight, even if it meant death, against the scourge of slavery and racial discrimination.”66 To Walker, their shared subjugation required Black people to resist; as Wilson J. Moses writes, Walker believed that “black people everywhere were morally bound to revolt against their common heritage of oppression.”67 Walker’s Appeal followed wider contemporary notions of individual responsibility for bringing about reform, but his embrace of militancy was distinct (and displeasing to many white Americans). But despite his engagement with suffering and violence even unto death, Walker does not explicitly invoke the language and rhetoric of martyrdom; instead, those would come from Garrison’s pen within the year, sparking the wider trend that would grow over the decade. 65 James Brewer Stewart, Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 19-21. Chapter 2 of this project examines the ways in which the ambivalence of violence was masked by the embrace of martyrdom rhetoric among Black and white abolitionists. 66 Glaude, “Religion and Violence,” 135-136. 67 Wilson J. Moses (ed.), Classical Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey (New York: NYU Press, 1996), 15. 32 Some of the vocabulary and concepts with which the Appeal engages are shared with the martyrdom rhetoric that would arise among the immediatist abolitionists: the text has highly charged, emotional language; an apocalyptic vision informed by Christianity;68 and a constant theme of suffering and oppression. But despite surface similarities, the suffering invoked by Walker is never depicted as a means to martyrdom – only as evidence of the wrongs of slavery and an exhortation for the enslaved to rise up. Even in a passage referring to his own potential death for his activism, Walker does not cast himself as a martyr: If any are anxious to ascertain who I am, know the world, that I am one of the oppressed, degraded and wretched sons of Africa, rendered so by the avaricious and unmerciful, among the whites. – If any wish to plunge me into the wretched incapacity of a slave, or murder me for the truth, know ye, that I am in the hand of God, and at your disposal. I count my life not dear unto me, but I am ready to be offered at any moment. For what is the use of living, when in fact I am dead.69 At first glance, this language resembles martyrdom rhetoric – there is the familiar trope of being willing to be degraded or killed for the “truth” and an assertion that God will protect the author even in death. But I suggest that Walker’s ambivalence to the threat of death described here (“...what is the use of living, when in fact I am dead”) is much more akin to Orlando Patterson’s notion of slavery as the state of “social death”70 than it is to the volitional, persuasive martyrdom that would soon develop among Garrisonians. 68 For more on the apocalyptic imagery in Walker’s Appeal, see Kevin Pelletier, “David Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Logic of Sentimental Terror,” African-American Review 46.2-3 (Summer/Fall 2013), 255-269. 69 Walker, Appeal, 81. 70 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). Patterson’s view of slavery, which can be here extended to Walker’s existence even as a free Black American during the antebellum period, is that it is a substitute for death since the slave is a “nonperson” outside of his or her enslaver (5). This abjection is the kind of state to which Walker appears to be alluding in his text, as opposed to the glory of volitional martyrdom. 33 Walker’s revolutionary power, too, is different than that accorded to a martyr. While rooted in suffering, it is not the transformative and persuasive power of martyrdom – it is the raw power of the potential uprising of oppressed enslaved people,71 as illustrated in the treatise’s very next sentences: But remember, Americans, that as miserable, wretched, degraded and abject as you have made us in preceding, and in this generation, to support you and your families, that some of you, (whites) on the continent of America will yet curse the day that you ever were born. You want slaves, and want us for your slaves!!! My colour will yet root some of you out of the very face of the earth!!!!!72 What emerges from Walker’s Appeal is certainly a picture of the motivational power of Black suffering, but neither the language nor the rhetorical structure of martyrdom that would soon become a trope among white abolitionists is invoked in this influential text. Walker’s Appeal was an exhortative and powerful call to end the suffering of Black Americans, but it ultimately asked for warriors, not martyrs. White Abolitionist Engagement with Black Suffering Around the same time as Walker was writing, Garrison was also utilizing Black suffering, albeit quite differently, to further his antislavery message. In 1829, he introduced to Benjamin Lundy’s abolitionist newspaper Genius of Universal Emancipation his column titled “Black List,” headed by an image borrowed from the successful British abolitionist movement: a depiction of a kneeling, bound enslaved man and the question, “Am I not a Man and a Brother?” Under the pathos-laden image and question, Garrison “recorded each week some of the terrible incidents of slavery, –instances of cruelty and torture, cases of kidnapping, advertisements of slave auctions, and descriptions of the horrors of the foreign and domestic slave trade.”73 Garrison’s development of a regular column focused on the suffering of enslaved people demonstrates its value as a rhetorical strategy, but, like Walker, he did not ascribe the characteristics of martyrdom to any of the people highlighted in his column. The suffering of 71 See, e.g., Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 148. 72 Walker, Appeal, 81-82. 73 Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison: The Story of His Life, Told by His Children (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1885), 163. 34 the enslaved was designed to convict the hearts of white Americans as a part of Garrison’s nonviolent strategy of moral suasion, but these suffering Black Americans were not martyrs to any cause. Other Garrisonian abolitionists also utilized the pathos of Black suffering as a potent rhetorical tool during the first decade of the immediatist abolitionist movement. As Elizabeth B. Clark notes, in the antebellum period, stories about the horrors and violence inflicted upon the enslaved “became newly audible and visible in the North, where graphic portrayals of [their] subjective experience of physical pain emerged as common antislavery fare,”74 often penned by and for women and designed to provoke empathy that resulted in action. Two of the most influential anti-slavery works of the period were Lydia Maria Child’s An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833) and and American Slavery as It Is (1839), authored by Angelina Grimké, Sarah Moore Grimké and Theodore Dwight Weld. These texts share the goal of graphically detailing the suffering inflicted upon the enslaved at the hands of white people in order to nurture empathetic response in readers and motivate anti-slavery sentiment,75 a standard tactic within Garrisonians’ dominant strategy of moral suasion during the 1830s. Weld and the Grimkés, realizing that “sensationalism was effective,” sent out a circular seeking information on punishments and torture of the enslaved, insisting that “Facts and testimonies are troops, weapons and victory, all in one.”76 But again, no language or rhetoric of martyrdom is attached to the suffering enslaved in these stories, though the narratives were instrumentally effective in helping white people to develop sympathy for the plight of Black people and to act on behalf of ending their suffering.77 74 Elizabeth B. Clark, “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” The Journal of American History 82, Vol. 2 (September 1995): 463. 75 Clark, “Sacred Rights,” 466-467. 76 Quoted in Clark, “Sacred Rights,” 468. Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, eds., Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké, 1822-1844, Vol. II (Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1965), 809. 77 On the intentional practices designed to cultivate sympathy based on suffering slave narratives, see Clark, “Sacred Rights,” 476. 35 Garrison, Abolitionism’s Protomartyr Beginning in 1830, shortly after his “conversion” to immediatist abolition, Garrison expanded the rhetorical strategy of moral suasion beyond the pathos of Black suffering, now tapping his own suffering as a self-described martyr on behalf of the enslaved as a persuasive force.78 I contend that Garrison’s volitional suffering was different than the involuntary suffering of the enslaved, and it was an admixture of the antebellum impetus to action and Garrison’s abhorrence of violence. While Garrison was the architect of the particular ethic of abolitionist martyrdom, his innovation was nevertheless rooted in a larger tradition of both religious and political martyrdom in the United States.79 Protestant martyrology was a longstanding cultural presence in early America, with Foxe’s Book of Martyrs included on many New World bookshelves next to the Bible.80 As Mark Miller writes, the prevalence of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and “the logic of Foxean martyrdom, in which suffering forms the basis for dissenting speech and publication, ensured that martyrology became central to new modes of dissent in England and its Atlantic colonies.”81 Martyrology, already culturally present and adaptable, was then shaped by Garrison to fit the antebellum context and his abolitionist aims. Garrison’s public and published engagement with martyrdom rhetoric began with his own sentencing to jail on charges of libel, and he met his punishment with characteristic vigor. In his final words in the Genius of Universal Emancipation before prison, he is unrepentant as he defends his 78 Naveh also locates the origin of American martyrdom within political discourse to the antebellum abolitionists, noting that they “resorted to the martyr tradition as an ideological device and made martyrdom a leitmotif of rhetoric” and that they “asserted that martyr figures were instruments of redemption whose struggle for reform would help America purge itself of the sin of slavery” (Naveh, Crown of Thorns, 9-10). 79 Early America had recorded many martyrs, ranging from the eight Jesuit “North American martyrs” killed in the 1640s and the continent’s first official Catholic saints to Mary Dyer, a Quaker hanged in Boston in 1660, to the men killed in the Boston Massacre of 1775. See Adrian Chastain Weimer, Martyrs’ Mirror: Persecution and Holiness in Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press 2011); Emma Anderson, The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); John Fanestil, One Life to Give: Martyrdom and the Making of the American Revolution (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2021); Mitchell A. Kachun, First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 80 Wolf, On Freedom’s Altar, 4. 81 Miller, Cast Down, 9. 36 penchant for incendiary and passionate language.82 During his seven-week stay in the Baltimore jail, Garrison wrote prolifically and across genres, producing everything from sonnets scratched on his cell walls to caustic letters to those involved in his trial,83 and his writings during this period demonstrably began to cultivate his identity as a willing martyr after the fashion of the early Christian heroes immortalized in the Bible and in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. In one letter from jail, he critiqued an article about his trial published in his hometown newspaper, the Newburyport Herald, taking the newspaper to task for what he viewed as a weak approach to the question of slavery.84 Contrasting his own conviction with the editor’s, he writes, “For myself, neither the terrors of the law, nor the fires of martyrdom, shall deter me from invoking confiscation and imprisonment upon every such abettor.”85 A footnote to this quotation in Garrison’s 1885 biography demonstrates that others, too, recognized the abolitionist’s martyr-like zeal early on, noting that the presiding judge at his libel trial, Nicholas Brice, remarked to the Warden of the Jail that “Mr. Garrison was ambitious of becoming a martyr.”86 Along these same lines, Martineau’s Martyr Age records a sonnet of Garrison’s attributed to his time in the Baltimore jail. Asserting that “[s]ome record of what was his state of mind at this time was left on his prison wall,” she prints the following poem: I boast no courage on the battle-field, Where hostile troops inmix in horrid fray; For Love or Fame I can no weapon wield, With burning lust an enemy to slay: – But test my spirit at the blazing stake, For advocacy of the Rights of Man, And Truth – or on the wheel my body break; 82 Genius of Universal Emancipation, March 5, 1830, 205; see also Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 173. The quotation that ends his text is from English poet Edward Young’s poem “Formalism” (1742), a poetic rejoinder in sonnet form against the formalists that argues that God, having instilled it in humans, prefers passionate devotion to the “undevout” lukewarm. https://www.bartleby.com/library/poem/5807.html 83 Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 179-190. 84 Newburyport Herald, June 11, 1830; quoted in Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 185. 85 Garrison and Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 186. 86 Ibid. 37 Let Persecution place me ‘neath its ban; Insult, defame, proscribe my humble name; Yea, put the dagger at my naked breast; If I recoil in terror from the flame, Or Recreant prove when peril rears its crest, To save a limb, or shun the public scorn – Then write me down for aye – Weakest of women born!87 This brief sonnet contains all the most important tenets of Garrison’s developing ethic of abolitionist martyrdom. First, it draws some boundaries around the concept of martyrdom, explicitly distinguishing it from the war heroics of a soldier while simultaneously underscoring Garrison’s commitment to nonviolence. Garrison’s martyr, it is clear, should not be confused with a hero-soldier. His imagined passive – but, importantly, still volitional – acceptance of violence done to his person also evokes the stories of early Christian martyrs through references to the “blazing stake” and the wheel, both of which are instruments of torture appearing frequently in early Christian martyr stories. It is noteworthy that the threat Garrison describes is certainly bodily, as evidenced in the “save a limb” language in line 13, but there is also room for the martyrdom he describes to be one that threatens status (“Insult, profane, proscribe my humble name” and “shun the public scorn”) rather than one tied only to injury or death. Such an allowance of martyrdom to include non-lethal forms was both rooted in Protestant thought88 and served to allow Garrison’s repeated instances of martyrial suffering to be revisited with each indignity, stoking the fires of righteous anger and spurring reformist action. 87 William Lloyd Garrison, in Martineau, Martyr Age, 9; the poem is also printed under the title “True Courage” in William Lloyd Garrison, Sonnets and Other Poems (Boston: O. Johnson, 1843), 13. Martineau may be wrong about the provenance of the sonnet; there is no published record of it before it appeared in the October 1, 1831 edition of The Liberator with the simple title “Sonnet.” The Liberator, Vol. I, No. 40, 160. http://fair-use.org/the-liberator/1831/10/01/the-liberator-01-40.pdf. Accessed 23 January 2023. 88 Weimer notes that for generations, Protestants in England and New England did not limit martyrdom to death, as Lewis Bayley’s Practice of Piety, a 1611 devotional manual found frequently in colonial libraries, offered three kinds of martyrdom: “both in will and deed,” or those who confessed and were killed; “in deed only,” such as the male babies slaughtered by Herod in Matthew 2; or “in will only,” or martyrs who were willing to die but were not ultimately killed.# Such a broadening of martyrdom allowed the white abolitionists, who were not being systematically hunted by the state like so many martyrs of previous centuries and generations, to wield the rhetorical power of martyrdom even without being killed. Weimer, Martyr’s Mirror, 15. 38 Garrison’s engagement with abolitionist martyrology in the 1830s shows that he saw martyrdom as both intensely personal and a structurally necessary part of antislavery activism. His 1830 pamphlet, A Brief Sketch of the Trial of William Lloyd Garrison for an Alleged Libel on Francis Todd, of Massachusetts, clarifies his views further. This text shows that in the earliest stages of his public embrace of the role of martyr, Garrison considers even non-lethal suffering to constitute martyrdom and, even more importantly, that he sees the relevance of race – particularly whiteness – to its impact. He tells readers that the pamphlet is designed to highlight the arbitrary nature of his conviction, but the main rhetorical thrust of the pamphlet serves to underscore his deep commitment to reform at any personal cost. In closing the text, Garrison tells his audience that he knows he will suffer for his activism: “A few white victims must be sacrificed to open the eyes of this nation, and to show the tyranny of our laws. I expect, and am willing to be persecuted, imprisoned and bound, for advocating African rights; and I should deserve to be a slave myself, if I shrunk from that duty or danger.”89 This first engagement with the contours of abolitionist martyrdom underscores Garrison’s view that the volitional suffering of committed white reformers is essential to the success of the abolitionist movement. Garrison continues this thread of suffering white victims in the very first edition of The Liberator, published January 1, 1831. Again describing his libel trial in Baltimore, he asserts his unwavering commitment to antislavery reform within a framework of his asserted civil rights and classic tropes of martyrdom: I am not discouraged; I am not dismayed; but bolder and more confident than ever. I say to my persecutors, – ‘I bid you defiance.’ Let the courts condemn me to fine and imprisonment for denouncing oppression: Am I to be frightened by dungeons and chains? Can they humble my spirit? Do I not remember that I am an American citizen? And, as a citizen, a freeman, and what is more, a being accountable to God, I will not hold my peace on the subject of African oppression. If need be, who would not die a martyr to such a cause?90 89William Lloyd Garrison, A Brief Sketch of the Trial of William Lloyd Garrison: For an Alleged Libel on Francis Todd, of Massachusetts, (Baltimore: 1830), 8. https://www.loc.gov/item/18019032/. Accessed 1 February 2023. 90 William Lloyd Garrison, “My Second Baltimore Trial,” The Liberator, 1 January 1831, 2. 39 As the decade wore on, Garrison continued to engage with themes of martyrdom in his work, even as his thought evolved in other ways. Comparing the subtle changes between the 1830 and 1834 editions of A Brief Sketch illustrates some of this change. In the 1834 edition, he changes “advocating African rights” to “advocating the rights of my colored countrymen,”91 showing a new emphasis on the shared American identity of Black people while neatly stepping away from colonization schemes.92 That edition also includes some letters from supporters that provide evidence that in four short years, Garrison was already recognized as a martyr by abolitionists. In one, an unidentified author writes, “We would say to brother Garrison, that ‘the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church,’ – the death of patriots, the life of their country – the cruelty of tyrants, their own destruction.”93 This excerpt pairs the words of Tertullian and Thomas Jefferson, underscoring the enmeshment of the religious and political in the immediatist worldview, and also demonstrates that reformers had a sense of Garrison as eager to embrace suffering and martyrdom. This perception persisted for years and even crossed the Atlantic; an 1845 letter from British abolitionist Elizabeth Pease Nichol to Garrison urges him to take greater care of himself, noting that there “seems to be a kind of ambition in men like you to die martyrs to the good cause.”94 And, as detailed below, there were plenty of such figures within the circles of Northeastern antebellum abolition. 91 William Lloyd Garrison, A Brief Sketch of the Trial of William Lloyd Garrison: For an Alleged Libel on Francis Todd, of Massachusetts, 2nd edition (Boston: Garrison & Knapp, 1834), 15. 92 William Lloyd Garrison, A Brief Sketch of the Trial of William Lloyd Garrison: For an Alleged Libel on Francis Todd, of Massachusetts, 2nd edition (Boston: Garrison & Knapp, 1834), 21-23. 93 This statement’s parallel reference to “patriots” and “tyrants” seems to be parodically referencing Thomas Jefferson’s well-known quote “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson to William Smith, 13 November 1787. Letter. From Library of Congress, Thomas Jefferson: Establishing a Federal Republic. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/105.html (accessed 25 January 2023). 94 Nichol, Elizabeth Pease, to William Lloyd Garrison. "Letter from Elizabeth Pease Nichol, Darlington, [England], to William Lloyd Garrison, May 16. 1845." Correspondence. Darlington, England, May 16, 1845. Digital Commonwealth, accessed 24 October 2023, https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/m900q5678 . 40 The Growth of the Antebellum Ethic of Martyrdom From the earliest days of his immediatist abolitionism, Garrison had been writing about his sufferings through the lens of martyrdom, but the ethic of abolitionist martyrdom went beyond his self-description and his urgent and fiery prose. By 1833, he had also explicitly enshrined a commitment to the possibility of martyrdom in the “Declaration of Sentiments” adopted at the inaugural convention of the newly formed American Antislavery Society (AASS). In the document’s closing paragraph, Garrison writes that the signers of the declaration pledge to “overthrow the most execrable system of Slavery that has ever been witnessed upon earth” despite the dangers of their efforts: “...come what may to our persons, our interests, or our reputation – whether we live to witness the triumph of LIBERTY, JUSTICE and HUMANITY, or perish untimely as martyrs in this great, benevolent, and holy cause.”95 Coming at the end of a long and specific list of the ways that the members of the AASS vow to act to dismantle slavery, the call to martyrdom carries a particular gravitas as it binds the signers of the pledge to the real potential of a martyr’s death. Importantly, as Teresa Goddu observes, the society’s commitments were buttressed by its development of a mass media enterprise focused on tailoring its message to different constituencies, which contributed to the growth of antislavery sentiment as a central part of the newly emergent identity of middle-class America.96 Thus, while the messaging was tailored to different audiences, the core tenets of the missions of the AASS were consistent and widely distributed – and the ethic of martyrdom was one of them. Garrison himself led the charge with much of the messaging about what it would take to end slavery, and following the promulgation of the AASS Declaration of Sentiments, Garrison made some canny rhetorical choices that capitalized on the oppression of abolitionists. Beginning in January 1834, 95 American Anti-Slavery Society. Declaration of sentiments of the American anti-slavery society, adopted at the formation of said society, in Philadelphia, on the 4th day of December, 1833. (New York: William S. Dorr, 1833). https://www.loc.gov/item/rbpe.11801100/. 96 Teresa Goddu, Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 9, 20-22. 41 he began running on The Liberator’s front page the column “Refuge of Oppression,” which printed snippets of anti-abolitionist rhetoric from pro-slavery newspapers (as well as the occasional anti-Garrisonian abolitionist rhetoric from other abolitionists) and reprinted them with a light editorial touch, mostly limiting his commentary to brief, if pointed, contextual information and insertions such as (!!) to denote the sentiments he seemed to find most egregious. In the January 4, 1834 issue, Garrison’s description of the purpose of “Refuge,” dripping with irony, is that it was intended to “copy some of the choicest specimens of anti-abolition morality, decency, logic, and humanity – generally without note or comment.”97 Strikingly, this column seems to have been working to develop sympathy for the suffering white abolitionists in the same ways as other activists were using the stories of violence towards the enslaved to convict the hearts of white Americans. Responding to the “intelligent correspondent ‘O,’” who has clearly written to the paper to ask why anti-abolitionist screeds are reprinted in The Liberator with so little rebuttal, Garrison responds that the column is incredibly popular and “has already opened the eyes of many to see how cruelly abolitionists are calumniated by their enemies.”98 The column remained a fixture for decades and, as described by Brian Allen Santana, “explicitly linked Garrisonian abolitionists to martyred figures within the early history of the Christian church.”99 That this strategy of nurturing sympathies, already applied to the stories of violence to enslaved Black Americans within Garrisonian abolition, was being widened to include a new category of white sufferers once again demonstrates the raced nature of abolitionist martyrdom in the 1830s. “Refuge” focused only on the sacrifices and perception of white abolitionists, while elsewhere in The Liberator, 97 The Liberator, January 4, 1834, 8. 98 “Refuge of Oppression,” The Liberator, January 3, 1835, 3. The question of why the “Refuge” found such a prominent home in The Liberator seems to have persisted; Garrison answers the question again in the January 8, 1847 (6) and February 29, 1856 (35) issues. 99 Brian Allen Santana, William Lloyd Garrison and American Abolitionism in Literature and Memory (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2016), 29. While his footnote misdates the first appearance of the Refuge of Oppression, dating it to September rather than January 1834, Santana’s summary of the column’s aims is helpful: “These columns consistently revel in the hostile attitudes that Garrisonian abolitionists encountered from both northern and southern audiences during this period”(164, n. 25). 42 Garrison still traded in stories of graphic examples of violence directed at the enslaved. Others have observed this distinction, as well. Miller argues that the the “continuum of violence” charting the suffering of abolitionists, the “far more intense violence against free blacks” and the “systemic violence of slavery” was real and impactful, and he suggests that in this context, “martyrological rhetoric attempted to distance white man’s suffering from that of the black slave.”100 He concludes that abolitionist martyrology “distinguishes between black suffering as worthy of pity and white male suffering as worthy of admiration and imitation.”101 While I am not inclined to go as far as Miller in asserting that “[all] abolitionist republican martyrology attempted to harness black suffering for white publicity by emphasizing white male rights and silencing the black voice,”102 it is unquestionable that, at least to white abolitionists, abolitionist sacrifice and Black suffering were separate, raced categories within the sphere of antebellum antislavery activism. This strategy was working, too: white sacrifice was quickly proving to be an effective rhetorical weapon within Garrison’s nonviolent arsenal. It provoked strong responses outside of the inner circles of abolitionism in ways that the suffering of the enslaved had not accomplished. Opponents of the Garrisonians, both from rival abolitionist factions or pro-slavery forces, routinely attacked notions of abolitionist sincerity, bravery, or both. In the July 5, 1834 edition of The Liberator, “Refuge” reprints a screed against the abolitionists of New Hampshire originally published in the New York Courier. The author, an abolitionist of a different faction, strikes at the sincerity of Garrisonian abolitionism, accusing its representatives of being shrewd businesspeople rather than passionate reformers doing real work. The climax of his argument accuses the Garrisonians of cowardice, asking why they would argue against slavery in free states, where there were no slaves, rather than in the dangerous Southern states, where the problem was embodied. Tellingly, the author takes a swipe at the Garrisonians’ ideal of martyrdom, 100 Miller, Cast Down, 87. 101 Miller, Cast Down, 93. 102 Miller, Cast Down, 104-105. 43 contrasting their high ideals with their reputed actions. After telling the story of an abolitionist lecturer who canceled a lecture in Portsmouth, New Hampshire when the townspeople were vocally displeased, the author asserts with heavy-handed irony, “There is very little hankering after martyrdom among these extra superfine philanthropists.”103 In the face of mounting commitment to self-sacrifice, adversaries sought to deflate the power of martyrdom by questioning whether those committed to self-sacrifice could – and would – live up to their stated ideals. Pro-slavery opponents, too, seemed particularly perturbed by the martyrdom the Garrisonians were publicly embracing, repeatedly and provocatively daring them to enter Southern states ready to die for their cause. The September 26, 1835 “Refuge” shows evidence of these challenges ranging from the politely implied to the brazenly stated. It reprints the New York Evangelist’s reporting of a resolution in South Carolina that averred that they regard abolitionists as “furious fanatics, or knaves and hypocrites; and we hereby promise them, upon all occasion which may put them in our power, the fate of the pirate, the incendiary, and the midnight assassin.”104 In a more indirect, yet still sinister tone, the Alexandria Gazette requests that Garrison, Arthur Tappan and other prominent abolitionists visit the South, grimly noting, “We can assure them they would meet with a warm reception.”105 The Little Rock Advocate is the bluntest of the bunch, vowing, “Some of Garrison’s disciples declare themselves ready to suffer martyrdom even in the good cause. If they will travel this way, they can be accommodated.”106 With the threats of violence mounting, many on both sides of the slavery issue were acutely aware of the potential impact of the public abuse or death of a white abolitionist. The same “Refuge of Oppression” column quotes the New York Journal of Commerce, which appealed to Macon, Georgia and New Orleans to rescind their bounties of $12,000 and $20,000, respectively, for the abduction of Tappan 103 The Liberator, Vol. 4, no. 27, 5 July 1834, 1. 104 The Liberator, Vol. 5, no. 39, 26 September 1835, 1. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid. 44 and his delivery to their cities. The Journal warns that such an event would “give an impulse to Abolitionism, which nothing else could,”107 a theme that persists throughout the antebellum period. Unitarian theologian William Ellery Channing wrote in his 1835 tract Slavery, “One kidnapped, murdered abolitionist would do more for the violent destruction of slavery than a thousand societies. His name would be sainted. The day of his death would be set apart for solemn, heart stirring commemoration. His blood would cry through the land with a thrilling voice, would pierce every dwelling, and find a response in every heart.”108 Public commitment by abolitionists to the potential for suffering and death was becoming an important rhetorical tool, but it is equally important to note the ample evidence of martyrdom as a deeply personal spiritual commitment by Garrison and others. In a January 1835 letter to George Benson, Garrison lamented the state of America and sought to correct it via the spirit of the early Christian martyrs. He wrote that he was “appalled at the daring front and rapid growth of atheism – lascivious, blasphemous, heaven-defying, God-rejecting atheism109 – in New England and elsewhere…We must bring back again the triumphant and memorable days of martyrdom.” Garrison sees the bold sacrifice of the martyr as an atonement for the crisis of sin and weakness in America, and he continues to maintain his willingness to suffer for the cause of abolition himself, continuing: “My prayer to God is, that I may be kept from the fear and the wisdom of man, and be ready to lay down my life victoriously in his service, whenever it shall be necessary.”110 107 Ibid. 108 William Ellery Channing, Slavery (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1835), 2. 109 For more on the relationship between violence, atheism and abolitionism, see Matthew Bowman, “Violence and Atheism in the Age of Abolition,” Church History 89 (2020), 857-874. Bowman argues that physical violence against enslaved people led to accusations that slaveholding was atheistic and therefore a threat to American democracy. 110 William Lloyd Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison to George Benson, 12 January 1835. Letter. In The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, Volume I, I Will Be Heard! 1822-1835 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 435. 45 Other abolitionists evinced this personal embrace of martyrdom in the mid-1830s, as well. An 1835 letter to his wife from Amos Augustus Phelps, who had become an agent of the AASS in 1834, shines a light on Phelps’s private commitment to the public spectacle of martyrdom. In it, amid relatively banal remarks about the keeping of their house and his abolitionist efforts in various pulpits, he writes, In regard to our cause, you see the enemy is raging on all sides and foaming out his wrath and shame, and as I said in my former letter, so say I again, this cause will never triumph without the shedding of martyr blood, and we who love it, and who have pledged our lives to it, and whose hearts have grown to it, must prepare ourselves for the trial. And for one I care but little how soon the trial comes. Never were men called to die in a holier cause, and better die in the faithful discharge of duty as the negro’s plighted friend, than to sit in silken security and die the consenter to and abettor of the man-stealer’s sin.111 Similarly, Theodore Weld, who spoke out against slavery in Troy, New York in 1836 and was pelted in the pulpit by stones, rocks, eggs, coins and brick shards, is described as having “gloried in the persecution he suffered,” writing, “God gird us all to do valiantly for the helpless and the innocent. …Blessed are they who die in the harness and are buried on the field or bleach there.”112 As the above examples demonstrate, Garrison’s personal zeal for suffering on behalf of the enslaved had grown in a few short years into a widely embraced ethic of abolitionist martyrdom that twinned theological motivation with rhetorical efficacy. Within this context, Garrison’s description of being seized by a Boston mob in late 1835 both furthered his martyrdom ethic and offered him the opportunity to broaden the affronts on abolitionists to affronts on the very freedoms guaranteed to Americans. Contextualizing the mob violence in the November 7, 1835 edition of The Liberator, Garrison writes that the “struggle is between Right and Wrong – Liberty and Slavery – Christianity and Atheism – Northern Freemen and Southern Taskmasters,” Garrison says that the question a hand is not actually whether and how to end slavery in the United States, but “whether freedom is with us – THE PEOPLE OF 111 Phelps, Amos Augustus to Charlotte Phelps. "Letter from Amos Augustus Phelps, Rochester (N.Y.), to Charlotte Phelps, Aug. 31. 1835." Correspondence. Rochester (N.Y.), August 31, 1835. Digital Commonwealth, accessed 25 October 2023, https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/m900q313j. 112 Wolf, On Freedom’s Altar, 3. 46 THE UNITED STATES – a reality or a mockery; whether the liberty of speech and of the press, unquestioned and complete.”113 This is a relatively new development; Garrison’s earliest discussions of martyrdom engaged with questions of liberty and slavery, but with this event, he underscores the danger to white citizens, who in addition to Black Americans are now oppressed by the institution and mentality of slavery. Despite – or because of – the mob violence directed at him personally, he insists that abolitionists will fight for this freedom to the death if necessary, writing that, “The victims are ready to be sacrificed – throughout the Commonwealth, and all over the land – a noble company of martyrs!”114 Garrison also underscores the divine ordinance of his suffering by describing the events of the day in language specifically evocative of early Christian martyrs reveling in their persecution, writing that “throughout the whole of this trying scene I felt perfectly calm, nay very happy. It seemed to me that it was indeed a blessed privilege thus to suffer in the cause of Christ. Death did not present one repulsive feature. The promises of God sustained my soul, so that it was not only divested of fear, but ready to sing aloud for joy.”115 He also suffuses his recollection of the event with the landmarks of American identity and freedom, noting that as he was dragged through the streets by the mob, it was “over the ground that was stained with the blood of the first martyrs in the cause of LIBERTY AND INDEPENDENCE, by the memorable massacre of 1770.”116 By tying his treatment locationally to the site of the Boston Massacre, Garrison powerfully casts the abolitionists in the same light as the early Americans who sought independence. The same edition of the Liberator prints British abolitionist George Thompson’s response to the mob incident; in it, he 113 “Triumph of Mobocracy in Boston,” The Liberator, 7 November 1835, 178. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid. Note that this description of the Boston Massacre does not yet name Crispus Attucks as one of these martyrs. For further information the Black abolitionist innovation of ascribing martyrdom to Attucks, see Chapter 2 of this volume. 47 speaks directly to pro-slavery forces and assures them of the abolitionists’ assured triumph: “The abolitionists have risen after every attempt to crush them, with greater energy and in greater numbers. They are still speaking; they are still writing; still praying; still weeping, (not over their sufferings, but your sins).”117 Again, the language chosen presents the abolitionists as long-suffering martyrs, divinely inspired to be composed and strong in the face of their struggles. At the time of the mob attack on Garrison, both sides of the issue of slavery were familiar with the figure of the abolitionist martyr, but despite the heated threats and mob violence, no one had yet died. That changed with the death of abolitionist newspaper publisher Elijah Lovejoy in 1837, which ushered in an era of high-profile deaths that went beyond the previous martyrial sacrifice and suffering of Garrison and others. The death of Lovejoy was simultaneously a rhetorical boon and a credal complication for the Garrisonians; while it allowed the abolitionists to argue that anti-abolitionist attacks on free American citizens were evidence that slavery was a threat to the very fabric of American democracy, it also cast a spotlight on foundational tensions between nonviolent and violent tactics in the fight to end slavery. Again, the malleability of martyrdom discourse proved essential to movement success, expanding as required to support the abolitionists’ ultimate aims. (Non)Violence, Suffering and Death: Lovejoy, Brown and Lincoln’s Effects on Abolitionist Martyrdom Lovejoy’s death, coming as it did amid an increasingly violent culture of attempting to silence abolitionists, was not a surprise. But public reaction was widespread and strong, with the Boston Recorder reporting that Lovejoy’s murder provoked among American citizens a “burst of indignation which has not had its parallel in this country since the battle of Lexington, in 1775.”118 Unsurprisingly, Garrison’s “Refuge of Oppression” column highlighted the threats against the publisher in advance of 117 George Thompson, “Letter from Mr. Thompson to Mr. Garrison,” The Liberator, 7 November 1835, 178. 118 Quoted in Henry Tanner, The Martyrdom of Lovejoy: An Account of the Life, Trials and Perils of Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, Who Was Killed by a Pro-Slavery Mob, at Alton, Ill., on the Night of November 7, 1837 (Chicago: Fergus Printing Company, 1881), 9. 48 the attack that killed him, with the August 25, 1837 edition of The Liberator reprinting a piece by C.F. Daniels, editor of the New York Gazette, who wrote that the Alton, Illinois citizens “will not suffer their pleasant and prosperous town to be kept in hot water by any such minister to mischief, and have appointed a committee of six to wait on the reverend brawler and tell him so. If he really loves joy and wishes not to sup a little of its counterpart, he will probably take the hint.”119 Within three months, the Presbyterian minister was killed by a mob. With the death of Lovejoy, the message of abolitionist martyrdom now sent an urgent warning to the rest of the country: White American men were being killed by their fellow citizens while attempting to exercise rights guaranteed in the Constitution. This issue was no longer relegated to sufferings visited upon fringe fanatics – it threatened every white, male American citizen’s rights. After several years of engaging with martyrdom rhetoric, the antislavery press was primed to respond, and while the religiously charged language of suffering and sacrifice had been applied to many before him, the actual death of an abolitionist changed the conversation. As Ford Risley notes, reaction to Lovejoy’s death in the antislavery newspapers was swift and fierce with a unified proclamation of Lovejoy as a martyr.120 The official newspaper of the AASS, The Emancipator, issued an extra edition, while many other publications bordered the announcement in a black frame, both emphasizing its special, newsworthy nature and signaling to its readers appropriate mourning.121 Garrison reacted vehemently in The Liberator, printing “Horrid Tragedy! Blood crieth!” on his front page in thick, black font. The accompanying article detailed Lovejoy’s death in explicit religious and patriotic terms, describing him as having died “in defence of those inalienable rights which were given him by God, and guaranteed to him by the constitution.”122 One page over, an editorial headlined “A martyr for liberty, 119 The Liberator, August 25, 1837, 1. 120 Ford Risley, Abolition and the Press: The Moral Struggle Against Slavery (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 73, 128, 145-154. 121 Ibid. 122 “Horrid tragedy! Blood crieth!,” The Liberator, November 24, 1837, 2. 49 slain by the hands of his own countrymen!” again twinned the abolitionist and American identities of Lovejoy and the republican and Christian principles for which he died, asserting that, “In his martyrdom he died as the representative of Philanthropy, Justice, Liberty and Christianity.”123 The wider discourse around Lovejoy’s death provides a textbook example of the battle for meaning in the afterlife of a recognized martyr.124 That he was a martyr seemed clear to many outraged citizens and newspaper editors, but claims as to what, exactly, Lovejoy was a martyr to or for varied. Often, people and organizations that were not explicitly abolitionist elided the antislavery dimension of Lovejoy’s martyrdom: Some Northern newspapers saw his killing as an “affront to democracy itself,” with different presses calling him a martyr to freedom, free speech and/or a free press.125 The Liberator quotes the Boston Daily Advocate in saying, “Free discussion now has her martyr,”126 while the New York Evening Post inflated Lovejoy’s death’s meaning above the question of slavery altogether, writing, “We regard not this as a question connected with the Abolition of slavery, in the South, but as a question vital for the liberties of the entire Union.”127 For many abolitionists, slavery itself was the fundamental threat to the fabric of America, its proponents’ embrace fundamentally sinful and the direct cause of other sinful acts, including the murder of Lovejoy. But even those who were more moderate on the question of slavery were horrified by the way in which the rights of Lovejoy – a white, male citizen – were trampled by pro-slavery forces. By the end of November, public meetings to discuss Lovejoy’s death were held across several states, with many passing resolutions explicitly affirming his martyrdom. But the resolutions – many 123 “A martyr for liberty, slain by the hands of his own countrymen!” The Liberator, November 24, 1837, 3. 124 For more on the contested nature of martyrdom, see Paul Middleton, “Creating and Contesting Christian Martyrdom,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Christian Martyrdom, 12-30 and van Henten and Saloul, Martyrdom: Canonisation, Contestation, and Afterlives, 11. 125 Ken Ellingwood, First to Fall: Elijah Lovejoy and the Fight for a Free Press in the Age of Slavery (New York: Pegasus Books, 2021), 261-262. 126 “Voice of the press! The first martyr - another mob at Alton,” The Liberator, November 24, 1837, 3. 127 Reprinted in Tanner, The Martyrdom of Lovejoy, 159. 50 made by a self-consciously mixed body of local citizens and not by abolitionist groups – are notable in their general avoidance of claiming Lovejoy as a martyr to ending slavery. The citizens of Belfast, Maine, having identified themselves “not as men of any party, civil or religious, but on the broad ground of American citizenship,” make no mention of slavery at all, resolving that Lovejoy “has fallen a martyr in defence of rights which are guaranteed to every freeman by the constitutions of the general and state governments; rights of which our country has made her highest boast, and which are dear to every American citizen.”128 The citizens of Chichester, New Hampshire declared that Lovejoy, “not acting for himself merely, but in behalf of insulted humanity, and the liberty of speech and of the press…died a martyr to the holy cause of right, and truth, and freedom.”129 Marlborough, Massachusetts, explicitly distanced its martyr language from abolition efforts, writing that they viewed Lovejoy, “without reference to the particular cause in which he was engaged, as a martyr to the great and inestimable rights of the freedom of the press, and freedom of discussion.”130 Similarly, citizens of Salem, Ohio, convened a meeting “without distinction of sect or party” to condemn his murder; they declared that rather than their own free speech being silenced by the threat of mob rule, they would “suffer our bodies to be immolated on the spot upon which we may perish contending for our rights, and our name to be enrolled with that of E.P. Lovejoy, as martyrs to the cause of law, of liberty, and of free discussion.”131 It is notable that even when some of these citizen bodies referenced abolitionism, it was put on equal footing with the American rights for which he had died, as when Concord, New Hampshire, determined that “the blood of E.P. Lovejoy is no less an offering in behalf of the constitutional rights of American freemen, than it is in behalf of the enslaved.”132 These resolutions are a curious testament to 128 Joseph C. and Owen Lovejoy, Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy; Who Was Murdered in Defence of the Liberty of the Press, at Alton, Illinois, November 7, 1837 (New York: John S. Taylor, 1838), 11-12. 129 Lovejoy and Lovejoy, Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, 317. 130 Lovejoy and Lovejoy, Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, 318. 131 Lovejoy and Lovejoy, Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, 321-322. 132 Ibid. 51 both the influence and the complexity of the death of Lovejoy: Citizens within a deeply divided America felt moved to respond to the event, even as they were clearly often loathe to explicitly connect his martyrdom to the cause he espoused, preferring instead to amplify the American rights and ideals at the heart of his death. With the death of Lovejoy, claims from earlier years about the efficacy of abolitionist martyrdom resurfaced. Coverage in the Salem Gazette again led with Tertullian’s adage that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” noting that Lovejoy’s murder would do “more to drive a nail into the coffin of ‘the Patriarchal System,’ than a living Lovejoy could effect in a century of effort.”133 The pro-slavery St. Louis Commercial Bulletin warned that the “mode and measure of [Lovejoy’s] punishment has changed the offender to a Martyr, and the presuming, daring sinner to an apostle of righteousness and a saint. His martyrdom will be celebrated by every wild Abolitionist in the land – and the only consolation we have is that it was not inflicted upon him in a slaveholding state.”134 Similarly, Kentucky’s Louisville Journal rued Lovejoy’s death as a major victory for the anti-slavery movement and cautioned against the potential of harm to white abolitionists backfiring: It is well if this martyrdom do not kindle up a flame which years, and all the efforts of the patriot, will scarce extinguish. Let those who oppose the Abolitionists take warning from this event, and let them ever remember that the only weapons with which these zealots can be successfully encountered are truth, reason, moderation, and tolerance – and these are the only means to disarm them of their fanaticism; and that violence, outrage, and persecution will infallibly inflame their zeal, enlarge their numbers, and increase the power of their dangerous doctrines.135 The multivalent nature of the interpretations of Lovejoy’s death underscores the malleability of martyrdom as, in Castelli’s framing, “rhetorically constituted and discursively sustained.”136 Depending on the beliefs of the observer, Lovejoy the martyr was both saint and bogeyman, but no matter the 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid.; also reprinted in Tanner, The Martyrdom of Lovejoy, 164. 136 Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, 173. 52 cause, Americans agreed that his death meant something. Coming as it did on the heels of Garrison’s expansion of abolitionist martyrdom rhetoric to focus not just on religious zeal for suffering and persecution, but outrage at the trampling of foundational American rights such as the right to freedom of speech and of the press, Lovejoy’s death was ripe for multiple types of interpretation. And in short order, he had emerged as a martyr to the freedom of the press even more so than to abolitionist principles, despite the best efforts of the Garrisonians. But while the radical abolitionists were initially forced to share the martyr’s spotlight with the idea that Lovejoy had died for the freedom of the press, they gained a great deal of ground in that American civil martyrdom was becoming more and more recognizable across the country. Garrison and his allies capitalized on this turn of events as much as they possibly could, leaning into a strategy of crafting the image of Lovejoy as an American martyr via the rhetorical and material systems at their fingertips. In the days and weeks after Lovejoy’s murder, abolitionists – and particularly Garrisonian immediatists – set about to most effectively interpret his death and shape his memory and influence. Within a year, orations, sermons, tracts and discourses had been created and disseminated via the AASS’s mass media structure. Not solely a death in the service of ending slavery, they argued, Lovejoy’s martyrdom was one that reached to the very foundations of American rights and virtues. The abolitionists, so often painted by their adversaries as fringe lunatics, took the opportunity to carefully curate Lovejoy as a law-abiding American citizen whose rights were unjustly trampled. Rather than relying on the pathos-drenched narratives of the suffering visited upon enslaved people and white abolitionists by pro-slavery forces, they now had a new tactic: showing America that pro-slavery sentiment was directly threatening to the foundational freedoms of the nation. One of the most impactful speeches framing Lovejoy’s death was Wendell Phillips’s “Murder of Lovejoy” eulogy, which was delivered in Boston’s Faneuil Hall a month after the abolitionist’s death and marked Phillips’s debut as an orator and fierce antislavery reformer. Phillips spoke, perhaps 53 extemporaneously, in response to Massachusetts Attorney General James T. Austin, who sympathized with the Alton mob and claimed that Lovejoy died “as a fool dieth.”137 Phillips built his argument around the idea of Lovejoy as an American citizen who had acted completely within the bounds of his rights as guaranteed by the Constitution, noting that he “had stationed himself within constitutional bulwarks” and defending the freedom of the press within the bounds of the laws broken by his attackers.138 Phillips lays out a careful, legally-informed defense of Lovejoy’s actions in his speech, and it demonstrates one of the first instances of the Garrisonians needing to grapple with the question of violent versus nonviolence tactics in their crusade. Phillips’s strategy was to tackle head-on the rumor that Lovejoy or his group had fired first, but he nevertheless insisted that, “Even if Lovejoy fired the first gun, it would not lessen his claim to our sympathy or destroy his title to be considered a martyr in defense of a free Press.”139 He then further strengthens his argument by appealing to the five men killed in the 1770 Boston Massacre, who had undoubtedly begun the fray by throwing items at the British troops, asking whether their striking first negated their memory as “the first martyrs in the cause of American liberty.” The overall picture Phillips paints is one of Lovejoy as a defender of American principles who “took refuge under the banner of liberty, – amid its folds; and when he fell, its glorious stars and stripes, the emblem of free institutions, around which cluster so many heart-stirring memories, were blotted out in the martyr’s blood.”140 His sacrifice, in Phillips’s view, far outweighed questions of whether he was armed, self-defensive, or even aggressive in the melee, neatly smoothing over internecine differences within antislavery activism over questions of tactical violence. 137 Patrick G. Wheaton, “Abolition, Martyrdom, and Freedom of Expression: Wendell Phillips’ Eulogy of Elijah Lovejoy,” Free Speech Yearbook Vol. 43 (2006): 127. 138 Wendell Phillips, “The Murder of Lovejoy,” in American Voices: Significant Speeches in American History, 1640-1945, ed. James Andrews and David Zarefsky (White Plains, NY: Longman, 1989): 149. 139 Phillips, “The Murder of Lovejoy,” in Andrews and Zarefsky, 151. 140 Ibid. 54 In a rhetorical analysis of Phillips’s speech, Patrick G. Wheaton underscores the deft persuasion the orator undertakes in portraying Lovejoy’s abolitionist martyrdom without direct reference to either slavery or abolitionism. He writes, “Phillips wisely chose to make freedom of expression the central issue of the day; consequently, any friend of free speech and free press was compelled to confirm Lovejoy’s mantle of martyrdom in the cause of freedom.”141 As demonstrated above, this tactic did not originate with Phillips, and even the most immediate reactions to Lovejoy’s death demonstrated a mixture of causes to which he might be called a martyr. But Phillips’s speech, reported to be overwhelmingly convincing to the crowd of 5,000 gathered in Faneuil Hall and later described by George William Curtis in 1884 as one of America’s three major “oratorical triumphs,” placing it in the company of Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty or give me death!” and the Gettysburg Address,142 demonstrates first-hand the effectiveness of this religio-political version of martyrdom championed by the abolitionists. Activists published long-form narratives, too, adding greater texture and detail about the events at Alton and the character of Lovejoy than could be contained in orations and sermons. One of the first accounts published was Edward Beecher’s Narrative of Riots at Alton: In Connection with the Death of Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy (1838), which opens by calling Lovejoy the “first martyr in America to the great principles of the freedom of speech and of the press.”143 The rhetorical strategy here mirrors Phillips’s: The text seemingly intentionally downplays Lovejoy’s death as an abolitionist in favor of stressing his martyrdom to American principles. Beecher and Lovejoy were acquaintances, and Beecher joined Lovejoy in his belief in the freedom of speech and of the press, along with freedom from slavery.144 This conflation of freedom from slavery with other foundational American rights allowed for the antislavery 141 Wheaton, “Abolition, Martyrdom, and Freedom of Expression,” 123, 132. 142 George William Curtis, “Eulogy of Wendell Phillips,” in A Memorial of Wendell Phillips from the City of Boston (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1884), 44-45. 143 Edward Beecher, Narrative of Riots at Alton: In Connection with the Death of Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy (Alton, Ill.: George Holton, 1838), 5. 144 Jeanne Gillespie McDonald, “Edward Beecher and the Anti-Slavery Movement in Illinois,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 105, no. 1 (Spring 2012), 18. 55 activists to bind their cause more tightly to motivational civil religious virtues. In his text, Beecher paints Lovejoy’s murder as something that should never have happened in the United States and uses the text to urge reconciliation within the nation.145 The same year, Lovejoy’s brothers, Joseph and Owen, published their own version of his life story, Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy; Who Was Murdered in Defence of the Liberty of the Press, at Alton, Illinois, November 7, 1837, with an introduction written by former President John Quincy Adams, then serving in Congress. Adams was not a Garrisonian abolitionist, although he held anti-slavery views,146 so his involvement with the text demonstrates that Lovejoy’s death was meaningful outside of just the Garrisonian circle. Beginning with the life and death of Jesus, cast as a necessary event for bringing about the betterment of the world over time, Adams’s introduction casts Lovejoy’s death similarly. He writes, “That an American citizen, in a state whose Constitution repudiates all Slavery, should die a martyr in defence of the freedom of the press, is a phenomenon in the history of this Union. It forms an era, in the progress of mankind towards universal emancipation. … It is also the ordeal through which all great improvements in the condition of men are doomed to pass.”147 Adams imbues the death of Lovejoy with great cosmic and historical significance, claiming that it gave “a shock as of an earthquake throughout this continent” and that public interest in the martyr “will abide while ages pass away.”148 Concluding his introduction, Adams underscores the interpretation of the dual nature of Lovejoy’s martyrdom, describing him as the “first American Martyr to THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, AND THE FREEDOM OF THE SLAVE.”149 145 Beecher, Narrative of Riots at Alton, 5, 158-159. 146 David F. Ericson, “John Quincy Adams: Apostle of Union,” in A Companion to John Adams and John Quincy Adams, ed. David Waldstreicher (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2013), 367-382. 147 Lovejoy and Lovejoy, Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, 315. 148 Lovejoy and Lovejoy, Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, 12. 149 Ibid. 56 Even as Lovejoy was widely recognized as a martyr by the public, the Garrisonians were doing rhetorical work to make sure that his martyrdom was consistently and effectively understood in ways that supported doctrinal positions. Beriah Green, the first president of the AASS and a fiery orator known for his relentless abolitionist preaching, was asked by the AASS to compose an oration on Lovejoy, and in 1838, he delivered a speech commemorating Lovejoy’s death at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York City and at Utica, New York’s Bleecker Street Church, the site of an 1835 anti-abolitionist riot. 150 The oration took great pains to standardize the definition of abolitionist martyrdom, deciding who and what could be distinguished by the title. Building on the etymological root of martyr as the Greek “witness,” Green begins his oration with an insistence that martyrs must necessarily die as witnesses to the “truth.” He quickly engages with the interpretive subjectivity of martyrdom, admitting that the “advocate of error” might die a violent death at the hands of his “bad cause.”151 But because Green and his fellow Garrisonian abolitionists saw universal humanity as a God-revealed truth, and thus understood slavery as a perversion of this fundamental truth,152 the next logical step was that anyone who died in the service of this truth could be a martyr. Green understood the mob that killed Lovejoy as intentionally avoiding this revealed and eternal truth, depicting them as driven mad by their internal war between self-interest and God-revealed truth. Thus, “the only way in which they could hope to obtain the least relief, consisted in efforts to reduce to silence those by whose voice they had been disturbed and terrified.”153 Notably, despite the clear Christian underpinnings, language and symbols in Green’s 150 Milton C. Sernett, Abolition’s Axe: Beriah Green, Oneida Institute, and the Black Freedom Struggle (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 37-38, 71. Beriah Green, The Martyr: A Discourse in Commemoration of the Martyrdom of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy. New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1838. 151 Green, The Martyr, 3. 152 Green, The Martyr, 5-8, 10. Matthew Bowman describes the impact of Scottish common sense theology on antebellum reformers, whom he argues believed that morality and immorality were “equally comprehensible and perceivable to all humanity” and that pro-slavery forces were actively “denying the higher law of God.” Bowman, “Violence and Atheism in the Age of Abolition,” Church History 89 (2020), 857, 867. 153 Green, The Martyr, 6. 57 discourse on Lovejoy’s death, the martyr he describes is truly a martyr for America who “died for his country; for the bond and the free; for his friends and his foes; for the advocates as truly as for the enemies of slavery.”154 Similarly, Rev. Thomas T. Stone’s sermon “The Martyr of Freedom,” delivered in East Machias, Maine on November 30 and December 7, 1837, explicitly engages with the contested question of who may be called a martyr. Like Green, he appeals to the etymological root’s translation of “witness.” In his defense of Lovejoy, Stone takes on the thorny question circulating among citizens on both sides of the question of slavery: whether Lovejoy could be properly conceived of as a “martyr” if he acted rashly or foolishly. He writes, “He may be called, he may be, rash, obstinate, imprudent, mistaken in his judgment of what is the best mode of supporting truth; but if he seriously, deliberately, conscientiously devotes himself to the truth in peril of his life, his is the spirit, and if he falls, his is the end of the martyr. His imprudence is one thing, his martyrdom for the truth is another.”155 Such rhetorical exercises demonstrate that the concept of martyrdom within Garrisonian abolitionism was not a free for all: While martyrdom was frequently invoked and seemingly motivational, there were attempts to create rules and boundaries for the concept by the end of the 1830s, particularly as circumstances – such as the death of Lovejoy – dictated. The Canon of Abolitionist Martyrs Grows The abolitionist martyrdom rhetoric first championed by Garrison continued to flourish in the decade after Lovejoy’s death, though the actual death of an abolitionist martyr seems to have narrowed the scope of the term a bit: After 1837, the two most widely known martyrs to emerge in the period 154 Green, The Martyr, 17. 155 Thomas T. Stone, The Martyr of Freedom: A Discourse Delivered at East Machias, November 30, and at Machias, December 7, 1837 (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838), 3. 58 before John Brown’s 1859 raid were Jonathan Walker, who was maimed for his activism, and Charles Turner Torrey, who died from medical neglect while imprisoned. Walker, an abolitionist who in 1844 attempted to help enslaved people escape to the British West Indies but was caught and branded on the hand with an “S.S.” for “slave stealer,” became a cause célèbre.156 Walker’s branded hand became a sensation within abolitionist circles and was “daguerreotyped, engraved, woodcut, and printed on thousands of broadsides.”157 But even before his branding, Walker was already being described in martyrological language. Before he was sentenced and maimed, the August 16, 1844 issue of The Liberator printed a letter from Boston abolitionist Loring Moody in which Moody lionizes Walker’s character and rails against the Southern persecution of northern abolitionists. Closing the letter, Moody portrays the instrumentality of martyrdom to force Americans to grapple with the issue of slavery, noting that “we can well afford the sacrifice of some of our brave spirits, to secure the ‘great cloud of witnesses’ which will come up in their stead. The fires of martyrdom are already lighted; let the tocsin be sounded – strongly, clearly, certainly.”158 Nearly a year later, The Liberator celebrated Walker’s release from prison, noting, “We long to see this Christian martyr, face to face, that we may thank him for what he has done, and bless him for what he has suffered, in the cause of God and Liberty.”159 Within months, Walker was touring and sharing his story, advertised as “this humble but worthy martyr in Freedom’s cause.”160 The Liberator noted his intent to visit several towns in the Northeast in early 1846 and urged its readers to support Walker: “May he in 156 W.M. Harford, John Greenleaf Whittier, Parker Pillsbury, and Frank Edward Kittredge, A Short Sketch of the Life and Services of Jonathan Walker: The Man with a Branded Hand (Muskegon, MI: Chronicle Steam Printing House, 1879), 1. For further discussion and interpretation of the symbolism and imagery associated with Walker’s tale, see Miller, Cast Down, 84-94. 157 Miller, Cast Down, 84. 158 Loring Moody, “Case of Jonathan Walker,” The Liberator, August 16, 1844, 1. 159 William Lloyd Garrison, “Arrival of Jonathan Walker!”, The Liberator, July 18, 1845, 3. 160 “Jonathan Walker,” The Liberator, January 23, 1846, 4. 59 every place be hospitably entertained, and receive generous assistance. Think of that ‘branded hand’!”161 Around the same time Walker and his branded hand enjoyed wide renown, abolitionists were also gripped by the case of Torrey, who would follow Lovejoy as the second abolitionist martyr to actually die as a result of his activism. Torrey, whose anti-slavery actions involved the direct action of freeing enslaved people via the Underground Railroad, was imprisoned in Baltimore in 1844 on three counts of “slave stealing” and sentenced to six years in prison.162 By the fall of 1845, it was clear that Torrey would die of tuberculosis in prison if not freed, and family, colleagues and friends agitated unsuccessfully for his pardon163 until his death in May of 1846. His body was shipped to Boston, where both a funeral and memorial service were held. Notably, Rev. Joseph Lovejoy, brother of Elijah Lovejoy, provided the sermon and explicitly anointed Torrey as the second abolitionist martyr, exclaiming, “Mr. Torrey has showed us again, that there is something worth dying for. … Slavery has murdered the young, vigorous, social, talented, and pious Torrey!”164 This designation of Torrey as a martyr, especially as pronounced by the sibling of the first martyr to die for the abolitionist cause, demonstrates a continuity in how the Garrisonian abolitionists bestowed martyr status. Beyond eulogizing Torrey, Joseph Lovejoy contributed further to his canonization by publishing Torrey’s memoir (just as he had done for his brother Elijah) less than a year after his death,165 again underscoring the importance of rhetoric and words in explaining and contextualizing martyrdom. 161 Ibid. 162 E. Fuller Torrey, The Martyrdom of Abolitionist Charles Torrey (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 144-145. 163 Torrey, The Martyrdom of Abolitionist Charles Torrey, 155, 158-159. 164 Torrey, The Martyrdom of Abolitionist Charles Torrey, 162. 165 J.C. Lovejoy, Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey, Who Died in the Penitentiary of Maryland, Where He Was Confined for Showing Mercy to the Poor (Boston: John P. Jewett & Co., 1847). 60 Conclusion The recognizable category of abolitionist martyrdom was intentionally developed and nurtured by primarily Garrisonian abolitionists beginning in the 1830s as a key component of their immediatist rhetoric. Beginning with Garrison as an individual framing his own sacrifices, the ethic of abolitionist martyrdom became an aspirational virtue among many abolitionists after its inclusion in the AASS’s 1833 Declaration of Sentiments. As violence and threats of violence against abolitionists increased in the 1830s, abolitionist martyrdom rhetoric provided both motivation for activists and a powerful framing for the stories of those activists imprisoned, hurt, and/or killed in the pursuit of ending slavery. But while suffering abounded as a result of slavery, the abolitionist martyrs were overwhelmingly white men. The efficacious outrage about their treatment drew upon the curtailment of these elite white men’s guaranteed American freedoms and rights,166 centering their specific identity within the understanding of abolitionist martyrdom. This framework of white, male martyrdom was also foundational for the wider American understanding of the sensational deaths of John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. The nationwide impact of both men’s deaths far eclipsed the suffering and/or death of any of the abolitionists previously cited in the discourse of martyrdom, but their influence was nevertheless reliant upon the foundational understanding of republican martyrdom that the Garrisonians had created and promulgated. Though he differed from the nonviolent abolitionists over the question of violence and militancy, Brown was certainly in touch with Garrison and his associates, and he was clearly cognizant of the rhetorical framework of such a category: It is reported that it was the death of Lovejoy that led to Brown’s pledge to “consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery,”167 and it is well documented that he spent the 30 days between his sentencing and his execution explicitly crafting his own martyrology. As Zoe Trodd and 166 See, e.g., Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 234. 167 Ken Ellingwood, First to Fall: Elijah Lovejoy and the Fight for a Free Press in the Age of Slavery (New York: Pegasus Books, 2021), 270. 61 John Stauffer write, Brown realized after his capture that he was “more valuable as a martyr than as a political leader,” and his time in prison was “wholly focused on martyrdom. He exchanged his weapon for a pen and shifted from his most recent role of warrior-hero to that of martyr-hero.”168 As with the death of Lovejoy 12 years earlier, the death of a white, male abolitionist was of great rhetorical value to the movement, and Brown, sentenced to death, was particularly well-positioned to craft his own martyrology and contribute to the larger antebellum trend of white sacrifice for Black suffering. It worked: Brown’s status as a martyr persisted for many decades, particularly within Black American circles,169 and with the assassination of Lincoln following only a few years later, the two were twinned as American martyrs by many white Northerners and Black Americans alike. Richard Wightman Fox writes that a “religious slant on Lincoln’s martyrdom took hold right after the assassination,” noting that one of the first resolutions to be printed about Lincoln’s death came from a group of Baltimore AME delegates that explicitly called both Brown and Lincoln martyrs.170 Similarly, only a few days after the assassination of Lincoln, jurist and political philosopher Francis Lieber urged the editors at the American News Company to collect and publish the words of Lincoln. Lieber’s note, included in the volume’s introduction, underscores that by doing so, the editors “would thus make the martyr rear his 168 Zoe Trodd and John Stauffer, “Meteor of War: The John Brown Cycle,” in The Afterlife of John Brown, ed. Andrew Taylor and Eldrid Herrington (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 133-136. Trodd explores the longer influence of Brown’s martyr status in the long Black freedom struggle in her dissertation, “The Reusable Past: Abolitionist Aesthetics in the Protest Literature of the Long Civil Rights Movement” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2009) and in “John Brown’s Spirit: The Abolitionist Aesthetic of Emancipatory Martyrdom in Early Antilynching Protest Literature,” Journal of American Studies 49 (2): 305-321. 169 See Miller, Cast Down, 115; Wolf, On Freedom’s Altar, 132; Eldrid Herrington, “The Anguish None Can Draw,” in The Afterlife of John Brown, ed. Taylor and Herrington, 1-10; Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., “Black People’s Ally, White People’s Bogeyman: A John Brown Story,” in The Afterlife of John Brown, ed. Taylor and Herrington, 11-26; John Oliver Killens, Black Man’s Burden (New York: Pocket Books, 1965), 23-24; Benjamin Quarles, Blacks on John Brown (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1972). 170 Richard Wightman Fox, Lincoln’s Body: A Cultural History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015), 54-55. See also James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, “The Man and the Martyr: Abraham Lincoln in African American History and Memory,” in The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America’s Enduring Conflict, ed. John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2021), 141-163. 62 own monument, which no years, no centuries could level and cause to mingle again with the dust.”171 The editors of the volume go on to describe Lincoln as “a martyr to his devotion to his country, to the duties of his high office, and to his conviction that ‘if slavery is not wrong nothing is wrong,’”172 hearkening back, intentionally or not, to the vision of abolitionist martyrdom that promoted Lovejoy as a martyr to both the cause of ending slavery and the most fundamental American rights and ideals. Brown’s and Lincoln’s deaths were certainly seen as martyrdoms by many Americans, largely owing to the earlier work of abolitionists to promote volitional suffering on behalf of others as a civic and religious virtue. To many activists of the time, the use of martyr rhetoric was a natural response to these high-profile deaths, resulting in the spread outside of the abolitionist context of the language and imagery of martyrdom. Harry Stout discerns the rise of martyrdom language in both the North and the South during the Civil War, the event he argues was the foundation of and impetus for the birth of American civil religion. He contends that martyrdom was a key factor in the instantiation of this civil religion, writing that “As the war progressed, there appeared increasing contemporary references to Union and Confederate casualties as ‘martyrs.’ …The language of martyrdom reveals how, at least subconsciously, this war was generating through sheer quantity of blood sacrifice a living and vibrant civil religion.”173 Stout is certainly correct about the spread of martyrdom language, but he is missing the larger context of the creation, growth and spread of abolitionist martyrdom. While it is certainly reasonable to imagine the rise of American civil religious martyrdom came from the carnage and magnitude of the war, set within a thoroughly religious social and cultural context, I suggest that rise of dueling claims of martyrdom in the sectional conflict is far more reliant on the intentional and iterative 171 Francis Lieber to American News Company, 18 April 1865, in The Martyr’s Monument: Being the Patriotism and Political Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln as Exhibited in his Speeches, Messages, Orders, and Proclamations, from the Presidential Canvass of 1860 until His Assassination April 14, 1865 (New York: The American News Company, 1865), iv. 172 Martyr’s Monument, 1. 173 Harry Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the American Civil War (New York: Viking Press, 2006), xxii. 63 crafting of an ethic of religio-political martyrdom among the antebellum abolitionists than previously understood. In the 35 years that had passed since Garrison was jailed for libel, abolitionist martyrdom – and the implicit republican values it centered – had grown from a personal experience to a widely understood national virtue that would continue to reverberate throughout American history, even as the creative agency of antebellum Black activists would soon transform it into an argument for their race’s worthiness of equal citizenship. 64 Chapter 2 Black Americans and Antebellum Martyrdom: Maria W. Stewart, Colored Conventions & Crispus Attucks While the previous chapter made the case for the vital role of William Lloyd Garrison in the development of the antebellum ethic of abolitionist martyrdom, this one details the creative agency of antebellum Black activists in adapting its rhetoric and imagery in the service of Black self-definition and claims to full citizenship rights. As Manisha Sinha stresses, Black activists for racial justice were integral to the antislavery fight, and “[t]o read them out of the abolition movement is to profoundly miss the part they played in defining traditions of American democratic radicalism.”174 I suggest even further that a previously overlooked part of this contribution to radical reform was the incarnation of what would become a long and impactful tradition Black American martyrdom and the claims it made about American identity, citizenship and values. This chapter examines the martyrdom rhetoric of three distinct, but related, arenas of antebellum Black activism: the jeremiadic writings of Maria W. Stewart, the materials of the Colored Conventions Movement, and William Cooper Nell’s work to establish Crispus Attucks as an influential, and specifically Black, martyr to the principles and foundations of America. Stewart, Nell and the convention organizers were all directly connected to Garrisonian abolitionism, and the timing of their usage of the tropes of martyrdom strongly suggests that they derived from Garrison’s influence. Yet even as early as 1830 – the earliest days of Garrison’s employment of the rhetoric of martyrdom – and despite the martyrdom promoted by Garrison and the AASS being almost exclusively white and male, these Black activists imagined Black Americans to be worthy martyrs to the cause of racial justice and American ideals, not merely victims of a vicious system of disadvantage and violence. In so doing, they argued both for the value and citizenship of their race and laid the foundations of an influential strain of 174 Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 2. 65 martyrdom that played a large role in Black self-definition and racial justice organizing for decades hence. This chapter’s analysis of the rhetoric of Black antebellum martyrdom dovetails with the work of several scholars who have noted antebellum Black activists’ combination of creativity and a commitment to foundational American principles. Drawing on Kazin and McCartin’s definition of Americanism, Mia Bay critiques historiographic approaches that conflate Black nationalism with what she instead sees as a distinct Black Americanism; she then describes this Black Americanism and abolitionism as “inextricably entwined elements of African American intellectual history.”175 Bay argues for a thorough Americanness at the center of Black culture and society, noting that by 1830, the community of free Black Northerners was “as American as it was African” and “shaped by a history of bondage in America and an enduring commitment to the egalitarian principles to which the new nation was at least rhetorically committed.”176 Derrick Spires also sees in antebellum Black political thought a “creative struggle for a just society based on the promises they saw in republican self-governance,” despite the nation’s systemic racism.177 He suggests that during this period, Black Americans were specifically developing a process of praxis-based citizenship in which what a person did, rather than who a person was, constituted citizenship.178 And Patrick Rael contends that the elite Northern Black activists of the antebellum period challenged racial inequality by developing “rhetorical strategies rooted in the American tradition,” seeking “not to revolutionize existing discourse, but to appeal to its core values in changing the ‘public mind’ on racial matters.”179 As these and others observe, the racial justice activism 175 Mia Bay, “See Your Declaration Americans!!! Abolitionism, Americanism, and the Revolutionary Tradition in Free Black Politics,” in Kazin and McCartin, eds., Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 27. 176 Bay, “See Your Declaration Americans!!!,” 35. 177 Derrick Spires, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 33. 178 Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 3. 179 Patrick Rael, Black Identity & Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 281. 66 of antebellum Black Americans was concerned with practices of meaning-making and self-defining, as well as how to appeal to the emotions and sensibilities of white Americans, and this work was rooted in a sincere belief in and commitment to the foundational principles of the American nation-state and connected to the larger-scale work of interracial abolition. A carefully crafted and distinctly Black vision of American martyrdom arose from this context, its martyrs simultaneously affirming their claims to citizenship while critiquing the injustice of the society that caused their suffering. The Martyrdom Rhetoric of Maria W. Stewart Boston’s Maria W. Stewart, a Black abolitionist closely connected to and influenced by both David Walker and William Lloyd Garrison, provides a useful case study for how ideas of martyrdom, suffering and identity could be imagined and reimagined in the early 1830s. Stewart is a fascinating, if understudied, figure; in what is still the only book-length treatment of her life and work, she is described by Marilyn Richardson as a “pioneer black abolitionist and a defiant champion of women’s rights.”180 Her career in public discourse began in 1830, after she was deeply affected by the untimely deaths of both her husband and Walker. Grieving both, she underwent a religious rebirth that spurred her activism and fueled her rhetoric.181 As the first American woman to lecture to an interracial, mixed-gender crowd, she published six pieces in Garrison’s The Liberator and a political pamphlet; she also delivered four public lectures in Boston, then moved to New York and published an edition of her collected works.182 Stewart’s life and work offers the discussion of abolitionist martyrdom a unique insight into political and religious understandings of a free Black woman of the Northeast. In her writings, she married a thoroughly evangelical religious conviction with her socio-political agenda, regularly invoking, per Richardson, “both the Bible and the Constitution of the United States as documents proclaiming the 180 Marilyn Richardson, ed., Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Political Writer (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 22-23. 181 Richardson, Maria W. Stewart, 23. 182 Richardson, Maria W. Stewart, 10-12. 67 universal birthright to justice and freedom”183 as she pursued obedience to God by resisting oppression. Richardson summarizes the confluence of these themes thus: “Religion and social justice are so closely allied in her analysis that, to her mind, one could not be properly served without a clear commitment to the other.”184 In building out her activist vision and voice, Stewart draws directly upon the work of both Walker and Garrison – themselves divided over violent vs. non-violent means of abolition – to create a distinct religio-political vision that mixes Walker’s fiery jeremiad with Garrison’s volitional and sacrificial martyrdom language. Her published treatise, Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build (1831), follows Walker in clearly addressing Black audiences and asking them to act to better their circumstances. And again similarly to Walker’s Appeal, which describes Black Americans as a “degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings,”185 Stewart’s treatise opens with a grave assessment of Black Americans’ “wretched and degraded situation” and takes on the issue of “ignorance” of the abjection of their situation.186 She then offers the testimony of her conversion as an impetus for her work for racial justice, acknowledging the danger that it will bring her in a way that is directly reminiscent of Garrison’s descriptions of his own sufferings while simultaneously invoking and reverencing Walker even more directly: Many will suffer for pleading the cause of oppressed Africa, and I shall glory in being one of her martyrs; for I am persuaded that the God in whom I trust is able to protect me from the rage and malice of mine enemies, and from them that will rise up against me; and if there is no other way for me to escape, he is able to take me to himself, as he did the most noble, fearless, and undaunted David Walker.187 183 Richardson, Maria W. Stewart, 10. 184 Richardson, Maria W. Stewart, 25. 185 Walker, Appeal, 3. 186 Stewart, “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build,” in Richardson, Maria W. Stewart, 45. 187 Stewart, “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality,” in Richardson, Maria W. Stewart, 46. 68 Stewart continues to draw on themes of sacrifice in other texts, notably bringing not only Black Americans but also women into the fold of martyrdom – a notable innovation and departure from the de facto white, male martyrdom of the abolitionists. In her “Farewell Address to Her Friends in the City of Boston,” delivered September 21, 1833, she provides historical evidence for the ability of women to take on physical and spiritual leadership, noting that a “religious spirit which has animated women in all ages…has made them by turns martyrs, apostles, warriors, and concluded in making them divines and scholars,” then challenging the Black women in her audience to claim their place in this lineage: “Why cannot a religious spirit animate us now? Why cannot we become divines and scholars?”188 Perhaps unsurprisingly, Stewart’s radical approach to race, gender and activism did not come to dominate abolitionist strategy and rhetoric in the antebellum period. In fact, as James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton write, while she was initially encouraged in speaking out on behalf of the race by Black Bostonians, her “stinging criticism” of Black men eventually turned the community’s feeling against her, leading to her departure from the city.189 But her influence among Garrisonian abolitionists seems to have persisted. In one such example, Black abolitionist William Cooper Nell mentioned her in a letter to Garrison published in The Liberator in 1852. Writing of a woman’s powerful public address he had recently seen in New York state, he reminded Garrison that there was in “the perilous years of ‘33-’35, a colored woman – Mrs. Maria W. Stewart – fired with a holy zeal to speak her sentiments on the improvement of colored Americans” and who, despite opposition, was cheered and encouraged by Garrison such that “her public lectures awakened an interest acknowledged and felt to this day.”190 Nell’s letter indicates that Stewart’s writing, and her audacity in speaking publicly, was noted and 188 “Farewell Address to Her Friends in the City of Boston,” in Richardson, Maria W. Stewart, 69. 189 James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North, 20th Anniversary Edition (New York: Holmes & Meyer, 1999), 70-71. 190 “William Cooper Nell to William Lloyd Garrison,” 19 February 1852; published in The Liberator, 5 March 1852, 39. 69 perhaps influential in the early days of immediatism, thus suggesting that her notions of Black American martyrdom may have had more impact than previously understood. While Stewart did not ultimately become a leading figure of abolition in her time or after, her work nevertheless offers evidence that, despite interracial abolition’s de facto segregation of the suffering of victims and of martyrs,191 Black abolitionists nevertheless were able to begin a long tradition of claiming the martyr status Garrison was previously conferring upon white men as a means of establishing the value and national identity of Black Americans. In addition to serving as a rhetorical weapon within the Garrisonians’ moral suasion arsenal, the ideas and language of martyrdom as a virtuous response to the reality of racist violence harmonized, at least superficially, conflicting perspectives on the role of violence in ending slavery. Stewart’s remixing of the rhetoric of Garrison and Walker demonstrates the plasticity of abolitionist tactics as well as her own agency as a Black, female activist in selectively constructing her own vision for reform, one that insisted upon a place for both women and Black Americans as political and moral leaders. This audacious new vision of Black leadership, embodied by the creative agency of Stewart in the 1830s, is also evident in the rhetoric and ideals of the growing Colored Conventions Movement, which organized for racial justice around the same time as Walker and Garrison were writing. From Suffering to Martyrdom in the Colored Conventions Movement An understudied expression of antebellum Black activism is the Colored Conventions Movement (CCM), which began in 1829 and both grew alongside and was informed by Garrisonian immediatist abolition. Only recently has scholarship paid close attention to the movement, an effort to organize groups of free Northern Black Americans to advocate collectively for the end to slavery and the full 191 See Miller, Cast Down, Ch. 2 70 citizenship rights of their race.192 As P. Gabrielle Foreman points out, though overlooked in scholarship and history, the Colored Conventions were in fact trailblazing innovations of activist organization that predate the dominant, primarily white anti-slavery groups of the antebellum period, and radical white abolitionists often followed the lead of these Black reformers.193 As in the case of Walker’s Appeal, published almost exactly a year before the first convention met, a foundational and motivational aspect of the convention movement was the suffering of the race. The first convention, held in Philadelphia, explained its purpose as a meeting to consider resettlement for Black Americans in Canada as a response to “a series of privations and sufferings” inflicted upon free Black people.194 While small, it was successful, setting the stage for further conventions in the 1830s. The next few annual conventions broadened the scope of the conveners’ aims, and they speak to the role of sympathy for the suffering of the enslaved in spurring the gatherings. The plenary address of the 1833 gathering, delivered by convention president Abraham D. Shadd, made clear that the “spirit of persecution was the cause of our Convention” and stressed the motivational power of sympathy for those in slavery. He goes on to say that the minutes of the event will make apparent “how deeply we sympathize in the distresses of our more unfortunate brethren, and the interest we willingly take, to the extent of our power, to mitigate their sufferings.”195 Shadd’s address also emphasized the motivational 192 The University of Delaware hosts the Colored Conventions Project (CCP), a digital humanities project designed to “bring the buried history of nineteenth-century Black organizing to life” (www.coloredconventions.org/about-conventions, accessed 29 January 2023). Until the CCP published an edited collection of essays in 2021, the only full-length book on the conventions was Howard H. Bell’s 1969 A Survey of the Negro Convention Movement, 1830-1861 (New York: Arno Press, 1969). 193 P. Gabrielle Foreman, “Black Organizing, Print Advocacy, and Collective Authorship: The Long History of the Colored Conventions Movement,” in The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century, ed. P. Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey and Sarah Lynn Patterson (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 28. 194 American Society of Free Persons of Colour (1830: Philadelphia, PA), “Constitution of the American Society of Free Persons of Colour, for improving their condition in the United States; for purchasing lands; and for the establishment of a settlement in upper Canada, also, The Proceedings of the Convention with their Address to Free Persons of Colour in the United States,” Colored Conventions Project Digital Records, accessed February 8, 2023, https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/70. 195 Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Color, Third Annual (1833: Philadelphia, PA), “Minutes and proceedings of the Third annual Convention, for the Improvement of the Free People of Colour in 71 factor of Black suffering for white activists by noting that the presence at the convention of Garrison and other white abolitionists was due to the fact that “[o]ur sufferings have excited their sympathy.”196 In both cases, sympathy for the suffering of Black Americans – both enslaved and free – is read as a motivational factor for convening for the first three national conventions. Additionally, the presence of white activists at the conventions is an important, yet unremarked upon, dimension of understanding their role in antebellum activism. Garrison appeared at both the 1831 and 1832 conventions, but a fund-raising trip to England caused him to miss the 1833 meeting.197 Despite Garrison’s absence, the convention minutes nevertheless evince his strong relationship with the group, as a resolution giving hearty approval of Garrison’s trip overseas was adopted.198 These records demonstrate the congress between Garrison and Colored Conventions organizers as early as 1831, and it is notable that while the language of suffering is present in the first two conventions’ minutes, the rhetoric of martyrdom is not. But the next convention meeting, held in New York in 1834, demonstrates a marked shift in the invocation of the rhetoric of suffering that was almost certainly precipitated by a specific event: In December of 1833, Garrison had convened the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) and enshrined in its Declaration of Sentiments the call to activists to be willing martyrs in the cause of abolition. The fourth annual Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Colour in the United States, held six months later, shows a clear influence of this Garrisonian abolitionist organizing and rhetoric (though Garrison was not in attendance this time, either). For the first time, a Colored Convention adopted a these United States, held by adjournments in the city of Philadelphia, from the 3d to the 13th of June inclusive, 1833.,” Colored Conventions Project Digital Records, accessed February 8, 2023, https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/275, 32. 196 Convention of the People of Color, First Annual (1831: Philadelphia, PA), “Minutes and Proceedings of the First Annual Convention of the People of Colour, held by adjournments in the city of Philadelphia, from the sixth to the eleventh of June, inclusive, 1831.,” Colored Conventions Project Digital Records, accessed February 8, 2023, https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/72, 12, 14. 197 “Minutes and proceedings of the Third annual Convention,” 5. 198 “Minutes and proceedings of the Third annual Convention,” 9. 72 “Declaration of Sentiment,”199 clearly modeling it after that of the AASS; perhaps even more notably, though, in it, the convention goers’ language now engages explicitly with martyrdom: And if our presence in this country will aid in producing such a desirable reform, although we have been reared under a most debasing system of tyranny and oppression, we shall have been born under the most favourable auspices to promote the redemption of the world; for our very sighs and groans, like the blood of martyrs, will prove to have been the seed of the church; for they will freight the air with their voluminous ejaculations, and will be borne upwards by the power of virtue to the great Ruler of Israel, for deliverance from this yoke of merciless bondage.200 This language suggests that the convention attendees have explicitly connected their systematic, race-based suffering to the heaven-moving blood of the martyrs, tying the efficacy of early Christian martyrdom to fortify the church to the suffering Black Americans’ ability to reform the nation through their suffering and attendant appeals for God’s deliverance. This is a slightly different take on martyrdom than Garrison’s, which focuses more on the spectacle of the white martyr’s debasement and willingness to volitionally suffer. The drafters of the Declaration of Sentiment seem to see their suffering as collectively motivational, something more akin to that of Israelites in Exodus, which Eddie Glaude sees as a key theme in the activism of the period and of the rhetoric of the Colored Conventions Movement,201 than to the Foxean activist martyrdom shaping Garrison’s formulation of the concept. But it is important to note that in this same document, the convention goers also demonstrate their agency as actors: Their commitment to martyrdom is not abstract or limited to their unchosen 199 The AASS “Declaration of Sentiments” is plural, while the Colored Convention “Declaration of Sentiment” is singular. 200 Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Color, Fourth Annual (1834: New York, NY), “Minutes of the Fourth Annual Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Colour, in the United States; held by adjournments in the Asbury Church, New York, from the 2nd to the 12th of June, inclusive, 1834,” Colored Conventions Project Digital Records, accessed January 29, 2023, https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/276, 29. Martyrdom language appears in various degrees, though steadily, through the rest of the Conventions, which ran through the 1890s at state and national levels. 201 See Eddie Glaude, Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Glaude argues that Exodean themes inspired concepts of nation for Black Americans of the period, specifically analyzing the CCM of the time for the presence of its language. 73 place within a system of prejudice and subjugation. Later in the Declaration of Sentiment, the convention operationalizes the possibility of chosen martyrdom. The declaration underscores their support of the AASS, who supported immediate abolition, over its rival, the American Colonization Society, which wished to deport Black Americans to Africa. This time, their potential martyrdom is the result of their choice to engage in the specific activist work of the AASS. They declare, “With [the AASS] we will make one common cause, satisfied to await the same issue. With them we are willing to labour for its achievement, and terminate our lives as martyrs, in support of its principles.”202 Such a commitment, its words in direct response to the AASS Declaration of Sentiments, once again demonstrates the convention framers’ close relationship with Garrisonian abolition and illuminates the distinct Black understanding of the role and efficacy of martyrdom in the pursuit of racial justice. The treatment of martyrdom in the convention’s declaration, which was affirmed verbatim again at the 1835 meeting,203 suggests two important things. First, its absence until 1834 again demonstrates that specific martyrdom language was not suffused within the antislavery and Black rights activism of the period before Garrison intentionally cultivated it, first related to his individual suffering and then more widely as an abolitionist aspiration, and enshrined it in the AASS Declaration of Sentiments in 1833. Second, it illuminates the nuances of the Black understanding of martyrdom, as Black Americans seem to have understood their martyrdom as both collective and individual. Their collective martyrdom, often understood in Exodean terms,204 is their suffering as an entire race under the racist system of slavery and oppression, while a second sense of martyrdom encompassed the activist organizing of the free Black Northerners who, like the Garrisonian abolitionists, could choose to 202 “Minutes of the Fourth Annual Convention,” 31. 203 Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Color, Fifth Annual (1835: Philadelphia, PA), “Minutes of the Fifth Annual Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Colour in the United States; Held by Adjournments, in the Wesley Church, Philadelphia; from the first to the fifth of June, inclusive; 1835,” Colored Conventions Project Digital Records, accessed February 8, 2023, https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/277, 22-24. 204 Glaude, Exodus!, esp. 63-81. 74 risk their livelihoods and/or lives for the sake of racial justice. Such a dual understanding of martyrdom is noteworthy because it highlights the agency of Black activists, even within a prejudicial system. Their collective, racial martyrdom was already cosmologically significant in bending the arc of the universe towards freedom and justice,205 while the second dimension of their martyrdom – the ability, like white abolitionists, to opt to risk suffering and death for their activism – fundamentally centers agency and self-determination after the fashion of Maria W. Stewart.206 Though smaller local and state conventions continued to meet, the National Convention of Free People of Colour took a hiatus after the 1835 meeting, resuming nationwide meetings again only in 1843.207 The intervening years had seen both the death of Elijah Lovejoy and its effect in the spread of martyrdom rhetoric, as well as and its efficacy at provoking strong responses from advocates for slavery. It had also seen the fragmenting of Garrisonian abolitionism, but many Black activists took Garrison’s side and committed specifically to his view of abolition. In September of 1838, the Black periodical The National Reformer, helmed by William Whipper, endorsed the AAAS platform from 1833, writing, “With them (the Society) we make common cause; satisfied to await the same issue with them, we are willing to labor for its achievement, and terminate our lives as martyrs in support of its principles…”208 Similarly, the June 7, 1839 issue of The Liberator printed “A Voice from the Colored People of Boston,” a group that passed resolutions in favor of Garrison’s aims and methods, recommending that Black Americans take the approach outlined in The Liberator as their reference for activism.209 205 This collective suffering, described by the 1840s with explicit martyrdom language, harkens back to a similar sentiment in Walker’s Appeal. 206 For a similar reading of agency within respectability politics and racial uplift, see Glaude, Exodus!, 124-125. 207 Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, eds., Proceedings of the Black National and State Conventions, 1865-1900, Vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), xix. The editors note that during this period, the movement lacked “continuity and authority” (xix). 208 William Cooper Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1855), 355-356. 209 “A Voice from the Colored People of Boston,” The Liberator, 7 June 1839, 91. 75 Unsurprisingly, then, the spirit of abolitionist martyrdom seems to persist to the next national convention, itself drawing on themes of martyrdom in its framing. This national convention was convened in August 1843 in Buffalo, New York, with a clear goal that centered American identity: It met “for the purpose of considering [Black Americans’] moral and political condition as American citizens.”210 The frontispiece of the convention minutes sets the tone by centering two stanzas of the abolitionist hymn “On to Victory.” The hymn as published in convention-goer William Wells Brown’s 1848 The Anti-Slavery Harp has eight stanzas,211 and the two chosen to frame the convention are significant: Ours is not the tented field – We no earthly weapons wield – Light and love our sword and shield – Truth our panoply. Onward, then, ye fearless band – Heart to heart and hand to hand – Ours shall be the Christian’s stand, Or the martyr’s grave.212 The selected stanzas are reminiscent of Garrisonian nonviolent abolitionism; indeed, these twinned stanzas evoke similar images as Garrison’s early jail sonnets. Both take great care to depict those struggling for racial equality as nonmilitant Christian reformers who are nevertheless willing to sacrifice their very lives in the pursuit of their goals, and this framework for the 1843 convention is a testament to the consistency in usage of abolitionist martyrdom rhetoric by the 1840s. 210 National Convention of Colored Citizens (1843: Buffalo, NY), “Minutes of the National Convention of Colored Citizens; Held at Buffalo; on the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th of August, 1843; for the purpose of considering their moral and political condition as American citizens.,” Colored Conventions Project Digital Records, accessed 8 February 2023, https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/278, 211 William W. Brown, The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings, Fourth Edition (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1854), 32. 212 “Minutes of the National Convention of Colored Citizens; Held at Buffalo; on the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th of August, 1843.” 76 Black Recognition of White Abolitionist Martyrdom, 1837-1846 In addition to the convention movement’s engagement with martyrdom rhetoric to describe their own commitments and activism, there is also a demonstrable tendency within groups of Black Americans of the period to formally recognize specific white abolitionists as martyrs and honor them collectively. Meeting two weeks after Lovejoy’s death in 1837, a group described simply as the “Coloured Citizens of New York,” similarly to many citizen bodies and anti-slavery societies around the country, adopted a resolution in response to the murder. The resolution contains both martyr language and an explicit affinity with white-organized anti-slavery activism, noting that they agree with the “feelings and views” of the AASS on Lovejoy’s death. But there is still a notable, if slight, difference in language as utilized by the group of Black Americans. Whereas many of the other resolutions responding to Lovejoy’s death opted to downplay or ignore outright the role of abolitionism in his martyrdom in favor of stressing his death in defense of the American principles of free speech and the free press,213 the Coloured Citizens of New York do the opposite, writing that Lovejoy “gave up his life on the 7th of November, in sustaining the liberty of the press and the holy principles of Abolition, to which he was honoured of God to become the first Martyr in this nation.”214 The difference is subtle, but the Black Americans drafting the resolution, clearly influenced by Garrisonian principles, place the “holy principles of Abolition” higher than the American principles to which many others responding to the death of Lovejoy appealed. Furthermore, they explicitly codified him as the first martyr to abolitionism in the nation, tying his death directly to those principles and entwining them with fundamental American identity. Evidence of canonization of white abolitionist martyrs is found in the convention movement, too. The minutes of the 1843 Michigan State Colored Convention, which followed closely on the heels of 213 See Ch. 1 of this dissertation for specific examples of this convention. 214 “Colored Citizens of New York,” in Lovejoy and Lovejoy, Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, 319. 77 that year’s national convention, show that its attendees unanimously adopted a suite of three resolutions acknowledging the sacrifices of white abolitionists. They first resolved to “hold in remembrance” Jabez M. Fitch, whom they write “gave freely, of not only his money, but was willing to sacrifice (what most men prize more dearly), his personal popularity” in the cause of abolitionism. The second resolution lauds the efforts of Michiganders who are “willing to be called Abolitionists, despite the sneers and the ridicule of men.” The third and final resolution calls out the proof of abolitionist goodwill as evidenced by the death of Lovejoy, as well as the motivational power of his death to eventually end slavery: Resolved, that in the self-denying life and martyr death of Lovejoy, we have the gratifying assurance that American Abolitionists are to be found who prove their faith by their works, and who are willing, if need be, to sacrifice worldly goods, and life itself, in the cause of the oppressed slave; and as the blood of the martyrs has heretofore proved to be the seed of the church, we trust the day is not far distant when the blood of Lovejoy may cry from the ground, and the millions now in slavery shall shout their jubilee song of deliverance from the bondage which oppresses them.215 The three resolutions at the 1843 convention suggest some dissension within the Black activist community about the role of white people in the fight for racial justice. The third resolution appeals to Lovejoy’s death as the “gratifying assurance” that abolitionists are willing to actually back up their words and beliefs with actions, and in context with the other two resolutions, the unspoken accusation is that white people are not always useful in the fight to end slavery. Through these resolutions, the Michigan convention goes out of its way to argue for the value of white allies to Black activism, even reaching back six years to the death of Lovejoy to do so. In doing so, it also underscores the potential for white suffering and martyrdom as a ticket into Black activism – quite the opposite of what Miller describes as a 215 State Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of Michigan (1843: Detroit, MI), “Minutes of the State Convention, of the Colored Citizens of the State of Michigan, Held in the City of Detroit on the 26th and 27th of October, 1843 for the Purpose of Considering Their Moral & Political Condition, as Citizens of the State,” Colored Conventions Project Digital Records, accessed February 8, 2023, https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/245. 78 sacrifice that “allows white men to ventriloquize a suffering black voice.”216 Such a reading reaffirms the agency shown by Black antebellum activists in determining who and what were invited into their work, reframing the traditional reading of the centrality of white male abolitionists in antebellum antislavery activism and concurring with Sinha’s views of the radical nature of Black abolitionism.217 A few years later, when Underground Railroad conductor Charles Turner Torrey died in Baltimore while imprisoned for “slave-stealing,” Black Americans responded thoroughly to his martyrdom, too, again stressing the suffering of Torrey as a sacrifice on behalf of Black people. Lovejoy’s brother, Joseph, both eulogized Torrey as the second abolitionist martyr and published his memoir; in it, he stresses the participation of Boston’s Black community in Torrey’s memorial: “The colored people thronged in great numbers to pay the last tribute of respect to one who had suffered so much for their kinsmen according to the flesh.”218 The memorializing of Torrey continued after the funeral, and within a few months of his death, a collection of Black leaders had raised enough money to erect a monument to Torrey at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts,219 which reads, “The friends of the American Slave erect this stone in his memory as a Martyr for Liberty.”220 As happened in the response to Lovejoy’s death, too, public bodies passed resolutions responding to the death of Torrey. The “colored citizens of Oberlin” (Ohio), led by Sabram B. Cox and Lawrence R. Minor, convened on May 28, 1846 “to express their deep sense of the worth of the lamented Torrey, and to improve the occasion in a manner suggested by his martyrdom.”221 The group unanimously adopted six resolutions regarding Torrey’s death, and the language they use suggests several things about their perspective on race, death and martyrdom. 216 Miller, Cast Down, 105. 217 Sinha, “An Alternative Tradition of Radicalism,” 10. 218 Lovejoy, Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey, 294. 219 Torrey, The Martyrdom of Abolitionist Charles Torrey, 165-166. 220 Mt. Auburn Cemetery, “Charles Turner Torrey Monument,” accessed 10 February 2023, https://www.mountauburn.org/torrey-monument/. 221 Lovejoy, Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey, 322. 79 First, the group describes themselves as “disfranchised Americans,” suffering similarly but separately from enslaved people. They explicitly delineate that they “are identified not only with thousands who with us are disfranchised, but with three millions of our brethren in bonds,”222 indicating that Black Americans of the time saw distinct categories of prejudicial suffering. In a fairly standardized and routine way, other resolutions also affirm Torrey’s effort and sympathize with his widow and children, then censure the Maryland governor who refused clemency to Torrey. But the third resolution is illuminating in offering both a brief abolitionist martyrology and demonstrating the group’s views about the efficacy of martyrdom. The Oberlin citizens lay out their martyrs, noting their sympathy for the sufferings of Alanson Work, James T. Burr, and George Thompson, who were imprisoned for the previous several years in Missouri for aiding fugitive enslaved people;223 the “noble stand and noble fall” of Lovejoy; Walker’s branded hand; and, finally, Torrey’s “glorious martyr-death.” They declaim the “utter disregard of the rights of humanity” in these sufferings, but “rejoice to see the crisis of our cause approaching, and the dawning of a brighter day which will surely follow.”224 Like the 1833 convention goers described above, the group clearly sees the sufferings of these martyrs as a teleological necessity in the fight for freedom, but they also see the necessity of their own action, committing to imitate the “spirit which actuated Mr. Torrey and his coadjutors” and pledging to “stand firmly in the conflict until death.” They seal their commitment to being held publicly accountable to their promise by also voting that their resolutions be published in more than 10 influential newspapers around the country, including Garrison’s Liberator.225 222 Lovejoy, Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey, 323. 223 For more on Work, Burr, and Thompson, see George Thompson, Prison Life and Reflections, 1847. See also “Three Abolition Martyrs,” The New York Times, 28 July 1879, 3.; accessed 11 February 2023, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1879/07/28/80693884.html?pageNumber=3. 224 Lovejoy, Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey, 323-324. 225 Lovejoy, Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey, 324. 80 The above examples demonstrate a strong response to white abolitionist martyrdom among antebellum Black Americans. But whereas Garrison’s initial conception of abolitionist martyrdom was about convincing other white people of the rightness of the abolitionists’ cause, it is evident that Black Americans experienced it differently, seeing white individuals’ suffering for Black rights as both a worthy personal sacrifice on behalf of Black people and a qualifying action for establishing allyship. Furthermore, with the rise of martyrdom in abolitionist activism more widely, Black activists saw the suffering of their race as a type of collective martyrdom that would cosmically hasten the progress towards freedom. Both of these uses of martyrdom rhetoric speak to Rael’s understanding of Northern Black activism as reappropriating of the ideals of antebellum society,226 in this case reinterpreting even the themes of other antislavery activists in reimagining white abolitionist language and imagery. They would continue to do so with the creation of Crispus Attucks as the first American martyr, a feat of Black activist rhetoric that would be culturally and politically influential for more than 100 years after its inception. The Resurrection of Crispus Attucks: Black/American/Martyr Crispus Attucks was one of five men killed in the 1770 Boston Massacre, the event credited with sparking the American Revolution. Though little about him is definitively known, descriptions from as early as 1770 suggest he was non-white and likely of mixed Black and Native American ancestry.227 Attucks is referenced in the hubbub around the coverage of the event and the trial of the British soldiers who fired into the crowd, but while the event itself persisted in cultural parlance,228 Attucks seems to have disappeared from American memory not long after his death – a lacuna for which no satisfactory explanation yet exists. Of Attucks, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. notes, “Curiously, Attucks seems to have been 226 Rael, Black Identity & Black Protest, 3, 282. 227 Mitchell Kachun, First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 8-9. 228 Kachun, First Martyr of Liberty, 17-21. 81 forgotten for the next eighty years [after his death],”229 while Mitchell Kachun, author of the definitive text on Attucks in American memory, writes that between 1770 and 1839, “both African Americans and white abolitionists ignored Attucks completely, even when they referred to the massacre.”230 On the one hand, Attucks’s omission from the cultural record is not necessarily puzzling – diligently memorializing a non-white, non-elite participant in an event that was ultimately utilized propagandistically would have been more surprising than ignoring him completely. But when put into context with his overwhelming influence in Black politics and culture beginning in the 1850s, Attucks’s 80-year absence is much more perplexing. As Kachun notes, “The post-1840s revitalization of Attucks makes the absolute silence about him prior to 1839 all the more intriguing and raises questions about why Attucks was not used as a symbol of black citizenship during the years of the early republic.”231 I contend that the question is actually not why Attucks was absent from the historical record, but why he was suddenly present in the 1850s and beyond. A partial explanation for Attucks’s appearance in the 1850s may be found in Benjamin Quarles’s discussion of the roots of Black history. Quarles contends that in the antebellum period, racial justice activists were contending with the charge that Black Americans had an “unworthy past” and a history without achievement, and he observes that the two rhetorical approaches used to combat this accusation were denials and data-based refutations.232 In this context, the reappearance of Attucks in the cultural conversation makes some sense: He was invoked to demonstrate Black valor at the earliest part of the American fight for freedom, a rhetorical tactic that certainly counters accusations of an unworthy past. Tavia Nyong’o concurs, noting that the function of the “black first” icon was to correct 229 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 30. 230 Kachun, First Martyr of Liberty, 39. 231 Kachun, First Martyr of Liberty, 42. 232 Benjamin Quarles, “Black History’s Antebellum Origins,” in African-American Activism before the Civil War, ed. Patrick Rael (New York: Taylor & Frances, 2008), 78. 82 the historical record and “protest the exclusion of blacks from the story of progress.”233 Nyong’o sees Attucks and his attendant imagery as key to integrating the “counterhistory of black Americans back into the common story of American identity.”234 However, adding to these interpretations, I contend that the heretofore overlooked necessary condition for the resurgence of Attucks is actually the martyrdom rhetoric initially promoted by white abolitionists. No matter how little was known of the historical Attucks – or perhaps because so little was known – his death could easily be framed in a way that aligned with the American martyrdom celebrated in the antebellum period, now endowing a Black American with the virtues and Americanness associated with previous abolitionist martyrs like Lovejoy and Torrey. Attucks became a touchstone of Black culture precisely because the rhetorical vehicle that allowed his death to be framed as motivational was appropriated by Black antebellum activists to argue for the race’s worthiness of freedom and full American citizenship. Released into a cultural context primed for valuing the American identity of martyrs, the “Crispus Attucks, First Martyr” presentation was more powerful than the simple history of a man could ever be, and it did pioneering work in bringing a Black American into the categories of martyrdom – and citizenship – previously not open to the race. The strongest supporting evidence for the influence of Garrisonian abolitionist martyrdom on the construction and promulgation of the Attucks martyr narrative is that Attucks’s chief champion in the antebellum period was William Cooper Nell, a Black Bostonian abolitionist and close ally of Garrison’s. As a young man, Nell was likely an apprentice to Garrison in the early days of The Liberator,235 and he began exploring the history of the life and death of Attucks in the 1840s. An 1841 233 Tavia Nyong’o, “‘The Black First’: Crispus Attucks and William Cooper Nell,” in Slavery/Antislavery in New England, Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (Boston: Boston University, 2003), 142. 234 Nyong’o, “‘The Black First,’” 144. 235 Patrick T. J. Browne, “‘To Defend Mr. Garrison”: William Cooper Nell and the Personal Politics of Antislavery,” The New England Quarterly Vol. 70, no. 3 (September 1997): 416. 83 letter from Nell to Wendell Phillips, which Kachun tallies as the second reference to Attucks by a Black American, demonstrates that Nell was interested in finding out more about Attucks’s biography,236 but it is important to note that Nell is not yet applying the title of “martyr” to him.237 Nell continued collecting biographical information about Attucks, and it clearly influenced his activism. The “Declaration of Sentiments of the Colored Citizens of Boston on the Fugitive Slave Bill,” published in the October 11, 1850 edition of The Liberator, seems to be the earliest reference to Attucks as a martyr whose sacrifice argued for freedom and equality for Black Americans. The group, of which Nell is listed as a secretary, appealed to the revolutionary sensibilities of the American founders when faced with the likelihood of being “deprived of God-given liberty,” then noting the historical fact that “the first martyr in the attack on residents was a colored man, Crispus Attucks by name, who fell in State Street on the 5th of March, 1770.”238 Within a year, Nell’s crusade to center Attucks as a Black American martyr had hit its stride; in 1851, he both petitioned (unsuccessfully) the Massachusetts Legislature to erect a monument to Attucks, explicitly calling him “the first martyr of the American Revolution,”239 and published the pamphlet Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812.240 A few years later, he published the influential Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855); situated as they 236 Kachun, First Martyr of Liberty, 41-43. 237 In A Faithful Account of the Race, Stephen G. Hall misquotes this letter, reporting that Nell wrote, “I have been unable to find much of the history of Attucks, the first martyr in the revolutionary conflict” (98); the letter does not actually use the word “martyr” at all. Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Kachun’s transcription of the manuscript is correct: “I have been unable to find out much of the History of Attucks. Botta contains an allusion to him as the first who fell in liberty’s cause…” (41). William Cooper Nell to Wendell Phillips, 15 April 1841, Phillips, Wendell, 1811-1884. Wendell Phillips papers,1555-1882 (inclusive),1833-1881 (bulk). MS Am 1953 (924). Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 238 “Declaration of Sentiments of the Colored Citizens of Boston on the Fugitive Slave Bill,” The Liberator, 11 October 1850, 162. See also Kachun, First Martyr of Liberty, 49 and Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 197-198. 239 Petition reprinted in William Cooper Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1855), 14. 240 William Cooper Nell, Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812 (Boston: Prentiss & Sawyer, 1851), 1. 84 were within the developing genre of Black historiography,241 these texts provide insights into race, martyrdom and national identity in the antebellum period. Crispus Attucks and Antebellum Black Historiography Laurie Maffly-Kipp contends that as early as their arrival in America, enslaved Africans began the work of reconstructing their history, and that by the nineteenth century, these historical accounts formed prolifically within a “rich and varied Afro-Christian culture” that, in addition to its African origins, was “anchored in a Protestant bedrock.” 242 She sees a complex web of overlapping identities at the center of the creation of Black history, centering race and religion within emerging Black history and historiography. This identity-based context, coupled with the proliferation of Black publishing by the 1840s and 1850s, gave Black Americans “usable histories that anchored them as both African and American.”243 Similarly, Stephen G. Hall sees this emerging Black history as revolutionary, noting that the 1850s as a time when Black historians like Nell offered their own “counternarrative” to American history, highlighting Black service in the American Revolution “in order to remind the nation of its unpaid debt, the guarantee of freedom and citizenship.”244 He further argues that Nell, in particular, functioned to both create an explicitly Black history and to “use that history to intervene in and contribute to contemporary debates about the failures and future of democracy.”245 These descriptions of the historical setting of Nell’s work suggest a context in which racial, religious, and national identity – 241 For further discussion of Nell and works’ reach within the Black community, see Claire Parfait, “Early African American Historians: A Book History and Historiography Approach – The Case of William Cooper Nell (1816-1874),” in Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America, ed. Cécile Cottenet (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014), 29-50. 242 Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 3. 243 Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down, 7, 10-11; 63. 244 Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race, 96. 245 Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race, 97. 85 and their relationship to reform – were key. Crispus Attucks, described by Nell through the lens of the period’s martyrdom, captures all of those intersectional identities in a rhetorically efficacious way. Nell opens Services of Colored Americans with his unsuccessful petition to the Massachusetts Legislature, which sought to memorialize Attucks as the “first martyr in the Boston Massacre.” He then describes the scene of the massacre thoroughly by quoting from historian Charles Botta’s account in History of the War of the Independence of the United States of America (1820), the only extant description of the incident at the time that included Attucks. But Nell’s primary aim here is not actually the reconstruction of history; instead, he sets about to defend Attucks from a contemporary attack, referencing the Boston Transcript’s March 7, 1851 disparagement of Nell’s attempt to erect a statue to Attucks. In it, the newspaper accused Attucks of being a seditionist who would have deserved hanging had he lived. Nell’s retort is twofold: He first appeals to the reverencing of the 1770 massacre martyrs by founding fathers like John Hancock, then says that the disparagement leveled at Attucks is “the best evidence of their merits and strongest claim on our gratitude.” The apex of Nell’s argument, though, brings history to the present, explicitly placing Attucks within the present day as an example of the denial of justice to Black Americans. Of his failed petition to the legislature, he writes that it was to be expected –“if we accept the axiom that a Colored man never gets Justice done him in the United States, except by mistake. The petitioners only asked for that Justice, and that the name of Crispus Attucks be surrounded with the same emblems constantly appropriated by a grateful country to other gallant Americans.”246 This is a neat rhetorical trick: Attucks the martyr, with all the glory that title should accord, is being ill-treated in the present in the very same way as his fellow Black Americans. Thus, Nell creates a timeless martyr Attucks whose imagery is efficacious in the contemporary struggle for racial justice, and he would continue to draw on that image in his future activism. 246 Nell, Services of Colored Americans, 5-7. 86 Hall notes that there are no extant records that offer information about the sales or popularity of Services of Colored Americans, but it is known Nell issued a second edition in 1852.247 His most influential work, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, was much longer and was published in 1855. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s introduction to the text demonstrates both Nell’s closeness to Northeastern abolitionism and how history can motivate the present. She writes that the text should serve two purposes – first to give “new self-respect and confidence” to Black Americans, and then to convince white people of Black Americans’ worthiness of rights due to their “generosity, disinterested courage, and bravery.”248 Such a statement underscores the multivalent nature of texts such as this that served both Black and white audiences, both of whom had different motivations, contexts, and needs. Nell again begins his work with Attucks, this time using imagery to set the tone by including a frontispiece captioned, “Crispus Attucks, the First Martyr of the American Revolution, King (now State) Street, Boston, March 5th, 1770.”249 It centers on Attucks, distinctively of a darker complexion than everyone else in the image, peaceful in death while a comrade reaches out to stop the firing of the British soldiers. The soldiers are presented as a stony-faced, unbroken line of violence, while the Americans scramble to halt the assault as smoke billows from the muskets facing them. In both image and caption, Attucks is clearly presented as a classical martyr, his body peaceful in the midst of the chaos that surrounds him. Strikingly, the image omits any suggestion of the Americans as the aggressors; the only weapons in sight are the coordinated and deadly line of bayoneted British muskets, seeming to fire on command as an intentional act of harm rather than the unfortunate result of a chaotic scrum. 247 Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race, 99. Claire Parfait infers through indirect evidence that Nell’s works were not widely read in the Black community at the time in “Early African American Historians: A Book History and Historiography Approach – The Case of William Cooper Nell (1816-1874),” in Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America, ed. Cécile Cottenet (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014), 29-50. 248 Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Introduction,” in Nell, Colored Patriots, 5-6. 249 Nell, Colored Patriots, frontispiece. 87 Moving from the imagery of Attucks to the written word, Nell quotes extensively from his earlier pamphlet, highlighting again his efforts to get Massachusetts to memorialize Attucks and again quoting from Botta. Again, he utilizes the image of Attucks-as-martyr to comment on the present, but whereas in the Services of Colored Americans Nell used Attucks’s death, presented as a glorious martyrdom, to argue against injustice generally, in Colored Patriots he uses it to speak specifically to the cases of Thomas Sims (1851) and Anthony Burns (1854), two fugitive enslaved men who were extradited from Boston to the South under 1850’s Fugitive Slave Act. Nell is outraged that such events should happen “over the very ground that Attucks trod,”250 and he is not alone. He prints several references to the site of Attucks’s death being the very place through which the fugitives were marched – all statements from white men sympathetic to the antislavery cause. He quotes Anson Burlingame’s Faneuil Hall speech of October 13, 1852, in which Burlingame decries the event due to its physical location within a city that fought for freedom. Burlingame describes the men capturing Sims and Burns as creeping along “over the ground wet with the blood of CRISPUS ATTUCKS, the noble colored man, who fell in King [S]treet before the muskets of tyranny, away in the dawn of our Revolution.” Nell also cites the abolitionist newspaper the Worcester Spy as saying that thousands viewed Burns being led away to slavery “over the spot where Hancock stood and ATTUCKS fell” and quotes Theodore Parker’s description of the site as the spot “where the negro blood of CHRISTOPHER [sic] ATTUCKS stained the ground.” Finally, he quotes Charles Sumner as describing the place where the men were carried away as being that which “was first moistened with the American blood in resisting slavery, and among the first victims was a colored person.”251 This roundup offers some insights into both the cultural relevance of Attucks and the raced dimensions of martyrdom at the time. First, it seems clear that by the early 1850s, Attucks was known 250 Nell, Colored Patriots, 18. See also Nyong’o, 146-147. 251 Nell, Colored Patriots, 19. See also Kachun, First Martyr of Liberty, 50-51. 88 and referenced as an important figure within Boston’s interracial antislavery circles. But it is notable that in these early years, he was not yet widely seen as a “martyr”: While Nell consistently refers to Attucks with that specific terminology by the early 1850s, none of the white speakers referring to him in Colored Patriots apply martyr language, opting for words like “noble” and “victim” instead. This distinction again underscores the initially white-coded nature of abolitionist martyrdom in the antebellum period. Per Kachun, though, within a few short years, Attucks was viewed by Black and white activists alike as a martyr.252 As Stephen Kantrowitz notes, Nell’s “rehabilitation” of Attucks, coupled with a focus on the tradition of Black military valor and the assistance of fugitive enslaved people, “worked a profound change in the relationship between black activists and their white allies.”253 Crispus Attucks in Antislavery Activism This shift was almost certainly the direct result of the continued organizing of Black activists to center Attucks as a key martyr figure after the fashion of abolitionist martyrdom – but one with an distinct and emphatic American flavor. One such example is the first Crispus Attucks Commemoration organized by Nell and held March 5, 1858. Again, activists drew on rich traditions but tweaked them for their present needs; as Marcus Wood points out, such a celebration was a part of a “long-standing performative tradition in which African-Americans had created their own historical agendas for formal celebration.”254 Importantly, this event was another instance of Black activists using history to advocate for justice in the present, as it was held in response to the Dred Scott decision the year prior.255 The festival suggests a wide knowledge of Attucks as a historical figure, at least within Boston, as is evidenced by the performance of the “Attucks Glee Club” and the presentation of scrupulously collected 252 Kachun, First Martyr of Liberty, 48. 253 Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom, 221. 254 Wood, Blind Memory, 250. See also Mitch Kachun, “From Forgotten Founder to Indispensable Icon: Crispus Attucks, Black Citizenship, and Collective Memory, 1770-1865,” in Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 29, no. 2 (Summer 2009), 284. 255 Wood, Blind Memory, 252, image 5.24. 89 artifacts said to have been connected with him.256 The event itself is an excellent example of creative activist reappropriation, and the associated images depicting Attucks were also fertile ground for reimagination. Paul Revere’s 1770 propagandistic engraving of the Boston Massacre, which Wood calls “the most influential and sensational political print in the history of the American graphic tradition,” had originally listed Attucks among the dead but depicted only white men in the image. When Revere’s engraving was used to publicize the Attucks commemoration, organizers corrected the racial composition of the tableau, giving the scene’s central figure, reclining in the arms of a comrade after being shot by a British soldier, a Black face.257 The development over time of martyr language around Attucks in both white and Black circles suggests some important takeaways: First, the language of martyrdom was not applied broadly and without consideration in the period; second, that Nell in the 1850s was undertaking the same kind of intentional martyr construction as did his mentor Garrison in the early 1830s. While Garrison’s innovation was to bring the weighty significance of martyr rhetoric to his abolitionist cause, as discussed in the previous chapter, it was distinctively raced: Abolitionist martyrs were almost exclusively white men – Stewart’s self-conception the conspicuous and audacious exception that proves the rule – with the implicit ability to choose to renounce their privilege in support of the antislavery movement. Nell’s innovation was consistently and publicly applying this language to a Black American, elevating his character and imbuing him with the positive connotations of citizenship and national identity that Black activists sought. Importantly, despite the race of the martyr, volition was still key to martyrdom, ruling out the title from being applied to the enslaved; Attucks is consistently presented as in control of his actions and in possession of the option to choose to risk his safety and life in defense of the country for which he died. 256 Wood, Blind Memory, 251; Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race, 103-104; Kachun, First Martyr of Liberty, 56-57. 257 Wood, Blind Memory, 255. 90 Strikingly, this description persisted even when in 1859 Nell seems to have found evidence that Attucks was once enslaved. A letter from Nell printed in the August 5, 1859 edition of The Liberator illustrates the author’s dual commitment to uncovering the historical Attucks while at the same time continuing to adapt his story and image to suit abolitionist aims. The headline provided by the newspaper is “Crispus Attucks Once a Slave in Massachusetts,” and the letter seems to imply that Nell had just recently uncovered the possibility that Attucks had escaped from slavery. He writes to Garrison that Charles H. Morse, a collector of material from the early republic, had given him a copy of the November 20, 1750 Boston Gazette and Weekly Journal that contained an advertisement asking for aid in the recovery of an escaped enslaved man named Crispus. Using this information, Nell connects Attucks’s desire for freedom from slavery with his putative zeal for American freedom from Britain, writing, “It seems that Crispus was imbued with the spirit of liberty in thus declaring independence of his master.” He then describes Attucks as “being the first martyr (though a slave) in the struggle which resulted in liberty to these United States – securing to them the boon they have denied to his race.”258 Such a statement provides some insights into conceptions of martyrdom and race at the time. First, the “first martyr (though a slave)” phrasing supports my reading of the category antebellum martyrdom as initially limited to free white men, or at least those with the volitional capability of choosing to suffer. Second, it ties together questions of freedom from slavery and freedom from colonial rule. While the discovery that he may have been enslaved could have undermined Nell’s careful construction of Attucks as a Black, American martyr, Nell rhetorically turns the potential detriment into an even stronger case for the abolition of slavery and the primacy of Attucks as America’s first (Black) martyr. Reading the presentation of Attucks as a Black, American martyr within the context of Garrisonian abolitionist martyrdom rhetoric allows for an understanding of Black activists’ intentional 258 William Cooper Nell, “Crispus Attucks Once a Slave in Massachusetts,” The Liberator, 5 August 1859, 124. 91 construction of this figure and of what, to the audience of the time, “martyrdom” connoted. While Sinha calls it an “irony of history that one of the first martyrs of the American Revolution was an Afro-Indian sailor and runaway slave,”259 I contend that Attucks’s identity was no irony at all, but reflective of an intentional choice by savvy Black antebellum activists transforming established rhetoric to argue for their race’s right to claim American citizenship and rights. Similarly, Kachun sees “the Crispus Attucks who emerged in the late antebellum period” as a “shrewd construction” playing a key role in Black Americans’ “affirmation of their essential Americanness.”260 Nell and his antebellum compatriots were successful in this creation; the throughline of Attucks in Black political and cultural spaces from the antebellum period all the way into the late 21st century underscores his centrality to both racial and national identity, as Kachun has ably demonstrated in his work.261 Conclusion: The Martyrs of Harper’s Ferry Less than three months after Nell wrote Garrison about Attucks’s likely former enslavement, John Brown was sentenced to death for his Harpers Ferry raid, becoming for many abolitionists the era’s martyr par excellence – and enjoying that status among Black Americans for decades hence.262 Both Brown himself and his supporters embraced his role as a martyr, with the month he spent in prison between his sentencing and death providing nearly endless opportunities for discussions of his sacrifice and impending martyrdom.263 And yet Attucks was not supplanted from his role as the first American martyr: Even responses to the sensational martyrdom associated with Brown’s raid were in dialogue 259 Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 34. 260 Kachun, “From Forgotten Founder to Indispensable Icon,” 285. 261 Kachun, First Martyr of Liberty. 262 For a thorough overview of primary sources, see Benjamin Quarles, Blacks on John Brown (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1972). 263 See especially Paul Finkelman, “Manufacturing Martyrdom: The Antislavery Response to John Brown’s Raid,” in His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid, ed. Paul Finkelman (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 41-61. 92 with the legacy of Attucks, representing the deaths at Harper’s Ferry as next steps in the struggle for freedom that began with America’s fight for independence. In a November 19, 1859 meeting for the aid of Brown’s family at Boston’s Tremont Temple, white abolitionist Jacob Merrill Manning of Old South Church explicitly compared the case of Attucks to that of Brown, seeing the death of Attucks as the necessary antecedent to the end of colonial rule in the same way that he sees Brown’s impending death and its impact as essential to the end of slavery. In alignment with the ethic of abolitionist martyrdom previously established and promulgated in the Northeast, Manning recognizes martyrdom’s motivational power and contends that future generations “will say that from the time when John Brown swung between heaven and earth, we may date the beginning of the end of American slavery.” Notably, race still stood at the center of questions of sacrifice and martyrdom; in comparing the cases of Attucks and Brown, Manning pointed out that “[t]hen it was a black man sacrificing his life in behalf [sic] of oppressed white men. Here it is a white man sacrificing his life in behalf of enslaved black men.”264 Attucks sacralized the deaths of the Black members of Brown’s raiding party, as well. In an April 1860 speech delivered in Toronto, Osborne P. Anderson, a Black Canadian who participated in the Harper’s Ferry raid, calls Dangerfield Newby, a formerly enslaved man who was first to die in the fray, the “second Attucks in the cause of freedom” and “the first man whose blood was spilled to cleanse the soil of that country from the stain of slavery – the first martyr to liberty.” Anderson’s description of Newby’s sacrifice is equal parts eyewitness and visionary, underscoring both the volitionality and the religious deserts of the martyrdom he describes: “I saw him offer up his life, and was by his side during his dying moments, until his spirit leaped from its earthly tenement to the world on high; and tonight he is seated on the right hand of God, in the full enjoyment of that great blessing for which he died – 264 “Meeting in Aid of the Family of John Brown,” The Liberator, 25 November 1859, 186. 93 liberty.”265 When Anderson self-published his book-length account of the raid in 1861, he again connected the shedding of first blood by a Black man to Attucks’s death in the American Revolution and notes that Black people were “well represented by numbers, both in the fight, and in the number who suffered martyrdom afterward.”266 Such responses to the Harper’s Ferry raid and its aftermath represent a microcosm of the time’s understanding of martyrdom and its relationship to race and national identity, and they stand at the end of a long road of rhetorical effort by both Black and white abolitionists. By Brown’s death in December of 1859, not yet two decades had passed since Garrison began to draw on themes of Christian suffering and martyrdom to contextualize his abolitionist activism and call others to action, and less than ten years had elapsed since Nell set about to create Attucks as a Black, American martyr whose sacrifice lay at the very foundation of the American republic. But within that short period, martyrdom language and imagery had grown to be understood by many Northerners as tied to fundamental republican truths and values. Osborne’s published version of events at Harper’s Ferry concludes with a dirge sung at a December 1859 meeting in Concord, Massachusetts that explicitly underscores this connection, depicting Brown as inspired by both “The Pilgrim Fathers’ earnest creed/Virginia’s ancient faith” and “Jehovah’s law” and urged on by “Great Washington’s indignant shade” and “the voice of Jefferson.” The hymn closes with an explicit description of Brown as a martyr and a reaffirmation of the promise of God’s justice and deliverance: But now the faithful martyr dies, His brave heart beats no more, His soul ascends the equal skies, His earthly course is o’er. For this we mourn, but not for him – 265 “Speech by Osborne P. Anderson, Delivered at the Coloured Regular Baptist Church, Toronto, Canada West, 9 April 1860,” in C. Peter Ripley, et al., eds., Black Abolitionist Papers (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 427-429. 266 Osborne P. Anderson, A Voice from Harper’s Ferry: A Narrative of Events at Harper’s Ferry; with Incidents Prior and Subsequent to Its Capture by Captain Brown and His Men (Boston: O.P. Anderson, 1861), 60. 94 Like him in God we trust; And though our eyes with tears are dim, We know that God is just.267 As these examples have demonstrated, using as a starting point the de facto white ethic of abolitionist martyrdom nurtured in the antebellum period, antebellum Black activists began a practice of claiming the mantle of martyrdom for their race’s collective and individual suffering. By doing so, Black activists began a tradition of American martyrdom in the pursuit of racial justice that would factor into activism for more than a century thereafter. Whether the spark of daring that inspired Maria W. Stewart to consider her potential suffering an act of martyrdom, the complex interplay of ideas among the conveners of the Colored Convention Movement or the tireless work of William Cooper Nell to frame Crispus Attucks as a Black, American martyr, these rhetorical innovations – and their attendant claims of power and citizenship rights – would allow for further empowerment of Black figures as Black Americans and their allies sought racial justice during the tumult of the coming civil war and the racist backlash to Emancipation. 267 “Dirge, Sung at a Meeting in Concord, Mass., Dec. 2, 1859,” in Anderson, A Voice from Harper’s Ferry, 72. 95 Chapter 3 The Valor and Value of Black Americans in the Historiography of the Late Nineteenth Century As the Civil War loomed, the martyrdom rhetoric originally invoked by Garrisonian immediatist abolitionists had contributed to the creation of two larger-than-life martyr figures in the minds of Black Americans and their allies: Crispus Attucks, a relatively unknown victim of the 1775 Boston Massacre who had been intentionally promoted by William Cooper Nell as an exemplary Black man and an exemplary American, and John Brown, who had spent his final month of life explicitly depicting himself in martyrial terms.268 Both figures were directly connected to the ethic of abolitionist martyrdom cultivated in the antebellum Northeast, and both remained influential for decades to come. Martyrs invested meaning into the suffering of those pursuing freedom and equality and established the moral authority of the socially and structurally weaker reformers, and as the country cycled through the upheaval of war and the resurgent anti-Black violence of failed Reconstruction, martyrdom rhetoric expanded alongside the increasing significance of Black print culture and evolved responsively to continuing and new challenges to freedom and equality. This chapter examines martyrdom in the Black historiography of the 1860s to 1890s, arguing that, as a result of the intellectual efforts of Black authors who followed Nell’s lead, the martyrology initially created by antebellum abolitionists developed into a proto-uplift understanding of martyrdom as an argument for the capability and merit of the Black race, and thus Black Americans’ worthiness of full citizenship. In support of this vision, Black authors of the postbellum era greatly expanded the ranks 268 Explicitly blending Christian and republican martyrdom in the figure of Brown, James Redpath described the martyr in 1860 as “the latest and our greatest martyr to the teachings of the Bible and the American Idea.” Redpath, The Public Life of Capt. John Brown (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860). On Brown in Black American memory, see Benjamin Quarles’s book Blacks on Brown, which collects Black American statements on Brown from the antebellum period to the late nineteenth century. Benjamin Quarles, Blacks on John Brown (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1972). On John Brown in memory, see R. Blakeslee Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives! America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality and Change (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 96 of race martyrs into two distinct categories: previous race heroes whose stories accreted new martyrdom language and imagery, and new martyrs, increasingly described via the language and imagery of martyrdom for their individual acts of courage and bravery amid racist violence. Martyrs were now not only those from days of yore who fought for republican freedom, like Attucks, or white allies who sacrificed to end slavery (again, to many, in the name of republican freedom), like Brown, Elijah Lovejoy and Abraham Lincoln; in this period they were also newly and increasingly Black, conveying a clear sense of both the worthiness of the race and the significance and meaning of Black lives in America. Ultimately, the martyrdom language of this period both aptly highlights the systemic oppression of Black Americans in the post-Emancipation world – what Eric Sundquist calls “a new slavery of racism and economic oppression”269 – and demonstrates the agency inherent to Black Americans’ visions of themselves and their future. The rhetoric of this era’s emerging Black print culture was certainly an heir of the ethic of abolitionist martyrdom, which was itself also deeply informed by precepts of evangelical Christianity – particularly a widespread theological understanding of history as divinely ordained and bound for improvement. As Clarence Walker notes, both Black and white evangelical Protestants of this period “believed that history was progressive and God was history’s prime mover. They also saw themselves as being elect, chosen, and covenanted with God to effect his purposes for the world.”270 The historical developments of the late nineteenth century – most notably Emancipation – certainly underscored this perception, and, as many scholars have argued, the Black print culture of the nineteenth century was thoroughly religious. Francis Smith Foster, Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Benjamin Fagan have all outlined the 269 Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), 2. 270 Clarence E. Walker, “The American Negro as a Historical Outsider,” pp. 87-101 in Deromanticizing Black History: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 91. 97 mutually reinforcing connections between the Protestant Black church,271 the Black press, and notions of identity and citizenship;272 Foster argues that overlooking the religious dimension of the era’s Black writing “creates distinctions between religion and politics, economics, art, and education that did not exist” for Black Americans in the nineteenth century.273 Maffly-Kipp writes that by the end of the century, “for at least some African-American Protestants, conceptions of race, religion, and national identity were indistinguishable: the notion of the ‘African race’ had been sacralized and understandings of national identity and purpose integrated into a sacred saga of emancipation, redemption and salvation.”274 The rhetoric of martyrdom in the Black press of this period reinforces all of these strands that made up Black American culture and activism in the late nineteenth century. In this blended context of activism and belief, martyrdom in the pursuit of freedom was both an argument for equality – if Black Americans could be martyrs, their personhood was the same as that of white Americans – and a cosmological motivator of progress towards a more just and equal society. As the new century neared, Black minister P. Thomas Stanford summarized this perspective in his reflection on the deaths of Brown and Lincoln in The Tragedy of the Negro in America (1897): [Lincoln] was a martyr, whose death sealed and made secure the glorious work which had been done. His assassination was another proof of the most weird fact of history, that martyrdom is the price good men have paid for human progress. Jesus Christ gave His life to save all men from sin and the ruin of disobedience, and His disciples feared not to emulate his example. Filled with His spirit, from His day until now…noble men have brooded over the sorrows of the human family, and feeling heaven’s call have ventured to assuage them, and, like John Brown, passed into rest by violence.275 271 Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya center the Black church as the cornerstone of Black American culture in their influential study The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990). 272 Frances Smith Foster, “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African-American Print Culture,” American Literary History 17 (no. 4), 714-740; Benjamin Fagan, The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 18; Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Foster refers to Black religious culture as “Afro-Protestant,” while Maffly-Kipp uses “Afro-Christian.” 273 Foster, “A Narrative,” 728. 274 Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past, 12. 275 P. Thomas Stanford, The Tragedy of the Negro in America (Cambridge, MA: 101 and 103 Dudley Street, 1897), 73. 98 The antebellum figures of Attucks and Brown serve as reference points for other martyrs to freedom – for example, Denmark Veazie is pitched as the “Black John Brown”276 – and many of the figures accreting new martyrdom rhetoric during this period represent the same values of bravery, valor, masculinity, and sacrifice that had been central to Black Americans’ desire to, as Wendell Phillips put it in his introduction to Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, “prove themselves men in a land where laws refuse to recognise their manhood.”277 But as the century drew to a close, a tendency to invite new types of Black Americans into the pantheon of martyrs began to emerge. In a post-Emancipation world where Black Americans were increasingly confident of what they were owed as American citizens, Black American martyrs began to expand beyond the sole realm of brave and valorous men and into the new frontier of Black Americans exercising their earned and owed rights as citizens. And as the oppressive violence of Jim Crow rose, Black Americans increasingly saw as martyrs those who suffered and died as a result of the racist systems of America, expanding the pantheon of Black American martyrs beyond the exceptionally valorous military man and into a realm where oppression made martyrs of those Black citizens attempting to claim their citizenship rights. The Aims & Practices of Nineteenth-Century Black Historiography The emergent Black historiography of this period, represented primarily by the genres of biography and race history,278 is particularly fruitful for the analysis of martyrdom rhetoric because of its dual commitment to the telling of history and the creation of meaning. Walker influentially suggests both, calling the historiographers of this period “idealist historians” who shared a view that “history could be an instrument of social change.”279 John Ernest captures this tendency to idealize history for 276 William J. Simmons, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive, and Rising (Cleveland, OH: George M. Rewell & Co., 1887), 231. 277 Wendell Phillips, “Introduction,” in Nell, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, 8. 278 The seminal work on race history as a genre is Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past. 279 Walker, “The American Negro as a Historical Outsider,” 87, 91. 99 instrumental purposes in his theory of “liberation historiography,” which stresses the intentionality and rhetoric at the center of the era’s Black historical writing and describes the genre as “not simply of historical recovery but of historical intervention.”280 He argues that the Black historians of the period before modern historical approaches took hold were using the “tools of consciousness and the materials of record to liberate consciousness and resuscitate their readers in a newly envisioned community of faith and moral duty.”281 This hearkens back to Nell’s work on Attucks as the quintessential and foundational Black American martyr, but in the late century, this work expanded. In other words, the matters of argument – the rhetorical persuasion they undertook to both counter notions of racial inferiority and to build collective racial identity – were the ultimate aims of these historiographical texts, even more so than the collection of objective facts. As V.P. Franklin writes, “‘Vindicating the Race’ became a major social purpose for African American historiography, and ‘contributionism’ became an important discursive structure framing analyses of the African-American experience.”282 And as Ernest argues elsewhere, “conceptions of historical truth are culturally generated and necessarily reflect struggles for cultural authority”;283 in such a context, martyrdom becomes a potent argument for both truth and authority. Many of the historiographical texts of this era explicitly denote in prefaces and introductions their twin goals of changing white people’s minds about Black inferiority and inspiring Black Americans to excel. In this sense, they represent an early promotion of the rhetoric of uplift that rose to prominence after failed Reconstruction as described by Kevin K. Gaines, who contends in Uplifting the Race that uplift ideas served as a “form of cultural politics, in the hope that unsympathetic whites would 280 John Ernest, Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 8. 281 Ernest, Liberation Historiography, 8. 282 V.P. Franklin, “Introduction: Symposium on African American Historiography,” Journal of African-American History 92, no. 2 (2007), 214. 283 John Ernest, “Liberation Historiography: African-American Historians before the Civil War,” American Literary History Vol. 14, no. 3, “An ALH Forum: Race and Antebellum Literature” (Autumn 2002), 414. 100 relent and recognize the humanity of middle-class African-Americans, and their potential for the citizenship rights black men had possessed during Reconstruction.”284 Literarily, these ideas were seeded in the historiographies that emerged in the mid-1850s, and they continued – bolstered throughout by the exceptional morality represented by martyrdom – as uplift ideology flourished around the turn of the 20th century. In Nell’s Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855), an early example of Black historiography, white abolitionists Harriet Beecher Stowe and Wendell Phillips both contributed introductions making these arguments. Phillips gets straight to the point, opening with, “The following pages are an effort to stem the tide of prejudice against the colored race.” In language predictive of the uplift ideology that would take hold among elite Black Americans later in the century, Phillips argues that Black Americans must “live down” prejudice via “successful trade or speculation,” and that, “To show his capacity for mental culture, he must BE, not merely claim the right to be, a scholar.”285 Phillips’s point was provocative: At the middle of the nineteenth century, the question of what Black people could “be” was still very much contested, and even the understanding of their suffering and/or death as martyrdoms was not yet a possibility, especially for the enslaved. Published that same year, C.W. Elliott’s history of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian revolution curiously mentions martyrdom as something that Haitians were explicitly not considered capable of, writing that “the whites…believed only that the blacks were their born slaves, fit for the whip, incapable of courage, or honor, or martyrdom.”286 Such a sentiment chimes with Marcus Wood’s observation that volition is key to martyr 284 Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 4. 285 Wendell Phillips, “Introduction to Pamphlet Edition,” in Nell, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1855), 7. 286 Elliott gave a lecture on L’Ouverture in 1855 and then published the text of his oration for the New York Library Association. “Toussaint L’Ouverture: Lecture by C.W. Elliott,” New York Times, 27 February 1855, 8. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1855/02/27/76458842.html?pageNumber=8. Accessed 10 September 2023. C.W. Elliott, St. Domingo, Its Revolution, and Its Hero, Toussaint L’Ouverture (New York: J.A. Dix, 1855), 20. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/70281/70281-h/70281-h.htm. Accessed 10 September 2023. 101 status; he notes that the “Western post-Renaissance martyrological inheritance cannot easily be applied to describe the experience of slaves who suffered torture or abuse” because the enslaved – unlike the empowered white abolitionists described as martyrs as early as the 1830s, or Attucks in Nell’s descriptions – lacked the martyr’s ability to choose to suffer.287 But a combination of Emancipation and the sustained work of Black historiographers changed that perspective, creating in the final decades of the nineteenth century an expanded corpus of Black martyrs – some historic heroes, and others new figures responding valiantly to the racist reality of America – who exemplified the best traits of humanity, thus arguing for the merit of the race. Importantly, as Maffly-Kipp points out, rhetorical constructions vindicating Black Americans were responding to the privileging of “dominant American understandings of dignified manliness, whiteness, Christianity, and Americanness” versus depictions of Black men as hypersexual beasts. She argues that defining the Black man such that he could meet cultural aspirations while escaping being painted as a brute required “presenting the ideal black man as a combination of controlled aggression and morally guided virility.”288 To Maffly-Kipp, the Black historiographers of the late nineteenth century met this need by playing up the role of the patriotic Black soldier, but I suggest that the added dimension of martyrdom emphasized in this period further elevated the claims of religiosity, morality and exemplary humanity for these figures, serving as a key rhetorical tactic in ways that have been so far overlooked by scholarship. By the time the Convention of Colored Newspaper Men met in Cincinnati in August of 1875, the category of martyrdom had become a recognizable trope in the way Black Americans thought about their race’s history and accomplishments. At that convention, a resolution was presented proposing the “Centennial Tribute to the Negro,” a text proposed to “let the coming generation know our true history” 287 Wood, Blind Memory, 242. 288 Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past, 224-225. 102 and to be published to coincide with the centennial of the United States the next year. The proposal was a spin on the genre of the race history, beginning with the origins of the race but spending 15 of its proposed 18 volumes on different areas in which Black Americans excelled and contributed in the hundred years since the foundation of the United States. The proposed volumes covered everything from medicine to art to writing and academic study, with the final one to be titled “Negro Martyrs.”289 The project never materialized, as Philip S. Foner points out,290 but it is certainly noteworthy that the concept of Black martyrdom was central enough to receive its own proposed volume – and that, by 1875, the convention delegates felt that there were enough Black martyrs to provide the material for such a volume. In the twenty short years since Nell began to promote Attucks as a Black, American martyr, the category had expanded its boundaries and its influence enough to rate inclusion in the definitive historiographical celebration of the race in America. Scholarly Assessments of Martyrdom Rhetoric in the Late Nineteenth Century Some scholars have observed the instances and significance of martyr language in the history and historiography of the late nineteenth century, particularly because of the well-documented influence of Protestant Christianity on Black culture and activism. Seeing the Black print culture of this era as thoroughly religious, Maffly-Kipp argues that the race history was the key expression of the construction of a “new sacred narrative” for Black Americans and that in creating and exploring this genre, authors incorporated Christian and American history into a new-fashioned canonical account of the road to freedom complete with the inclusion of new documents and “new saints and martyrs.”291 289 Convention of Colored Newspaper Men (1875: Cincinnati, OH), “Convention of Colored Newspaper Men, Cincinnati, August 4th, 1875, Wednesday A. M.,” Colored Conventions Project Digital Records, accessed 25 August 2023, https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/455. 290 Philip S. Foner, “Black Participation in the Centennial of 1876,” Phylon, Vol. 34, no. 4 (Winter 1978), 286. 291 Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past, 214. 103 However, she leaves the specific meaning of the role of martyrdom in this new canonical account of race progress unexplored. Maffly-Kipp also notes that certain Southern Black denominations in the late nineteenth century drew on martyrdom imagery to agitate for freedom, urge Black leadership and promote the spread of the gospel within the African diaspora.292 She sees Southern Black Baptists, in particular, as drawing on “a long tradition of persecution narratives” dating to the seventeenth century and notes that suffering “translated into a racial context presented a powerful religious challenge to white Christian oppressors.”293 This explanation of the racial and religious value of suffering is convincing, but I suggest that the response to suffering in the denominational histories she cites was also certainly influenced by the cultural and intellectual dimensions of the strain of Black American martyrdom being nurtured in activist spaces. Similarly, Zoe Trodd discerns an aesthetic of “emancipatory martyrdom” that began with John Brown’s death in 1859 and carried through early antilynching protest literature between the 1880s and the 1920s. She argues that antilynching writers portrayed Black lynching victims as Christ and blended that imagery with the prophetic martyrdom of Brown, resulting in a powerful argument for national contrition and redemption.294 I agree with many of her points, but contend that she, like Maffly-Kipp, misses the underlying thread of abolitionist activist martyrdom explored in this project, and that this strain of Black American martyrdom offers additional reference points beyond Jesus for contextualizing Black suffering in the protest literature she describes. Others have explored the significance of individual figures depicted as martyrs in the late nineteenth century, but they, too, lack a thorough understanding of the rhetoric of martyrdom in this 292 Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past, 103. 293 Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past, 100. 294 Zoe Trodd, “John Brown’s Spirit: The Abolitionist Aesthetic of Emancipatory Martyrdom in Early Antilynching Protest Literature,” Journal of American Studies Vol. 49, no. 2 (2015): 305-321. 104 era. Mitchell Kachun’s First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory and Nyasha Junior and Jeremy Schipper’s Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon have each contributed significantly to a new understanding of the role and impact of specific American cultural martyr figures in this period and the years beyond. Kachun reads Attucks through history, highlighting his symbolic significance in Black American culture from the antebellum period to the present and showing how his symbolism shifted to meet each era’s needs for activism.295 Junior and Schipper trace references to Samson – often invoking themes of martyrdom – beginning in the antebellum period, noting the instances of the portrayal of specific Black figures as Samson or with Samson-like qualities.296 But while both works show clearly the significance of their subjects to protest literature and Black American culture, neither text is able to ground its analysis of its individual figures in an understanding of the meaning of American cultural martyrdom within the eras it analyzes. For example, Junior and Schipper’s chapter “Samson and the Making of American Martyrs” provides an impressive catalog of the ways in which key figures engaged in racial justice activism between the antebellum period and the early twentieth century were described both as Samson and as martyrs, but the closest they come to an exploration of the rhetorical and cultural role of martyrdom in the period is their chapter-closing observation that a figure’s association with Samson “lent a divine endorsement to what were often viewed as morally complex actions in the struggle against racial injustice. Samson imagery helped elevate these historical individuals into martyrs as future generations compared their actions to that of the equally morally complex biblical character.”297 But as this project argues, it’s not that simple: The significance of these figures within American contests over meaning and identity goes beyond just a connection to religion and a biblical imprimatur. Instead, the rhetoric of martyrdom at the end of the 295 Mitchell Kachun, First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 296 Nyasha Junior and Jeremy Schipper, Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 297 Junior and Schipper, Black Samson, 47-48. 105 nineteenth century depended upon – and engaged with – a pantheon of Black American martyrs that was constantly under construction, animated by Black innovation, creativity and aspiration. Old Heroes Become New Martyrs The Rhetoric of Rebellion: Denmark Veazie and Nat Turner In the historiography of the 1860s through the 1890s, Black figures such as Denmark Veazie, Nat Turner and Toussaint L’Ouverture, predominantly described in earlier historiography as heroes or patriots, accrete explicit martyrdom language for the first time as their stories are retold. Building on and influenced by Nell’s construction and promotion of Attucks as a valorous, exemplary Black and American martyr, Black historiographers of this period increasingly added detail to stories and images of Black martyrs, suggesting to their audience the ways in which these stories should be interpreted. This turn in rhetoric was not completely new: Martyr language describing an exemplary Black man appears as early as Henry Highland Garnet’s 1843 “An Address to the Slaves of the United States,” delivered at the National Colored Convention in Buffalo, NY. In it, the orator describes Veazie, whose 1822 rebellion by enslaved people in Charleston, S.C. was ultimately unsuccessful, as a “martyr to freedom.” Garnet called for resistance by the enslaved, and Veazie is the first in a list of brave and heroic enslaved people he uses as exemplars and inspirations for his audience in an attempt to motivate them to act. He elevates the daring fighter to the status of historically valorous saviors of their nations, writing, “Many a brave hero fell, but history, faithful to her high trust, will transcribe his name on the same monument with Moses, Hampden, Tell, Bruce and Wallace, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Lafayette and Washington.”298 Garnet’s aims in the speech were to inspire bravery in the enslaved people of America, demonstrating to them that they – like Veazie, himself the equal of history’s storied national saviors – 298 Garnet’s full 1843 text is not extant, but he published an edition he called “slightly modified” in 1848 within the same book as his publication of Walker’s Appeal. Henry Highland Garnet, Walker’s Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life and Also Garnet’s Address to the Slaves of the United States of America (New York: J.H. Tobitt, 1848), 95. 106 were capable of history-changing action. As Derrick Spires points out, these convention addresses themselves were a powerful act of argument that were designed to “counter arguments that black people were either too irredeemably inferior or too dependent on waged and manual labor to warrant full citizenship” and suggested instead that citizens were linked, despite their differences, by their “faith and participation in a republican style of government.”299 In this context, it is unsurprising that Garnet’s description of Veazie draws on the foundational ideals of republican government, including a sense of martyrial sacrifice. Such a statement was striking for both its vision of an enslaved man as capable of the highest echelon of masculine leadership and for its willingness to support rebellion by the enslaved.300 As Robert Abzug has argued, fears of violent race war had permeated the United States and even motivated immediatist antebellum abolition,301 so leaning into the actions of Veazie as worthy of emulation was a strong stance for Garnet to take. By describing Veazie as a martyr, Garnet is both rehabilitating him against the idea that his rebellion failed and claiming for Black Americans the agency to powerfully resist slavery. Garnet wished for the address to be adopted by the 1843 Colored Convention and “sent out with its sanction,” but after protracted debate, the resolution to do so failed on multiple votes, with Frederick Douglass standing resolutely against the motion, afraid of its implication of physical force and in favor of “trying the moral means a little longer.”302 It is worth noting here that Garnet’s rhetorical choices were likely influenced by the language of martyrdom that had been adopted by radical 299 Derrick Spires, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 30. 300 For more on the ambivalence about armed rebellion and revolt, see Stanley Harrold, The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004). 301 Robert H. Abzug, “The Influence of Garrisonian Abolitionists’ Fears of Slave Violence on the Antislavery Argument, 1928-1840,” The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 55, no. 1 (January 1970), 15. 302 National Convention of Colored Citizens, “Minutes of the National Convention of Colored Citizens; Held at Buffalo; on the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th of August, 1843; for the purpose of considering their moral and political condition as American citizens,” Colored Conventions Project Digital Records, accessed December 15, 2023, 13-16. https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/278. 107 abolitionists with increasing frequency in the decade before his speech,303 but additional references to Black martyrs did not appear until Nell’s work in the 1850s – perhaps because of the failure of Garnet’s oration in 1843. But once the idea of valorous Black martyrdom entered the zeitgeist with Nell’s tireless promotion and celebration of Attucks, a new canon demonstrably emerged. As part of his big-picture efforts to highlight the valor and value of Black Americans, Nell also included Veazie within the pantheon of Black martyrs in his Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855). Importantly, the work of Nell and others demonstrates a dependence upon the ideas and words of other authors and orators, suggesting a continuity in words, rhetoric and meaning across these historiographical texts. In addition to his lengthy and prominent discussion of Attucks as a martyr, Nell borrows several sentences of exact phrasing from Garnet’s “Address to the Slaves,” combining his direct quotes from the oration with some additional details about the insurrection to frame his discussion of Veazie and demonstrating his familiarity with Garnet’s work. Continuing the practice of relying upon the writings of earlier figures, Simmons’s Men of Mark, published more than 20 years later, also directly quotes and cites Nell’s Colored Patriots in describing Veazie, reproducing the sentiment that the name of Veazie will be engraved by history upon the same monument as other national heroes and strategists.304 When William Wells Brown published The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements in 1863, he bestowed the title of martyr upon Nat Turner, who was hanged in November 1831 after fomenting a rebellion by enslaved people. Brown’s take on Turner’s martyrdom was new: An account of Turner’s “confessions” was quickly published in 1832 by Thomas Gray. While the text certainly shows the centrality of Christianity to Turner’s plans, it is completely absent overt martyr 303 See Ch. 1 of this project. 304 William J. Simmons, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising (Cleveland, OH: George M. Rewell & Co., 1887), 232. 108 language or imagery.305 Brown, on the other hand, both captures the religious imagery of the earliest account (“Everything appeared to him a vision, and all favorable omens were signs from God”) and, reminiscent of Garnet’s and Nell’s description of Veazie, describes Turner as “a martyr to the freedom of his race, and a victim to his own fanaticism.”306 The “victim to his own fanaticism” is an interesting apologia, and it underscores that success was not a necessary condition for martyrdom. Veazie could be a martyr, despite a massive failure of his revolt, because he had acted. The similarities in language and viewpoint of these authors contributed to an increasingly canonical understanding of the pantheon of Black American martyrdom in the nineteenth century. But it is important to note that authors of this time were intentional and precise about their use of martyrdom rhetoric. William J. Simmons’s Men of Mark (1887) sees both the value and cosmological significance of martyrdom; there, Veazie is described as the “Black John Brown” and a child “who was destined to become a martyr for his race.”307 But Simmons notably takes care in the same passage to explain his definition of martyrdom, noting that while many may disagree about “what makes a martyr,” his definition is that “martyrs are made of such material as fit men to attempt great things for what they believe to be right.”308 Again, the language of “attempt” here is noteworthy, and it illustrates that success was not necessary in order for a Black American martyr to be crowned and thus allowing for a larger group of inspirational Black figures. Such careful attention to the interpretation of the language of martyrdom, including the evidence that Simmons is writing in a context where he recognizes the debatability of what makes a 305 The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va., as Fully and Voluntarily Made to Thomas R. Gray (Richmond, VA: Thomas R. Gray and T.W. White, 1832). 306 William Wells Brown, The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius and His Achievements (Boston: James Redpath, 1863), 71. Brown reprints his exact language in both The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1867), 24-25 and The Rising Son (Boston: A.G. Brown & Co., 1873), 315-316. 307 Simmons, Men of Mark, 231. 308 Ibid. 109 martyr, demonstrates that martyrdom was more than just hyperbole in the historiographies of this era and suggests that authors were carefully selecting the figures they described with this language while also taking care to make sure to instruct their audience about their intended meaning of martyrdom. It is telling that Simmons stresses the internal makeup of a martyr as allowing the figure to attempt great things in pursuit of what is right; such a framing supports the era’s efforts to argue for the inherent worthiness of the race and serves as a rebuke to the racist theories of eugenics that influenced the intellectual culture of the era.309 By 1902, Archibald Grimké had written a pamphlet about Veazie’s rebellion in which the rebels were termed “martyrs” in the very title of the text. In Right on the Scaffold, or the Martyrs of 1822, he offers a fuller description of the plan and its organizers, this time describing the actions and bravery of his co-conspirators. Grimké refers to those executed for their participation in the plot “martyrs” throughout the text, and his language consistently works to build out the virtues of Black men, consistently stressing their courage. Describing Peter Poyas, a lieutenant of Veazie’s, Grimké writes, It is verily no light thing for the Negroes of the United States to have produced such a man, such a hero and a martyr. It is certainly no light heritage, the knowledge that his brave blood flows in their veins. For history does not record that any other of its long and shining line of heroes and martyrs ever met death, anywhere on this globe, in a holier cause or sublimer mood, than did this Spartan-like slave, more than three quarters of a century ago.310 In ways typical of the time and of uplift ideology, Grimké’s description here draws on the aims of the race history to both exonerate his race and encourage other Black Americans to see their potential greatness. And, in Grimké’s view, this greatness was not an aberration – the blood of Veazie’s courageous martyrs flows in the veins of Black Americans. This is a neat rhetorical trick for the Jim Crow era; rather than even one drop of Black blood debasing people, the blood of Peter Poytas, hero and 309 For more on eugenics and race in the nineteenth century, see Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), particularly Chs. 1 and 2. 310 Archibald Grimké, Right on the Scaffold, or the Martyrs of 1822 (Washington, D.C.: The American Negro Academy, 1901), 23. 110 martyr, should elevate the entire race, and in the process, debunk eugenicist claims of inherent Black inferiority.311 Rebellion by the enslaved, once shut down among fierce debate at the 1843 National Colored Convention, had now become an inherited asset for Black Americans via the elevation of the ethic of Black American martyrdom. Toussaint L’Ouverture: [Black] Soldier, [Black] Patriot, [Black] Martyr Still other figures were cast as martyrs in the service of uplifting the race and encouraging Black people to see their potential, and it is perhaps Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture whose impact via presentation as a martyr was greatest in this era. In January of 1860, famed orator Wendell Phillips delivered a lecture on Toussaint L’Ouverture at New York City’s Cooper Institute. Phillips’s aim was set forth clearly, and it echoed his introduction to Nell’s Colored Patriots: His oration was meant to be “at once a biographical sketch and an argument, which he intended as a defence of the race to which a great negro belonged, and for which he bravely suffered and died.”312 Explicitly describing L’Ouverture as a “soldier, patriot and martyr” – the triplicate descriptors conveying that each has a specific meaning – Phillips recounted L’Ouverture’s exploits, ending his speech in a way reminiscent of Garnet’s, but with an even greater elevation of the general: People tonight might think him a fanatic, because they read history with their prejudices and not with their eyes. But when some future historian, like TACITUS, comes to write, he will take PHOCION as the noblest model of Greece – BRUTUS, of Rome – HAMPDEN, of England – LAFAYETTE, of France; WASHINGTON, the brightest star of the last generation, and JOHN BROWN, of Harper’s Ferry, of this – and with a pen dipped in the sunbeam, will write above them all the name of the patriot and martyr – Toussaint L’Ouverture.313 Phillips shares some of the pantheon with Garnet’s and Nell’s description of Veazie’s peers, including Hampden, Lafayette and Washington; he also notably adds Brown, who was hanged less than 311 For more on the cultural history of the “one drop” rule, see David Hollinger, “The One Drop Rule & the One Hate Rule,” Daedalus (Winter 2005), 18-28. 312 “Toussaint L’Ouverture: Lecture by Mr. Wendell Phillips,” New York Times, 1 February 1860, 5. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1860/02/01/issue.html. Accessed 21 February 2023. 313 Ibid. 111 two months earlier, thus participating in the development of the ethic of Black American martyrdom by elevating both Brown and L’Ouverture’s acts of antislavery violence to world-changing patriotism. But even as Phillips places L’Ouverture in a pantheon of familiar figure, the Black soldier-martyr is no longer on the same footing as his white counterparts: His name is inscribed above them all. This oratorical flourish points to a new way of describing L’Ouverture, and it is one that seems directly impacted by Nell’s initial framing of Black heroes and freedom fighters as martyrs, as well as by the martyr language surrounding Brown at the time. Despite the fact that many biographical texts had been written about L’Ouverture by this point, evidence points to this explicit description of L’Ouverture as a martyr as a new innovation. First, none of the several extant texts about L’Ouverture published in English and French before 1860 contain descriptors of the general as a martyr.314 Additionally, in February of 1855, before the publishing of Nell’s Colored Patriots later that year, the New York Times twice highlights a speech of Charles Wyllys Elliott about L’Ouverture. The reporters note its complexity and that it was “listened to with great interest,” but in the description of the speech calls L’Ouverture simply “the St. Domingo black hero.” Elliott’s stated aims were similar to Phillips’s five years later – the Times reports that the orator began by saying that “a sketch of Toussaint L’Ouverture might tend to weaken the bitter prejudices of the whites against the blacks, and also encourage the blacks themselves.”315 But despite the similar goals of the orations, Elliott’s described L’Ouverture only as a hero.316 In the intervening five years, Nell’s aggressive 314 Surveyed texts include M. Dubroca, The Life of Toussaint Louverture, Chief of the French Rebels in St. Domingo (London: C. Whittingham, 1802); Francois Domonique, The History of Toussaint Louverture (London: J. Butterworth and Son, 1814); A. de la Martine, Toussaint L’Ouverture: Poème dramatique (Bruxelles: Société Typographique Belge, 1850); John Relly Beard, The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Negro Patriot of Hayti (London: Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1853). 315 “Toussaint L’Ouverture: Lecture by C.W. Elliott,” New York Times, 27 February 1855, 8. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1855/02/27/76458842.html?pageNumber=8. Accessed 10 September 2023. 316 Elliott also published the text of his oration for the New York Library Association: C.W. Elliott, St. Domingo, Its Revolution, and Its Hero, Toussaint L’Ouverture (New York: J.A. Dix, 1855). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/70281/70281-h/70281-h.htm. Accessed 10 September 2023. 112 public promotion of Attucks as the first (Black) American martyr had taken place. It seems likely that this rhetorical choice of invoking martyrdom language in addition to ideas of soldierly heroism and patriotism may be traced to this new vision of Black valor and martyrdom, the combination of which suggested the heights achievable in both body and spirit. Phillips’s oration, like many of his compositions, was popular and well-known, serving as a framing of L’Ouverture for several decades after it originated. It was reprinted several times, including in full in The Liberator after Phillips reprised the speech in New York March 11, 1863317 and excerpted in the 1863 publication of Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography, which was advertised in The Liberator in November and December of that year.318 And in the wake of the Civil War, L’Ouverture’s heroic and valorous martyrdom provided a context for further acts of Black sacrifice. In W.W. Brown’s The Negro in the American Rebellion (1870), it serves as a comparison for according bravery to a Black Union soldier. Brown writes, “One of the number [of Black Union soldiers] deserves more honor than that accorded to Toussaint L’Ouverture in the brilliant lecture delivered by Wendell Phillips.”319 The descriptor of L’Ouverture pioneered by Phillips stuck – by the early the twentieth century, the Baltimore Afro-American was regularly running ads for The Colored American Novelty Co., a Washington, D.C. company selling photos of the Haitian “statesman and martyr” for 50 cents each. Phillips’s speech made an appearance there, too – the ad took care to note that “Wendell Phillips pronounced Toussaint the greatest General the world has produced.”320 The rhetorical effort of casting L’Ouverture as a martyr is continuous with Phillips’s view of the meaning and use of Black history, and it also folds in the language 317 Wendell Phillips, “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” The Liberator Vol. 33, no. 14, 3 April 1863, 56. 318 “Just Published: Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography,” The Liberator, Vol. 33, nos. 48 and 49, 27 November 1863 and 4 December 1863. 319 William Wells Brown, The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1867), 60. 320 Classified ad – “Toussaint L’Ouverture.” Baltimore Afro-American, 8 June 1907. http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/historical-newspapers/classified-ad-3-no-title/docview/530276741/se-2. Accessed 10 September 2023. The same ad ran in the Afro-American approximately weekly through November of that year. 113 and imagery in use among his network of abolitionists. As its language was widely adopted within the context of vindication of the race and uplift ideology, it served to stress the aspirational excellence and moral achievement of patriotism, martial valor and martyrdom. New Attucks Narratives in the Post-Emancipation World At the same time as new martyrs were promoted within Black historiography, Attucks continued to accrete ever more detailed and lofty narrative context. Unsurprisingly for the ideology of the time, the new details appended to the story of Attucks conspicuously contributed to portraying the first martyr as a learned and principled American.321 After Nell’s concerted efforts to portray Attucks as a patriot and martyr via both historiography and public spectacle in the 1850s,322 other Black historiographers of the nineteenth century embroidered his story, with two themes emerging. Both center Attucks’s race as a significant factor in their narratives: First, he was pointedly depicted as an exemplary figure who garnered the respect of both Black and white Americans, and second, these historiographers played up the significance of his personal progress from enslaved person to volitional actor and martyr, describing his idealistic motivation to seek freedom and his revolutionary spirit that embraced the foundational ideals of America. W.W. Brown’s The Black Man (1863) credits Attucks as “the first martyr to American liberty,” widely mourned and mentioned honorably “in the best circles,” a claim that white elites reverenced the Black patriot. Brown also takes care to point out Attucks’s death as motivational to both Black and white Americans during the revolution, but particularly to other Black 321 For the definitive era-by-era breakdown of the narratives about Attucks, see Kachun, First Martyr of Liberty. Kachun does not, however, trace specifically the development of the martyr language and imagery applied to Attucks, which this chapter aims to contribute. 322 The pinnacle of Nell’s efforts was the celebration in 1858; in a hand-written note to Garrison written on the back of the invitation to the 1859 event, Nell wrote, “I have made nothing like the extreme and varied arrangements as last year, but believing that the observance of the occasion has a use and significance I could not abandon it, just now at all events…though the number [and] the expense will fall far short of 1858 I hope to have an interesting time.” “William Cooper Nell to William Lloyd Garrison,” 22 February 1859, Boston Public Library, Anti-Slavery Collection, MS A.1.2 v.29, p.21, https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/m900q580t4698961. Accessed 15 December 2023. 114 men, noting, “The last words, the daring, and the death of Attucks gave spirit and enthusiasm to the battles of the revolution, and his heroism was imitated by both whites and blacks” and that Black troops “went into the battle [at Groton, Mass.] feeling proud of the opportunity imitating the first martyr of the American revolution.”323 An additional text by Brown, The Rising Son (1873), again contends that an esteem for Attucks after the American war for independence transcended racial boundaries by all Americans, writing (without providing evidence), “For half a century after the close of the war, the name of Crispus Attucks was honorably mentioned by the most noted men of the country, who were not blinded by foolish prejudice, which to say the most, was only skin-deep.”324 Brown’s sentiments build on the work of Nell to create Attucks as a patriot and martyr, but he makes a clear effort to exonerate the race and stress the ways in which as early as the American Revolution, a Black man was recognized by his white fellow citizens for the merits of his character and in spite of the color of his skin. Others followed suit, giving depth to the imputed motivations and ideals of Attucks as a man and a patriot – and focusing specifically on his rationality and purported education in an attempt to dodge accusations that he had merely been a rabble rouser in the wrong place at the wrong time and, I argue, in order to again distance Black men from their racist portrayals as impulsive, brutish and violent. In his History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880 (1882), George Washington Williams both echoes claims about Attucks’s great impact on his country and, in a new turn, purports to share his innermost motivations and feelings. Williams takes care to imagine an entire education and motivation for Attucks, claiming that, while his whereabouts between 1750 and 1770 were unknown, he was “doubtless in Boston,” where he was certainly being educated by listening to the best political, legal and religious minds of the era. Williams argues that Attucks was motivated by a commitment to grand ideals 323 William Wells Brown, The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (New York: Thomas Hamilton, 1863), 109. 324 William Wells Brown, The Rising Son: Or, The Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race (Boston: A.G. Brown & Co., 1873), 283-284. 115 and a volitional embrace of his sacrificial martyrdom, writing that he “went forth not only to fight for his liberty, but to give his life as an offering upon the altar of American liberty.” Explicitly laying out the contentions he was countering, he describes Attucks as a man whose patriotism was “not a mere spasm produced by sudden and exciting circumstances,” but instead was drawn from a long-term experiential education. To strengthen this claim, Williams prints a purported letter from an ardently patriotic Attucks directed to the Tory governor of the province; the letter insists that the world will hear from the colonists in their fight for freedom. Williams points to the letter as prophecy, writing, “The world has heard from him; and, more, the English-speaking world will never forget the noble daring and excusable rashness of Attucks in the holy cause of liberty!”325 Williams’s account of Attucks clearly takes pains to to present him, contra the period’s stereotypes of Black men, as a wise figure in control of his actions and choices, but he also made sure to stress that Attucks was indisputably Black, another illustrious figure in a long history of Black valor and sacrifice. Stretching the progressively perfecting arc of history from the Crucifixion to the American Revolution, Williams compares him to Simon of Cyrene, who bore Jesus’s cross and was understood by many to have been Black, and noting, “And when the colonists were staggering wearily under their cross of woe, a Negro came to the front, and bore that cross to the victory of glorious martyrdom!”326 Almost certainly drawing inspiration from Phillips’s 1860 oration on L’Ouverture and again demonstrating the continuity of Black American martyrdom rhetoric, Williams stresses both the timely and timeless impacts of Attucks’s death, writing that “the press had paused to announce his apotheosis, and to write the name of the Negro patriot, soldier, and martyr to the ripening cause of the American Revolution, in fadeless letters of gold – CRISPUS ATTUCKS!”327 325 George Washington Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880: Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1882), 330. 326 Williams, History of the Negro Race, 332-333. 327 Williams, History of the Negro Race, 330. 116 Williams was not alone in his rhetorical choices; Simmons undertakes the same campaign to describe Attucks in his 1887 Men of Mark. Like Williams, he offers a great deal of speculation as to Attucks’s motivations, portraying him as a thoughtful, intelligent actor: Only after much meditation and thought, he had broken away from the cruel chains that bound him and was determined to be a free American citizen. He learned to read at odd times, and he used this accomplishment in understanding the fundamental principles that underlie all regulated forms of governments. A fiery patriotism burned in his breast. He was anxious to avenge oppression in every form, not by fighting alone, but by the sacrifice of life, if necessary.328 In the hands of Simmons, Attucks, about whom only the barest of details were known after Nell’s careful historical search for traces of him, becomes the model Black man in the context of uplift ideology. He sought his freedom after careful, religiously-inflected reflection, then immediately pursued literacy and knowledge that led him to contemplate the fundamentals of a well-ordered democracy. Not content to just imagine Attucks’s motivation, the author also borrows the language from Williams’s account of Attucks’s name being written in fadeless letters of gold, and he extends the influence of Attucks from the Revolution into the far future, writing that his patriotism was “liberty to the oppressed” that “has blessed and will continue to bless generations yet unborn. He is rightly claimed as the savior of his country.”329 Attucks served other rhetorical purposes in postbellum historiography, too. No matter how lofty the claims about the martyr, some historiographers argued that he was not unique, but instead represented the capacity of many, or even all, Black Americans. Joseph T. Wilson’s The Black Phalanx (1890) takes care to point out that Attucks was “a fair representative of the colonial Negro,” as many of his fellow Black Americans “responded to the call, and side by side with the white patriots of the colonial militia, bled and died.”330 In a choice representative of the period’s ethos, Wilson also stresses how 328 Simmons, Men of Mark, 103-104. 329 Simmons, Men of Mark, 105. 330 Joseph T. Wilson, The Black Phalanx: A History of the Negro Soldiers of the United States (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company, 1890), 33. 117 Attucks himself embodied progress, writing in 1890, “The orators of New England poured out upon this once slave, – now hero and martyr, – their unstinted praise.”331 Kletzing and Crogman repeat the sentiment exactly in their Progress of a Race (1902);332 in both cases, the subtext is certainly that just as Attucks went from slavery to shining exemplar of American ideals, so, too, can all Black Americans progress from slavery to greatness in the post-Emancipation world via hard work, piety and education. Through the historiography of the late nineteenth century, even the foundational Black, American martyr had received an uplift-coded makeover, simultaneously arguing to whites the value and capability of Black people and signposting to Black readers the ways in which they could reach that level of success. The Martyrs of the Civil War Era The valorous and manly martyrdom cultivated in the nineteenth century predictably led to the description of Civil War figures as martyrs, the most influential of whom was Abraham Lincoln, whose assassination was immediately viewed as a martyrdom by Black Americans.333 Other white figures were also depicted as martyrs in these texts, particularly when they demonstrated a willingness to support interracial cooperation and a perception of Black people as capable of the abilities and achievements of whites. For example, Robert Gould Shaw is explicitly connected to the white abolitionist heroism of John Brown in W.W. Brown’s The Negro in the American Rebellion. There, the death of Shaw, the white Union officer in command of the all-Black 54th Massachusetts regiment during the Civil War, is twinned with 331 Ibid. 332 H.F. Kletzing and W.H. Crogman, Progress of a Race, or, the Remarkable Advancement of the Afro-American (Atlanta, GA: J.L. Nichols and Co., 1902), 63. 333 Several publications in the 1860s explicitly discussed the martyrdom of Lincoln, including a collection of sermons about his death, Our Martyr President, Abraham Lincoln: Voices from the Pulpit of New York and Brooklyn (New York: Tibbals & Whiting, 1865), which collected the orations of figures such as Henry Ward Beecher and George Bancroft. For more on the memorialization of Lincoln as a martyr by Black Americans, see James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, “The Man and the Martyr: Abraham Lincoln in African American History and Memory,” pages 141-163 in The Long Civil War, ed. Raymond Arsenault and John David Smith (Lexington, KY: The University of Kentucky Press, 2021) and Richard Wightman Fox, Lincoln’s Body: A Cultural History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015), 55, 167-169. For more on Lincoln as an American martyr, see Naveh, Crown of Thorns, 50-82. 118 the story of Brown blessing a Black child. W.W. Brown, particularly touched that Shaw’s parents insisted he remain buried with his men, writes that “neither death nor the grave has divided the young martyr and hero from the race for which he died; and a whole people remember in the coming centuries, when its new part is to be played in the world’s history” that he was buried with his company.334 Shaw appears in Joseph T. Wilson’s The Black Phalanx (1890) as well, appearing in a poem that calls his final resting place a “martyr’s grave.”335 These sacrifices of white men on behalf of the race, with an emphasis on their willingness see Black Americans as their equals, served to both continue the strain of martyrdom rhetoric being nurtured in this period and to bolster the precept of uplift that it was possible for whites to see the value of Black Americans. But the sacrifice of Black Union soldiers also qualified them for martyrdom. W.W. Brown describes Black war dead as the “sleeping braves, who, turning their backs upon the alluring charms of home-life, went forth at the call of country and race, and died, noble martyrs to the cause of liberty.”336 The twinning of “country and race” here offers some insights into the dual identities of Black Americans as both national citizens and members of their race, their martyrdom implied as a sacrifice on behalf of both. Exemplary Black war figures gained the status of martyr, too, such as Louisianian U.S. Army captain André Cailloux, one of the first Black officers of any North American military unit and one of the first Black soldiers to die in combat. Brown’s Negro in the American Rebellion describes the funeral services for Cailloux, noting that the priest officiating the sermon, Rev. Claude Paschal Maistre, “called upon all present to offer themselves, as Cailloux had done, martyrs to the cause of justice, freedom, and good government. It was a death the proudest might envy.”337 Wilson’s The Black Phalanx, published 13 years later, reproduced the same quote, crediting it to a correspondent who underscored that throngs 334 Brown, The Negro in the American Rebellion, 202. 335 Joseph T. Wilson, The Black Phalanx: A History of the Negro Soldiers of the United States (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company, 1890), 256. 336 Brown, The Negro in the American Rebellion, 264. 337 Brown, The Negro in the American Rebellion, 188. 119 of both Black and white people surrounded the soldier’s funeral.338 The funeral itself was an act of defiance, as Maistre was a pro-Union abolitionist Catholic priest in a staunchly Confederate city;339 it is unsurprising that Maistre, steeped in the language of both Catholicism and abolitionism, would use this specific language. A resolution adopted by the local social organization the Conclave du Bon Pasteur No. Deux ran in the June 13, 1863 edition of L’Union, the Black French-language newspaper; in it, the members of the organization mourn the death of “des braves et glorieux martyrs” who fought against the enemies of the United States and the usurpers of the liberty of men of their race for 250 years.340 The framing of Cailloux as a martyr is likely more complex than it initially appears. On the one hand, it represented a continuity of the strain of the ideologically Protestant and republican Black American martyrdom nurtured by Northeastern abolitionists and threading through the historiography of this period; on the other, it demonstrates for the first time a specifically Catholic vision of Black martyrdom. Brown and Wilson may have imagined Cailloux as a representative in the same vein as Attucks, but the Catholics responding to his death in New Orleans likely had a religiously informed understanding of his death and his status as a martyr.341 As Emily Suzanne Clark has argued, the connection between race, citizenship and martyrdom also emerged among the New Orleanian members of the Cercle Harmonique, Afro-Creole practitioners of American Spiritualism who between 1858 and 1877 were advised by the dead and who frequently engaged with the rhetoric of martyrdom. Clark 338 Wilson, The Black Phalanx, 216-217. 339 For further detail, see Stephen J. Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest: André Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 3, 95-115. 340 Cited in Ochs, Black Patriot and White Priest, 153; French cited from L'Union. (Nouvelle-Orléans [La.]), 16 June 1863. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83026401/1863-06-16/ed-1/seq-1 Accessed 11 September 2023. 341 Kevin Winstead argues for a Black Catholic influence in New Orleans as early as 1837, when the all-Black Sisters of the Holy Family provided community care to Black citizens. Winsted, “‘Authentically Black, and Truly Catholic’: A Survey of the Study on Black Catholics,” Sociology Compass Vol. 11, no. 10 (October 2017), https://doi-org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/10.1111/soc4.12517. For more on the connections between Black culture and Catholicism, specifically, see Matthew Cressler, Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2017), which focuses on the rise and development of Catholicism in Chicago in the years after the Great Migration. 120 observes a specific logic of martyrdom in the group: not all spirits who visited during seances were recognized as martyrs, and “only those who died in the name of egalitarian republicanism earned the name” for having died for Black civil rights.342 Clark employs a standard interpretation of the role of martyrdom rhetoric in her understanding of its relationship to the Afro-Creole Spiritualists – that martyrdom gave meaning to the needless violence and death that surrounded Black people343 – but there is likely a more complex foundation, rooted in the tradition of martyrdom within Black activism, to the practice. If this is the case, the Catholically-informed understandings of Black American martyrdom are examples of a growing tendency to apply martyrdom rhetoric to a wider group of individuals and situations. The New Martyrs of the Late Nineteenth Century In the postbellum period, the pantheon of Black American martyrdom began a shift that would continue well into the twentieth century, and authors began a tendency to create new Black martyrs who suffered specifically because of the racist structures of America. In these final decades of the century, the antebellum understanding of martyrdom as the primary purview of exceptional men – particularly in the context of military valor – expanded to accommodate new types of martyrs to American race prejudice: women, the enslaved, and ordinary men whose brave stands in the face of racial violence and discrimination were evidence of the indomitable spirit of the race. As early as Brown’s Negro in the American Rebellion (1867), martyrdom language was applied to Black people outside of the context of military valor. Describing the racial terror of the South amid the war, he writes of a free Black school teacher in Tennessee teaching Black children. The teacher was ordered by Confederate soldiers to stop teaching, and when found teaching the next day was ordered to 342 Emily Suzanne Clark, “‘To Battle for Human Rights’: Afro-Creole Spiritualism and Martyrdom,” Journal of Africana Religions Vol. 6, no. 2 (2018), 171. 343 Clark, “‘To Battle for Human Rights,’” 165. 121 receive 25 lashes. Brown describes the scene thus: “And they were administered, the man receiving the scourge like a martyr, telling his persecutors that he was willing to suffer for the right; and that Christ had received the same punishment for the same purpose; and he thought, if he could teach the children to read the Bible so that they might learn of heaven, he was doing a good work.”344 This scene blends race, religion and nation in potent ways, and the teacher’s commitment to the significance of his work again underscores both his agency and his capability for exemplary morality. The scene also serves to support the growing understanding in Black culture of education as a necessity for individual and racial advancement. Thus, the teacher signifies individual bravery as well as a serves as a representative of the race’s commitment to the centrality of education. William Still’s Underground Railroad (1872) views the enslaved as physically, spiritually and psychologically capable of the trials of martyrdom in their efforts to escape bondage, but he does so within the context of uplift ideology, noting in his preface, “It scarcely needs be stated that, as a general rule, the passengers of the U.G.R.R. were physically and intellectually above the average order of slaves.”345 He regularly describes enslaved people escaping from bondage in martyrial terms, writing of a woman named Clarissa as having the faith of a martyr and a man named William Jordon as having undergone “martyr-like endeavors” to escape. Of those traveling the Underground Railroad, he writes, “The martyrs in olden times who dwelt in ‘dens and caves of the earth’ could hardly have fared worse than some of these way-worn travelers.”346 In this history of those committed to escaping slavery, Still is innovating by opening up martyrdom as a possible status for the enslaved, but he is nevertheless careful to stress that these individuals are representing the most capable of that number, presaging a version of 344 Brown, The Negro in the American Rebellion, 348-349. 345 William Still, The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, Etc., Narrating the Hardships, Hair-Breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in Their Efforts for Freedom (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872), 2. 346 Still, The Underground Railroad, 60, 131, 277. 122 the “talented tenth” understanding of the capabilities and responsibility of the race that would grow over the next decades.347 The failure of Reconstruction seems to have kickstarted the biggest change in who could be a Black American martyr. While earlier texts had showed a willingness to go beyond male soldier-heroes, the racial terror in the Jim Crow South quickly gave rise to a widening understanding of Black American martyrs as those who had suffered because of racist systems and ideas, particularly in a setting of relentless anti-Black violence. An excellent example of the widening scope of martyrdom came from Black South Carolina state representative George W. Murray, who wrote an 1877 letter to Garrison describing the late-Reconstruction racial terror in his state. Murray writes that “my people have been driven from their own homes by the fierce assassins in their midnight raids, and in many cases, they have been brutally murdered.” Again underscoring the new volition of free Black Southerners, Murray stresses that these constituents were not victims, but martyrs, telling the abolitionist that “many have died martyrs for the cause of their principle and liberty.” Recounting one such particular instance, the politician tells Garrison that the Barnwell County Rifle Club “took one of the heroes who were brave and bold enough to own their manhood” and attempted to coerce him to give up being a Republican upon pains of death. When the unnamed man said he was born a Republican and expected to die one, “his heart was blown out of his body by the bullets and doubtless eaten up by the cannibal-like crew.”348 In this, the murdered man is still displaying the masculine bravery associated with martyrdom, but Murray’s letter indicates an understanding of all of his Black constituents suffering racist violence as martyrs. 347 W.E.B. DuBois explicated the “talented tenth” stressing education for the top 10 percent of the race in his essay “The Talented Tenth,” published in the 1903 essay collection The Negro Problem (New York: James Pott & Company, 1903), 31-76. 348 George W. Murray, "Letter from George Washington Murray, Columbia, S.C., to William Lloyd Garrison, 5th April, 1877." Correspondence. Columbia, S.C., April 5, 1877. Digital Commonwealth, https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/5h73zz51f . Accessed 21 August 2023. 123 Similarly, Gertrude Mossell’s 1894 The Work of the Afro-American Woman, itself an exercise an “impressing of a growing race with the importance of a correct life and independent thought”349 as a part of the greater project of uplift, extends the mantle of martyrdom to a woman – Ida B. Wells – oppressed by the racist South. After describing Wells’s exemplary journalistic efforts and celebrated reception in the North, Mossell writes that the “ire of the Memphis press was aroused by the courtesy shown Miss Wells at Boston, and retaliated by flooding the North with slanderous accusations against the martyr editor.”350 Such instances are early examples of the coming shift in understandings of Black American martyrdom, one that mixed the aspirational excellence of the piety of martyrdom with a growing understanding of martyrs as the Black Americans suffering under the racist violence and oppression of the Jim Crow era. With this turn, who could be a martyr broadened, and the emphasis on American ideals gave way to an emphasis on the rights – to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – that Black Americans were owed, but had been denied. Conclusion As the nineteenth century drew to a close and Black Americans reeled from the backlash of racism after the promise of Emancipation, historiographers nevertheless persisted in their efforts to present the merits of the race as an argument for equality, and to do so, they drew on the achievements of Black people particularly within the context of relentless oppression. In his 1887 Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising, William J. Simmons asserts, I wish the book to show to the world – to our oppressors and even our friends – that the Negro race is still alive, and must possess more intellectual vigor than any other section of the human family, or else how could they be crushed a slaves in all these years since 1620, and yet today stand side by side with the best blood in America, in white institutions, grappling with abstruse problems in Euclid and difficult classics, and master them? Was ever such a thing seen in another people? Whence these lawyers, doctors, authors, editors, divines, lectures, linguistics, 349 Benjamin F. Lee, “Introduction,” in Gertrude Mossell, The Work of the Afro-American Woman (Philadelphia: George S. Ferguson Company, 1894), 3. 350 Mossell, The Work of the Afro-American Woman, 34. 124 scientists, college presidents and such, in one quarter of a century?351 Similarly, Stanford’s dedication to “all honest men who sympathize with my race” in The Tragedy of the Negro in America appeals to the traditional tactic of moral suasion to bring an end to Jim Crow racial terror: “I dedicate this short story of Negro life in the United States in the hope of helping create a strong, healthy public opinion that will make it impossible for outrages and lynchings to be much longer continued.”352 In “The Martyrs of To-Day,” one of the poems closing her volume, Mossell describes implies that the “martyrs of today” are the Black men, women and children killed by the lynch mobs of the south, but she instructs her fellow Black Americans, “We must ponder Calvary’s lesson/View our martyred Savior’s fate/Work and pray, with faith in heaven/Right must conquer – therefore wait.”353 Ultimately, the story of Black American martyrdom in the latter half of the nineteenth century is one of continuity and change, faithful belief and practical activism. As Black Americans lived through the bloody violence of civil war, the promise of Emancipation and the despair of failed Reconstruction, Black authors repeatedly reached for the themes of martyrdom to illustrate their points and further their ideologies. The valor of the early descriptions of Black American martyrdom slowly began to give way to the value of Black lives, asserting their rights as citizens and their worth as individuals. 351 Simmons, Men of Mark, 7. 352 Stanford, The Tragedy of the Negro, front matter. 353 Mossell, “The Martyrs of To-Day,” in The Work of the Afro-American Woman, 163-164. 125 Chapter 4 “Crucified Upon the Cross of Race Passion”: Black Activism & Martyrdom in the Early 20th-Century Black Press The canon of American martyrs created and refined in the nineteenth century remained a part of Black American culture well into the twentieth, their sacrifices solidifying the worthiness of Black citizens in the pursuit of equal rights and the martyrs themselves representing the peak of what the race could accomplish and represent. And in the early decades of the 20th century, the rhetoric of martyrdom was increasingly employed across the Black press to describe Black Americans who simultaneously performed their commitment to American democratic ideals and suffered as a result of the nation’s de jure and de facto discrimination. As Black newspapers grew in status and influence in the early 1900s, they evinced a continuing reverence for the prominent 19th-century Black American martyrs like Attucks, Brown, Lovejoy, and Lincoln, invoking these figures in poems, op-eds, and anniversary observances. But during this era, a new type of martyr arose: Contemporary Black Americans whose commitment to the foundational ideals of America and of the betterment of the race began to be described with the rhetoric of martyrdom. In the context of uplift ideology that reigned at the beginning of the century, these martyrs represented the elevated status that Black Americans could achieve through morality and hard work. Such a turn underscored both the tenets of uplift and the influence of the Black press itself; by 1938, T.G. Standing could make the argument that the Black press “is itself a striking indication of an increasing degree of racial solidarity” and quote NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson’s assertion that it was second only to the church in its influence on Black life and thought.354 During the early decades of the 20th century, two major developments influenced the way Black Americans conceived of themselves and their relationship to the nation. First, America entered World 354 T.G. Standing, “Race Consciousness as Reflected in the Negro Press,” The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 19, no. 3 (December 1938), 269, 271. 126 War I, expecting and requiring the contributions of Black Americans without immediately relinquishing the benefits of full citizenship; second, radicalism flourished in the postwar years, seeding a broad-based coalition for racial justice but occasionally leading to contests between organizations fighting for social change. In this context, the rhetoric of martyrdom both grew in influence and encountered new challenges to its use and meaning, buttressed by the increasing influence of Black newspapers and periodicals, which are described by Thomas J. Sugrue as “an indispensable resource for civil rights activists across the country” because of their ability to share information and activist strategy widely.355 But even as the instances and usage of Black American martyrdom grew increasingly varied – and more often contested – amid the context of postwar radical ideas, Black American martyrdom itself developed a new and foundational understanding that was a departure from the uplift-coded martyrs of the previous century. Now, Black martyrs were not just those who suffered because of their personal virtues and deep patriotism – they were Americans who had been denied by the nation their earned and owed rights. By midcentury, the pantheon of Black American martyrdom had expanded, and the common understanding of such a martyr was someone who had been tragically shortchanged by a racially prejudiced system. This chapter charts this change, highlighting the NAACP’s intentional use of martyrdom rhetoric as a stratagem in the case of the “Houston Martyrs” in the 1920s, as well as the skirmishes over martyrs and martyrdom between race activists and labor activists that marked the 1930s and the connections between martyrdom and racial violence that were explored in these decades. In a season of growing activism that formed the roots of the the civil rights struggle of the later 20th century,356 this language and meaning wove its way through the roots of the long Black freedom struggle, setting the stage for the era of the civil rights martyr that dawned in the 1950s and 1960s. 355 Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North New York: Random House, 2008), xvii-xviii. 356 For more on this argument, see Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008); Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement”; Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History. 127 The Early 20th-Century Black Press The Black press is an important site for recovering cultural understandings of martyrdom because of its role as a key site of Black American self-definition. The significance to Black leaders of a press that would both be sympathetic to their needs and create a cohesive community appeared as early as the First Annual Convention of the People of Colour in 1831, where conveners called on delegates to sustain and support “those presses which are devoted to our instruction and elevation.”357 Although no national Black newspaper emerged from extended debates about the topic, Sheila Thompson notes that by the onset of the Civil War, Black Americans had founded at least 40 newspapers.358 Frankie Hutton describes the Black press of this period, like the Garrisonian abolitionists and Colored Conventions Movement, as using tactics of moral suasion to plead the cause of Black Americans, resulting in an editorial tone strongly influenced by “the democratic ideals spawned by the Revolution and the United States Constitution.”359 By 1875, this Black press, committed to racial justice as well as the unrealized ideological promises of America, had become a significant enough social force that a Convention of Colored Newspaper Men met in Cincinnati. Peter H. Clark, the convention president and a longtime journalist and educator, argued strongly for the need for “colored men’s newspapers” to motivate successful political reform, stating, “We need papers for the discussion of a public policy, and for obtaining that unity of action that comes from a unity of views.”360 At the end of 357 Minutes and Proceedings of the First Annual Convention of the People of Colour, Held by Adjournments in the City of Philadelphia, from the Sixth to the Eleventh of June, Inclusive, 1831, Colored Conventions Project, https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/72, quoted in Benjamin Fagan, “The Organ of the Whole: Colored Conventions, the Black Press, and the Question of National Authority,” in The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century, ed. P. Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey and Sarah Lynn Patterson (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 198. 358 Shirley E. Thompson, “The Black Press,” in A Companion to African American History, ed. Alton Hornsby Jr. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 205), 332. 359 Frankie Hutton, The Early Black Press in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), viii. 360 Convention of Colored Newspaper Men (1875: Cincinnati, OH), “Convention of Colored Newspaper Men Cincinnati, August 4th, 1875, Wednesday A. M.,” Colored Conventions Project Digital Records, accessed May 2, 2023, https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/455, 3. 128 the nineteenth century, as Thompson notes, there were “hundreds of black newspapers and periodicals of all stripes for each region of the country.”361 The Black press as first established in the antebellum period was a consistent advocate for the citizenship rights of Black Americans, but it was also nimble and responsive to cultural and social conditions. Todd Vogel has observed that the Black press’s “content and its very form changed with evolving historical and cultural conditions in America,”362 and in the post-emancipation world, while still drawing on the traditions of the antebellum Black press, writers and editors had a new target: “Jim Crow and the racial ideologies and political economies that underpinned it,”363 as D’Weston Haywood points out. The first part of this chapter examines the role of martyrdom rhetoric within this era of the Black press, and my interpretation is informed by three key characteristics of the period’s Black journalism. First, the Black press served as a locus for the ideologies of both Americanism and racial uplift. Citizenship rights had long been a key element of racial justice activism, and I. Garland Penn’s 1891 The Afro-American Press and Its Editors, the first scholarly treatment of the topic, saw a specifically Black press as “indispensable to the case of black fitness for American citizenship.”364 A significant part of this argument for citizenship was Black Americans’ belief in America’s founding ideals. Kazin and McCartin have argued for a unique version of nationalism termed “Americanism” in which group membership relies upon shared ideals, rather than shared blood, religion, or culture,365 and Mia Bay contends that this Americanist embrace of the foundational principles of America had long animated Black activism “in support of both rights and rebellion.”366 This balance of both believing in the foundations of American 361 Thompson, “The Black Press,” 333. 362 Todd Vogel, “Introduction,” in The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 1. 363 D’Weston Haywood, “Fight for a New America,” in Razvan Sibii, et al., Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2021), 59. 364 Thompson, “The Black Press,” 335. 365 Kazin and McCartin, “Introduction,” in Americanism, 1-2; Bay, “See Your Declaration Americans!!,” 42. 366 Mia Bay, “See Your Declaration Americans!!!,” 42-45. 129 democracy and demanding that America live up to its promises by treating its Black citizens as equals carried over from the antebellum period through to the early twentieth century and became even more pronounced as America entered the global conflict of World War I. An essay from 1920 by John R. Williams, a Black soldier who served in France, spells out this dance between Americanism and Black identity. Williams writes that he considers himself “the equal of any other American citizen. True I am of Negro blood – a fact of which I am justly proud – but in discussing Americanism that fact is only incidental. The term ‘Americanism’ is national and not racial. There is room for but one nation in these United States of America, and the Negro belongs to that nation.”367 To those who would lose faith in the principles of America based on their treatment, Williams says, “A true American may have a good deal to say of injustice that have been done him…but he never for a moment should lose faith in Americanism; it should stimulate in him a desire to purge the flag of all the abuses that beset it.”368 Williams’ essay is a part of a greater movement within Black intellectual culture; as Michele Mitchell notes, the Black press would “invoke and promote Americanism on an increasing basis up to and after 1930.”369 The Black press was also a major site for engagement with the uplift ideology that flourished as a response to scientific racism and the failures of Reconstruction. In describing this ideological movement, Kevin K. Gaines highlights “bourgeois cultural values” – including social purity, thrift, chastity and the patriarchal family – serving during this period to affirm elite Black Americans’ “sense of status and entitlement to citizenship.”370 Nedra K. Lee underscores the important role of Black newspapers in 367 John R. Williams, “Americanism of the Negro,” The Competitor, Vol. 1 (June 1920), 27. 368 Williams, “Americanism of the Negro,” 28. 369 Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 243. Theodore Vincent, in Voices of a Black Nation: Political Journalism in the Harlem Renaissance (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1973), argues for an embrace of Americanism that arose out of the promise of the New Deal, but the authors cited above and I agree that an embrace of Americanism is evident in Black periodicals far earlier. 370 Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 4. See also Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race, 130 outlining strategies of racial uplift in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, noting that the Black press “encouraged their readers to be industrious, righteous and self-reliant.”371 Importantly, Lee’s archaeological work demonstrates that racial uplift politics were not limited to the elite, but that Black Americans, “even in seemingly remote rural communities, mobilized around principles of racial uplift through education, consumer behavior and religious devotion.”372 And the wide circulation of the Black newspapers – 60% of which Sugrue notes circulated across state lines, reaching nearly a third of the nation’s adult Black population by the onset of World War II – resulted in “a virtual web of information about black life, politics and grassroots protests that linked ordinary readers, activists and leaders.”373 Additionally, the Black press balanced sensationalism – itself a way to sell newspapers, a necessary requirement for an industry that ran on tight margins and had a specialized and minority readership – with a serious commitment to Black issues and activism. Despite sensationalism’s present connotations of tawdry tabloidism, Kim Gallon argues that Black newspaper editors saw the use of this literary strategy in their papers as a “‘rational policy’ to draw readers’ attention to traditionally politicized topics such as lynchings, calls for southerners to migrate North, and appeals for African Americans to support campaigns for racial justice. …Sensationalism in this context could be justified as it shored up the racial uplift mission of black papers.”374 Similarly, Haywood sees the sensationalism of the Black press as a literary strategy to “signal the masculine implications of a critical racial moment through bold, provocative rhetoric and imagery.”375 Amid the growth of Black protest, the rhetoric of martyrdom particularly Ch. 5, “Advancement in Numbers, Knowledge and Power: African American History in Post-Reconstruction America, 1883-1915.” 371 Nedra K. Lee, “‘To Rise from Darkest Ignorance’: Black Texans’ Engagement with the Politics of Racial Uplift,” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 10, no. 3 (2021), 233-235. 372 Lee, “‘To Rise from Darkest Ignorance,’ 232. 373 Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 47-48. 374 Kim Gallon, “Silences Kept: The Absence of Gender and Sexuality in Black Press Historiography,” History Compass, Vol. 10, no. 2 (2012), 209. See also Gallon, Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2020). 375 D’Weston Haywood, Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 15. 131 worked hand-in-hand with sensationalism, drawing in readers via attention-grabbing headlines, engendering sympathy for the cause of Black rights and mobilizing efforts for racial justice. A particularly illustrative example of such efforts is the NAACP’s work to obtain clemency for the “Houston Martyrs,” soldiers of the all-Black 24th Infantry who had been harshly sentenced for their participation in a 1917 riot in Texas. In this case, detailed below, the NAACP paired their standard legal strategy with a full-court press appeal to public sentiment and opinion in order to achieve their aims, and the consistent use of the rhetoric of martyrdom in the influential Black press played a significant role in their success. Finally, the Black press of the early- to mid-20th century had to balance its voice of protest and reform with reassurances to white America of the patriotism and loyalty of Black Americans, particularly as the U.S. entered World War I. Thompson contends that Frederick G. Detweiler’s 1922 The Negro Press in the United States represented a scholarly effort to respond to the concern of Black disloyalty that was troubling many Americans and threatening government censorship of Black journalism. She concludes that Detwiler represented the need to affirm both protest and patriotism as central tenets of the Black press: “Ultimately, Detweiler’s study is a vindication of the protest role of the black press, but this protest is reassuringly American in tone.”376 William G. Jordan captures this impulse and notes that at times, the pressure to serve the needs of the federal government could overtake Black interests, as the “self-sacrificing loyalty demanded by the national government during the war suggested that blacks should not insist on racial justice as a condition of their participation in the country’s defense.”377 This conflict came to a head with the creation of – and activism around – the Houston Martyrs beginning in 1920, and the rhetoric, meaning, and history of Black American martyrdom directly contributed to Black 376 Thompson, “The Black Press,” 336; see also Frederick G. Detweiler, The Negro Press in the United States (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1922), 157: “In carrying on their general fusillade of protest the Negro newspapers are careful to proclaim their patriotism…. The essential Americanism of the Negro press is proved by the fact that its appeal is always to American constitutional rights. It wants its case handled by the United States. It does not desire to see the nation wrecked and rebuilt.” 377 William G. Jordan, Black Newspapers and America’s War for Democracy, 1914-1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 5. 132 critiques of American injustice even as they simultaneously served as a credit to the character of the race. Martyrdom in the Early Twentieth Century Black Press The martyrdom language in Black newspapers at the start of the twentieth century initially stayed very connected to the pantheon of martyrs built out in the nineteenth. Many figures associated with the fight to end slavery – Brown, Lovejoy and Lincoln, in particular – are described as martyrs and remembered via poems, anniversaries and other dedications.378 Demonstrating their patriotism, a key concern of uplift ideology and tenet of the era’s commitment to Americanism, the Black press of this time also shows a tendency to memorialize assassinated Presidents James A. Garfield and William McKinley as martyrs after the fashion of Lincoln, particularly around the occasion of McKinley’s death in 1901.379 Often, references to previous martyrs strengthened calls to activism in the present. The Baltimore Afro-American reports that November 7, 1907 – the seventieth anniversary of the death of Lovejoy – “was selected as a day to make a united protest against discriminatory laws commonly called ‘jim crow’ laws, as well as to honor the memory of Lovejoy.” The article notes that several cities, most notably Boston, New York and St. Louis, observed this “Protest Day” via special meetings and sermons. In discussing the protest inspired by the event, the author editorializes that it should be an annual observance and that “no more fitting day could be found than the anniversary of the murder of Lovejoy, 378 For example, the Baltimore Afro-American published poems like Robertus Love’s “At John Brown’s Grave,” which explicitly links Brown to Jesus (“There have been blessed martyrs whose memory is dear/ But who of all the number died like him beneath me here? I liken him to One alone, the first who died to save/ And this is why I kneel today/ At John Brown's grave," BAA 22 January 1910, 3) and Harry London’s “Lincoln” (“As long as grateful prayers assail the skies/ As long as freedom's ensign feasts the eyes / Dear to our memory will that name remain; The martyr, who for freedom's cause was slain,” BAA, 12 February 1910, 4) in early 1910. 379“Masons Hold Memorial Service,” Baltimore Afro-American, 28 September 1091, 5; Ophelia Carter, “This Flag’s Grief,” Baltimore Afro-American, 5 October 1901, 4; “It Calmed the Tumult: Garfield’s Memorable Utterance after Lincoln’s Assassination,” Baltimore Afro-American, 30 November 1901, 3. 133 first of freedom’s martyrs in America.”380 Similarly, a report of a 1909 meeting of the New England Suffrage League shows how the martyrdom of John Brown framed the meeting’s agenda. The opening remarks of the meeting addressed the crisis of the “undoing of the work for freedom for which John Brown sacrificed his life fifty years ago, especially singling out the increase of the jimcrow [sic] insult, of disfranchisement and of lynching.” Brown appeared in the remarks of several other speakers, all of whom decried the current state of affairs compared to the freedom for which Brown died. Like the Lovejoy Day of Protest, the meeting also asked “the colored people of the country to celebrate on December 29 the fiftieth anniversary of the public murder of John Brown, the martyr to the abolition of slavery.”381 In a manner reminiscent of the use of white martyrdom as a ticket into Black activism described in Chapter 2, white allies of the early twentieth century drew on the nineteenth-century tradition of “martyrs for the race” to describe their own activism. Charles Edward Russell, a white New Englander and one of the founders of the NAACP, in 1912 addressed a largely Black group in Chicago and explicitly placed himself in the lineage of these martyrs. As the Chicago Defender reports, he “outlined the biography of John Brown and Wendell Phillips, picturing them as martyrs for the race, and putting himself in that class” and then “told of the active work that he was doing through the league, and expressed his belief in the fact that the race, as a whole, is entirely worthy of all support and encouragement that it may receive.”382 The tendency continued for years; in 1929, the National Equal Rights League connected its activism against segregation and lynching all the way back to Attucks, the first [Black] American martyr, asking “every member of the race” to send letters in the name of Attucks to the newly-inaugurated President Herbert Hoover “demanding that there come an end to the national 380 “Protest Day,” Baltimore Afro-American, 28 December 1907, 3. 381 N.B. Dodson, “Ringing Appeal for Free Ballot,” Baltimore Afro-American, 16 October 1909, 6. 382 “Charles Edward Russell Classes Himself with the Martyrs for the Race,” Chicago Defender (Big Weekend Edition), 7 December 1912, 1. 134 sin by the federal government of segregating alone the blood which laid the foundation of this nation, and permitting lynching of Americans because they are the race of the country’s first martyr.”383 Even more consistently and widely, though, the martyrs of the first decades of the twentieth century were exemplary Black figures whose suffering and/or death was explicitly connected to foundational ideals of American democracy. These figures were important rhetorical tools as Black Americans cultivated a commitment to both nation and race. As uplift ideology flourished, such martyrs provided evidence of the worthiness and character of the race, with a particular emphasis on valor and patriotism. An 1898 article in the Baltimore Afro-American recounts an lecture titled “The Bravery of the Colored Americans as Soldiers and Sailors in the Wars of the Republic” at the “completely filled and packed” Waters AME Church, which was “profusely and gaily decorated with the Stars and Stripes and other insignia appropriate to such an occasion.” The speaker focused on the “valor and patriotic devotion” of Black soldiers and sailors, centering the martyrdom of Crispus Attucks and affirming that the “first blood of the Revolution was that of the colored race.”384 In an example of the material culture of uplift and race pride, L’Ouverture was described as “soldier, statesman and martyr” in a classified ad by The Colored American Novelty Co. offering photos of “all eminent colored people” that ran in the Baltimore Afro-American for much of 1907.385 Other martyrs of this time were everyday Black Americans whose democratic- and race-mindedness were vaunted as exemplary characteristics. In a dramatic article in the November 12, 1904 Baltimore Afro-American, the headline blared, “A Black Hero Leaves Hospital and Drags Himself To The Polls Risking His Life To Cast His Vote for Roosevelt – At Present In a Critical Condition.” The author wastes no time in describing the article’s protagonist in martyrial – and political – terms, opening, “Wm. 383 “Anti-lynch letters for Hoover Mar. 10,” Baltimore Afro-American, 2 March 1929, 2. 384 Baltimore Afro-American, “Negro Soldiers and Sailors – Their Valor and Patriotic Devotion,” 19 March 1898, 2. 385 The ad, simply titled “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” ran on page 5 of the Afro-American on May 25, June 8, July 13, August 3, August 10 and November 9 of 1907. 135 Hamilton, the negro who was shot through the lung last Saturday in a fracas in Southwest Baltimore, is a martyr to the cause of Republicanism.”386 As the story presents it, Hamilton, gravely injured a week earlier and hospitalized since, risked his life to cast his vote, a martyr to both big-R and little-r republicanism. The Chicago Defender, reprinting in 1912 a story originally in the Richmond Planet, also uses martyr language to describe George St. Julian White, the Black editor of the Georgia Broad-Axe who was charged with criminal libel for reprinting an editorial from the Defender that criticized a jury’s condemnation to death of a Black man. The article concludes, “He is a martyr to the cause of freedom of speech, where the murder of colored men is considered misdemeanors, and where libels of white men are regarded as capital offenses. Oh, the pity of it!”387 In this period of racial uplift, even the natural deaths of meritorious Black Americans, particularly those who rendered service to the race, could be construed as martyrdoms. Breaking with the tradition of most Black American martyrs being men, in March 1915 the Defender ran a front-page obituary for Amanda Smith, the above-the-fold headline announcing, “Amanda Smith, race martyr, sleeps near her monument.”388 The article describes Smith, who was born into slavery and when freed spent her career working as an evangelist and pro-temperance activist, as having left “a monument to her race” and breaking color barriers during her travels in Europe, where she was received “in courts and palaces where never a woman of color had ever been received before or since.” Strikingly, the paper printed above the byline a gender-tweaked snippet from a poem composed upon the assassination of McKinley:389 “‘Dust unto dust,’ in solemn state she lies/Who bowed to death, yet wore a 386 “A Black Hero Leaves Hospital And Drags Himself to the Polls Risking His Life to Cast His Vote for Roosevelt – At Present in a Critical Condition,” Baltimore Afro-American, 12 November 1904, 4. 387 “An Editor’s Predicament,” Chicago Defender, 13 April 1912, 4. 388 Frank A. Young, “Amanda Smith, race martyr, sleeps near her monument,” Chicago Defender, 6 March 1915, 1. 389 The poem is credited to George T. Pardy of Chicago in Murat Halstead’s The Illustrious Life of William McKinley, Our Martyred President (Chicago, 1901), 372. It seems to have been a popular memorial for the assassinated President, as it also appears in George Washington Townshend, Our Martyred President (Philadelphia and Chicago: Memorial Publishing Company, 1901), 423 and Table Talk Vol. XVI, no. 11 (November 1901), 411. 136 deathless name/And wears in triumph on her mantle brow/The martyr’s crown, the hero’s wreath of fame.” That the Defender would frame the death by natural causes of a formerly enslaved woman as a martyrdom aptly described by an elegy to a slain President epitomizes both uplift and perfectionism: Smith’s piety, self-sacrifice and work on behalf of the race had elevated her from a childhood in slavery to a death worthy of national mourning. That November, Booker T. Washington died after a period of ill health, and he, too, was memorialized with martyr language at several services. The Defender quotes Chicago Public Schools superintendent Ella Flagg Young as saying in a funeral oration that he died “a martyr to his people;”390 a few pages over, a different article describes a Louisiana memorial service for the educator. It quotes Dr. J.F. Anderson as not only calling Washington a martyr, but also justifying his choice: “It is not too much to say that Dr. Washington died a martyr to his race. It is true that no assassin’s bullet pierced his body; no knife of the bloody homicide pierced his breast. Still he fell a martyr to the race.”391 Similarly to the Smith obituary, Anderson’s speech connects Washington’s martyrdom to his tireless work and the magnitude of his contribution to the race. As these examples illustrate, the first two decades of the twentieth century evince a blend of the influence of the race martyrs of the 19th century and the uplift-coded achievements of individual Black Americans. But beginning with the intentional and careful efforts of the NAACP to build an activist movement around mistreated soldiers during a time of global conflict, Black American martyrdom would undergo a significant and lasting shift to a clear and powerful indictment of the intractable inequality of the United States, who mistreated even its most devoted citizens because of the color of their skin. 390 Celia M. Mallett, “Hundreds Attend Washington Memorial,” Chicago Defender (Big Weekend Edition), 27 November 1915, 1. 391 “[----] Meet to Honor Leader: With a Spirit to Pay Homage to One Whom They Loved Young and Old Pay Respectful Tribute,” The Chicago Defender, 27 November 1915, 3. 137 “Crucified Upon the Cross of Race Passion”: The Houston Riot of 1917 Violence permeated the American consciousness in 1917. On April 2, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany, signaling the entry of the United States into the First World War. His speech before Congress cast America’s military involvement in the conflict as necessary in order to ensure democratic peace, producing the famous line, “The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.”392 But Wilson’s aspirations for peaceful democracy around the globe was far from reality domestically. The world certainly did not feel safe for Black Americans, who had been steadily losing their hard-won citizenship rights since the Reconstruction era and faced the constant terrorizing threat of violence at the hands of their white neighbors. As Chad L. Williams contends, Black Americans “quickly recognized the larger historical significance of the war moment as a potential turning point in their continued struggle for freedom and citizenship. Democracy was worth dying for, and the United States emerged as a literal and figurative battleground.”393 These battles were fought with both arms and words. While the danger for Black Americans loomed largest in the South, where lynchings and other overt violent racism occurred, a campaign of white-led violence in East St. Louis culminated in July in what the NAACP called a “massacre” in which white citizens “burned and destroyed at least $400,000 worth of property belonging to both whites and Negroes; drove 6,000 Negroes out of their homes; and deliberately [m]urdered, by shooting, burning and hanging, between one and two hundred human beings who were black.”394 Within a few short weeks, another uprising claimed the lives of more Americans in Houston, when on August 23 the soldiers of the all-Black 3rd Battalion of the 24th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army clashed with locals 392 “Address of President Wilson to Joint Session of Congress,” April 2, 1917. Bound typescript reading copy. Woodrow Wilson Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (021.00.00). 393 Chad L. Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 61. 394 “The Massacre of East St. Louis,” The Crisis, Vol. 14, no. 5 (September 1917), 219. 138 after weeks of mistreatment by the Houston Police. That day, Houston policemen had brutally beat and arrested two Black soldiers. As night fell, more than 100 of the battalion’s ranks, both angry at the unrelenting racist abuse and fearful of rumors of an imminent attack by a white mob, armed themselves and marched from their camp toward the city’s police station, engaging along the way in a confrontation that left 19 dead.395 The white press immediately seized on the racial dynamic of the event, with the New York Times reporting on August 25 terming it “the race riot precipitated last night by negro soldiers of the Twenty-fourth Infantry” and describing the event in terms that suggested its brutal, wanton and criminal nature, noting that “civilians and police [were] shot down and mutilated by lawless regulars.” The article tells of the soldiers “shooting indiscriminately” and of mounted policemen “surrendering their lives in vain efforts” to halt the “mob” while rosily depicting white Houston citizens as having “armed themselves and quietly gathered to oppose the raiders.”396 Sidebar stories highlight the actions white Texans had already taken as a result of the riot – the filing of murder charges by Texas prosecutors and citizens’ protesting to Wilson about the very presence of Black soldiers in the South.397 The uprising created far more problems than it solved. White fears of a race war had simmered since the antebellum period, and, as Williams writes, “white supremacists equated the presence of black soldiers in the South with potential violence.”398 The Houston conflict confirmed this fear, especially 395 C. Calvin Smith, “The Houston Riot of 1917,” in Anti-Black Violence in Twentieth-Century Texas, ed. Bruce A. Glasrud (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2015), 70-72; V.P. Franklin, “Introduction: Documenting the NAACP’s First Century – From Combating Racial Injustices to Challenging Racial Inequalities,” Journal of African American History Vol. 94, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 457. John A. Haymond, “Tempest in Texas,” MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History Vol. 33, no. 3 (2021), 52-53. For further historical detail, see Jamie Salazar, Mutiny of Rage: The 1917 Camp Logan Riots and Buffalo Soldiers in Houston (Guilford, CT: Prometheus Books, 2021). 396 “Army riot at Houston cost 17 lives; Negro troops ordered out of state; Congress will take up race question,” The New York Times, 25 August 1917, 1. The total number of lives lost was 19, but the main newspapers did not count Black deaths in the earliest numbers. 397 “Texas Prosecutor Seeks by Murder Charges to Have the State Deal with Negro Slayers,” The New York Times, 25 August 1917, 1. “Texans Protest to President Against Negro Soldiers in the South: Riots at Houston raise the entire problem as to the quartering and training of colored troops – Baker awaits full report from Generael Parker before taking final action,” The New York Times, 25 August 1917, 1. 398 Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 31-32. 139 because, as Robert V. Haynes observes, the August 23 riot differed from other recent race-based confrontations in that it was the only one where there were more white than Black deaths.399 As the world war heated up, it was clear that the United States needed all the fighting strength it could muster, but racist fears and attitudes stood in the way, particularly over the issue of training and stationing Black soldiers in the South. Indeed, just a week before, Mississippi Senator James K. Vardaman had delivered a “vitriolic address on the senate floor” highlighting the “inevitable disaster” of the presence of Black soldiers in the Southern states.400 For uplift-minded Black Americans, limiting military service based on race would foreclose a significant opportunity both to advance economically and to prove the worthiness of the race. Black journalists were careful to denounce the violence, even as they explained its context, in order to avoid allegations of disloyalty. But in the days immediately following the events in Houston, Black newspapers from around the country coalesced around two main points: That the riot unquestionably resulted from the chronic racist mistreatment by the police, and that prejudiced white people could use the event – or could have even engineered it – to bolster the arguments that there should be limits on Black military service. The Norfolk New Journal and Guide printed that an investigation was underway to determine responsibility, but noted that reports “indicate clearly that the trouble was brought on by harsh treatment of colored soldiers by the Houston police.” The article winds down with a mix of optimism and pessimism: It says that the war department’s investigation will “no doubt” result in assigning fault to the police, “where it properly belongs, if all reports are true,” but notes too that the Houston civil authorities’ parallel investigation is underway “with the view, perhaps, of finding a way to place the blame upon the colored soldiers.” In closing, it says, “It is also worth while [sic] to note that Secretary of War Baker has announced that the Houston riot will not effect [sic] the 399 Robert V. Haynes, A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 319. 400 Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 32. 140 determination of the war department to train the Negro soldiers of the draft army in the South. That the Texas rumpus was staged by Houston civilians to prevent that very thing is perfectly obvious.”401 That day’s Chicago Defender saw the events as directly related to the uplift of Black men via their military service, writing that the white Southerners “expect to see this class of soldiers act like servants” when the soldier “feels himself a man and EXPECTS TO BE TREATED LIKE A MAN.” The Defender blames white Southerners for trying to tear down the significance of the exemplary patriotic service the soldiers render.402 And a writer in the Philadelphia Tribune is quick to stress that while he or she condemns lawlessness and murder, they also know “the dirty, foul-mouth hounds who insulted and humiliated them and their system of ‘baiting’ colored men.” This article imagines that any violence done by the 24th Infantry had to have been informed by thoughts of recent racist violence, citing the East St. Louis massacre and a particularly brutal Memphis lynching in May of that year.403 The author stresses the patriotism of Black Americans, writing, “We are loyal to this land, we will help to protect all good citizens of whatever race or color,” but warns that while the “long suffering, patient colored man is still true to his flag and his country…there is a limit to endurance, and insult and injury will lead to blood-shed and especially in those portions of this democracy that have no law for the colored man, be he soldier or civilian, and no rights that the white man must respect.”404 The Baltimore Afro-American recalls the excellent record of the company of soldiers to suggest how severe their treatment must have been at the hands of the Houston police: “The uprising, led by a non-commissioned officer and participated in by 100 men, shows plainly how great the provocation must have been.”405 401 “The trouble at Houston,” Norfolk New Journal and Guide, 1 September 1917, 4. 402 “Texas police cause of trouble with soldiers,” Chicago Defender (Big Weekend Edition), 1 September 1917, 1, 6. 403 “Houston Riot,” Philadelphia Tribune, 1 September 1917, 4. The Memphis lynching referred to is almost certainly that of Ell Parsons, who was killed on May 23 of that year. “Mob burns Negro who killed girl,” The Columbus Commercial (Columbus, MS), 24 May 1917. https://lynchingsitesmem.org/archives/columbus-commercial-5241917. Accessed 1 December 2023. 404 “Houston Riot,” Philadelphia Tribune, 4. 405 “The Houston Uprising,” Baltimore Afro-American, 1 September 1917, 4. 141 In October and November, Black journalists and leaders worked to provide a counternarrative to claims of the brutality of the soldiers and thus preserve the respectability of Black soldiers writ large. The NAACP sent Martha Greuning to Houston to pursue an investigation of the event by talking to eyewitnesses and printed her results in the November edition of The Crisis. Greuning’s findings aligned with the initial assessments by the Black press: the “primary cause of the Houston riot was the habituality of the white police officers of their treatment of colored people.”406 Others fought friendly fire: An anonymous member of the battalion who claims not to have participated in the riot published a letter in the October 6 Chicago Defender – but asked to “please have all Race papers copy” – to argue for the character of the remaining members of the 24th, responding to the claims by Lt. Henry O. Flipper, the first Black graduate from the United States Military Academy, that “Negro Regiments are composed wholely of thugs, gamblers, and the scum of the Negro Race.” The author lists the accolades given to the regiment from other places it has been stationed, as well as its members’ ability to gain officer commissions.407 Black Americans could certainly see the reasons behind why the men of the 24th Infantry fought back, but the largest court-martial in American military history nevertheless charged 118 men with murder, convicting 110 of them in three groups. At the end of the first trial on November 28, 13 had been sentenced to death by hanging and 41 had been sentenced to life in prison.408 Most shockingly to Black Americans, the execution of the 13 soldiers was “secretly carried out on December 11, 1917, before the cases could be reviewed and without notification to the respective families.”409 These deaths marked a change in Black American understanding of the riot and its aftermath, as well as in the fundamental tenets of uplift ideology. Before the executions, the sentiment was that these upstanding, 406 “Houston: A National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Investigation,” The Crisis Vol. 15, no. 1 (November 1917), 14-19. 407 “A Protest,” Chicago Defender (Big Weekend Edition), 6 October 1917, 12. 408 Haynes, A Night of Violence, 322. 409 Smith, “The Houston Riot of 1917,” 77. 142 meritorious soldiers had been pushed to defend themselves by both severe and pervasive racist mistreatment, and their previously upstanding records should speak on their behalf and on the behalf of all Black military men. This understanding represented a blend of the belief in the power of racial uplift and moral suasion, and until December 11, Black Americans had hope that what seemed perfectly clear to them could be understood by their white neighbors. But the federal government’s willingness to put the soldiers to death with such opacity and haste dashed those hopes and read as a failure of uplift ideology – even those who sacrificed for their country in times of war could not escape the structural and punishing racism of the citizens, and now federal government, of the United States. The thirteen executed soldiers were now seen by some as martyrs, put to death by their own country. Williams writes that the executed soldiers, “became instant martyrs, symbols of both African American resistance to racial abuse and the government’s disregard for the welfare and legal rights of black servicemen.”410 The Boston branch of the National Equal Rights League was among the first to explicitly name the soldiers as martyrs, issuing a statement ten days after the execution that read, If the unbearable provocation by white Southern police and civilians and the splendid record of these soldiers in noble, brave, self sacrificing loyalty and service to this Republic do not mitigate the severity of their punishment, then we can only honor them as martyrs to mean American color prejudice and enroll their names as heroes in the fight of colored Americans for life, liberty and justice. This unrestrained severity in penalty, accompanied with degradation unnecessary and undeserved is but another instance of the utter indifference of this national administration to the sensibilities and self-respect of the millions of colored Americans, even now that they are drafted to fight for the country in a war for “World Democracy.”411 The League made some requests of Black Americans, asking that on December 23 all Black churches hold funeral services for the 13 soldiers of the 24th “who went to their death singing hymns”; on January 1 the Black citizens of all large communities march in a silent protest parade; and that “every 410 Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 37. 411 “National Equal Rights League asks for funeral services in churches in honor of executed soldiers,” Philadelphia Tribune, 22 December 1917, 1. 143 adult in the fifteen millions of our people wear a black badge for thirty days in sorrow for the death of those martyrs to color prejudice in the land of their birth.”412 Ida B. Wells-Barnett also bucked the trend of capitulating to “the pressures of wartime nationalism,” spending twenty dollars of her personal funds to create and distribute buttons inscribed, “In Memoriam Martyred Negro Soldiers, Dec. 11, 1917.”413A photo of Wells-Barnett wearing the button sometime between 1917 and 1919 remains a frequently published image of the activist414; its precise date is not known, though a piece in the Chicago Daily Tribune references the button being sold beginning December 22, 1917.415 The soldiers were also compared to others from the tradition of Black American martyrdom. The National Colored Soldiers’ Comfort Committee, helmed by Kelly Miller of Howard University and the NAACP, sought support for the families of the hanged and imprisoned soldiers. While again being careful to aver their loyalty to both their country and its government, the committee describes the hanged soldiers as meeting death “stoically, as stoically as John Brown at Harper’s Ferry.”416 This characterization of the soldiers of the 24th spurred efforts to seek clemency for the remaining men imprisoned and/or sentenced to death. As the Baltimore Afro-American recounted to its readers, “The secret hanging of the thirteen men caused a wave of protest, many influential newspapers joining therein.”417 The feelings of Black Americans about the treatment of the soldiers of the 24th Infantry are perhaps most comprehensively and eloquently expressed in Miller’s February 1918 letter to Secretary of War Newton Baker. The letter epitomizes all of the issues bound up in the matter: a patriotism that had 412 Ibid. 413 Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 38. 414 Ida B. Wells Papers, University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center, Series I: Individuals and Groups. http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/scrc/md/ibwells-0010-002-12. Accessed 1 December 2023. 415 “Negro rioters ‘martyrs,’ says Mrs. Barnett,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 23 December 1917, 7. 416 “National Colored Soldiers’ Comfort Committee Are Asking for Loyal Support in Providing Relief for the Families of the Soldiers of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Who Were Hanged or Imprisoned,” Philadelphia Tribune, 22 December 1917, 1. 417 “President Wilson Issues Reprieve for Convicted Men of 24th Infantry,” Baltimore Afro-American, 1 March 1918, 1. 144 long been nurtured and claimed by Black Americans, even as it was increasingly expected from them in order to dispel concerns of disloyalty during a time of war; a deep frustration with nation’s failure to hold whites accountable for racial violence; and, despite all this, a healthy dose of unimpeachably Christian forgiveness of white America for its sins toward its Black citizens “if the white man will even now allow [the Black man] the semblance of a square deal.”418 Loyalty to the nation in the time of war is by far the dominant theme of the letter, with specific references to patriotism appearing eight separate times in its four pages. Miller begins by writing that he felt it his “patriotic duty” to “express the feeling of the colored race over the deplorable outbreak at Houston, Texas, and the direful tragedy resulting therefrom.” Recognizing the “necessity of patriotic reticence in time of national peril,” Miller nevertheless stresses the importance that the government understand “the effect of its policy on the feeling and attitude of loyal and patriotic citizens.” This effect, he writes, is that the harsh sentences have “fallen like a pall over the spirit of the colored race,” and he enumerates seven reasons why. A significant one is that the riot was stoked by what Miller calls “race passion,” the animus behind lynchings that uniquely “swiftly overrides all restraint of human or divine law”; he provocatively suggests that the race passion behind lynching was aroused in Houston “on both sides of the color line,” suggesting that if whites can lynch with impunity when out of their wits in the grip of this particular mania, Black soldiers should be given more understanding in the same situation. But Miller saves the most impactful reason for the effect on the spirit of Black America for last, writing, “The Negro believes that this punishment involves an element of race vengeance and that its purpose was to intimidate and terrify the black man’s spirit,” citing the execution means of being “hanged like dastards” rather than being “given the privilege of being shot like soldiers.” Miller writes that if the purpose of this method of execution was to paint the soldiers with ignominy, it was “badly 418 “Kelly Miller to Newton D. Baker,” 6 February 1918, Papers of the NAACP, Part 01: Meetings of the Board of Directors, Records of Annual Conferences, Major Speeches, and Special Reports, Special Correspondence, 1910-1939, Baker, Newton D. 1917-18. 145 calculated.” Instead, says, “These men went singing to their doom as if consciou[s] of righteous guilt.419 In the minds of many Negroes these men stand as martyrs who were crucified upon the cross of race passion. No patriotic purpose is served when an act of the government produces martyrs in the estimation of loyal and patriotic citizens.”420 Miller’s comments, less than a year into America’s involvement in the war, underscored the wartime danger of the nation’s alienation of its Black citizens, even as Miller made certain to stress their patriotism throughout his letter to Baker. This understanding of the men as race martyrs had been a centerpiece of some of the organizing, as noted above, but the “Houston Martyrs” did not yet exist as a named concept, and the majority of the efforts on the men’s behalf were focused on classic tropes of moral suasion in dealing with the Wilson administration and other governmental forces. Similarly, up to this point, the men had not been widely or consistently referred to as martyrs even in the Black press. Their deaths and suffering certainly provoked emotional responses, with a few references to martyrdom,421 but martyrdom did not emerge as the singular overarching theme of the men’s treatment for some time. For example, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of the riot in the October 1917 issue of The Crisis, invoking martyrs, but the martyrs are not the rioters, but the untold scores of Black men and women previously killed by racial violence. To Du Bois, the Houston affair was different in that white people were killed in a racial incident: “Is not the ink within the very wells crimsoned with the blood of black martyrs? Do they not cry unavenged, saying: – Always WE pay; always WE die; always, whether right or wrong, it is SO MANY NEGROES killed, so many NEGROES wounded. But here, at last, at Houston is a change. Here, at last, white folk died.” Du Bois is 419 Many press accounts of the previous months had noted that the men were singing hymns before their execution. 420 “Kelly Miller to Newton D. Baker,” 6 February 1918. 421“Fenton Johnson Publishes Great Magazine,” Chicago Defender, 10 August 1918, 10. This brief article mentions a poem called “The Houston Martyrs” appearing in the first edition of Johnson’s The Favorite magazine. Other poetry, such as Archibald Grimké’s “Her Thirteen Black Soldiers,” published in 1919 in A. Philip Randolph’s The Messenger, contrasts the bravery and service of the infantrymen with their ignominious treatment and hanging, but does not explicitly invoke the language of martyrdom. “Her Thirteen Black Soldiers,” Trotter Review: Vol. 18: Iss. 1, Article 13, https://scholarworks.umb.edu/trotter_review/vol18/iss1/13. 146 careful to say he does not exult in the death of white people, but he sees the event as indistinguishable from white-on-Black racial terror, closing the article, “We ask no mitigation of their punishment. They broke the law. They must suffer. But before Almighty God, if those guiltless of their black brothers’ blood shot the punishing shot, there would be no dead men in that regiment.”422 Here, Du Bois – like many Black writers at the time – does not disagree that the men had committed a crime or disobeyed orders, but he protests that the men were harshly punished when white Americans habitually walked free despite repeatedly spilling Black blood. He wrote again about the hanged men in the January 1918 issue of The Crisis, but never referred to them as martyrs, instead focusing on the injustice of their harsh punishment while revisiting the theme of injustice in that “the hundreds of thousands of white murderers, rapists, and scoundrels who have oppressed, killed, ruined, robbed, and debased their black fellow men and fellow women…walk scot-free, unwhipped of justice, uncondemned by millions of their white fellow citizens, and unrebuked by the President of the United States.”423 The advocacy for clemency continued, spearheaded by the NAACP, which attempted to deal directly with the federal government. Shortly after Miller sent his letter to Baker, James Weldon Johnson delivered a 12,000-name petition to the White House in an appeal for mercy for both those imprisoned and the five who had been condemned to death January 2 by a second court-martial.424 The appeal was effective; on February 27, Wilson notified the War Department that he would suspend all action on punishments until he could review the cases in their entirety.425 Nevertheless, a third court-martial of 40 soldiers commenced on March 26, and 23 were found guilty, with 11 sentenced to death and 12 to life in prison. Haynes writes that, even as wider American interest in the Houston riot waned, Black 422 “Houston,” The Crisis, Vol. 14, no. 6 (October 1917), 284. 423 “Thirteen,” The Crisis, Vol. 15, no. 5 (January 1918), 114. 424 Haynes, A Night of Violence, 323; Franklin, “Introduction: Documenting the NAACP’s First Century,” 457. 425 “President Wilson Issues Reprieve for Convicted Men of 24th Infantry,” Baltimore Afro-American, 1 March 1918, 1. 147 Americans’ interest in the fate of the soldiers grew with each successive court-martial, peaking in the summer of 1918. As the punishments of death sentences and long prison terms reached 87, “black organizations across the country stepped up their efforts to mitigate what appeared to them as unnecessarily harsh verdicts.”426 On August 31, Wilson commuted the death sentences of 10 members of the 24th Infantry to life imprisonment, though he confirmed the death sentences of another six. In a nod to the necessity of Black participation in the growing war effort, he also authorized the publication of a statement explaining his decision. In it, Wilson affirmed that the review of the trials had confirmed their fairness and legal soundness but explained that his commutation of the death sentences of the 10 soldiers was because “I believe the lesson of this lawless riot will have been adequately pointed by the action already taken” and because he desired that “the clemency here ordered to be a recognition of the splendid loyalty of the race to which these soldiers belong and an inspiration to the people of that race to further zeal and service to the country of which they are citizens and for the liberties of which so many of them are now bravely bearing arms at the very front of great fields of battle.”427 Wilson’s statement is transparently attempting to smooth over the issue and retain the patriotic support of America’s Black citizens, but it nevertheless wound down the matter in the Black press. While the additional hangings of six more soldiers the next month received front-page coverage in the Chicago Defender,428 the matter largely disappeared from the pages of Black periodicals after September of 1918. 426 Haynes, A Night of Violence, 299. 427 “President saves rioters: Commutes sentences of half a score of Negro soldiers convicted of murder,” The New York Times, 5 September 1918, 10. The statement is also published in full in “More to be executed; commutes sentence of 10 – President’s review of Houston Riot case determines fate of 55 members of 24th Infantry – total of those executed will then be 18,” Baltimore Afro-American, 6 September 1918, 1. 428 “Five soldiers hanged for riot at Houston: 24th Infantry soldiers pay death penalty on gallows; no civilians witness the executions,” Chicago Defender (Big Weekend Edition), 21 September 1918; “Twenty-fourth Infantry soldier hanged for riot at Houston,” Chicago Defender (Big Weekend Edition), 28 September 1918, 1. 148 “I Think We Ought to Start Something”: The NAACP and the Creation of the “Houston Martyrs” But even as the coverage of the treatment of the 24th Infantry waned, the prisoners themselves would not give up on justice. They launched a letter-writing campaign to anyone who might aid them – among them the NAACP,429 Black leaders,430 U.S. Senators,431 and law offices432 – asking these groups to address the severity of their sentences on the basis of the fundamentally racist miscarriage of justice and stressing this issue as a matter of great importance to the race. For example, in September 1918, James R. Hawkins wrote to Miller from Leavenworth to share evidence he felt was not taken into consideration in his trial. Hawkins writes that the imprisoned soldiers “would like to get you, with some more of the real Race people to take the evidence and look into the matter. We are not after mercy, but justice, and we think the Race should see what we get it, and now is the time the evidence shows that the mob was the cause of the trouble.”433 The incarcerated men kept at it, with Ben McDaniel writing Mary White Ovington at NAACP headquarters in April 1920, “Dear Madam, I respectfully, and honorably, request you to please render me, and my comrads [sic] some assistance in the way of regaining my freedom. I sincerely, and honorably request you with tears in my eyes and that you please, and kindly 429 Sara M. Benson, The Prison of Democracy: Race, Leavenworth and the Culture of Law (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2019), 109. 430 e.g., “Marcus Garvey to Walter F. White,” 16 October 1920. Papers of the NAACP, Part 09: Discrimination in the U.S. Armed Forces, Series A: General Office Files on Armed Forces’ Affairs, 1918-1955. Group I, Series C, Administrative Files, Subject File--Military. 24th Infantry. 1920. 25pp. 431 e.g., on August 24, 1920, Isaac A. Deyo sent a letter to Senator W.S. Kenyon of Iowa asking for assistance in appealing for clemency. National Institute of Military Justice, “Returning the 24th Infantry Soldiers to the Colors,” 65. https://www.nimj.org/uploads/1/3/5/5/135587129/returning_the_24th_infantry_soldiers_to_the_colors__bookmarked_11-20-2020.pdf. Accessed 2 December 2023. 432 For example, James Campbell, an attorney in Paducah, KY, wrote in April 1918 on behalf of Walter Johnson, whose mother was employed by their office and who asked that the attorneys write to the NAACP and pass on a letter from her son “so he can get either a lowering of his sentence or a full pardon from the prison.” “Campbell & Campbell to NAACP,” Papers of the NAACP, Part 07: The Anti-Lynching Campaign, 1912-1955, Series A: Anti-Lynching Investigative Files, 1912-1953. Group I, Series C, Administrative File: Subject File--Lynching--Texas. Houston. January-November 1918. 41pp. 433 “James R. Hawkins to Kelly Miller,” September 1918, Papers of the NAACP, Part 07: The Anti-Lynching Campaign, 1912-1955, Series A: Anti-Lynching Investigative Files, 1912-1953.Group I, Series C, Administrative File: Subject File--Lynching--Texas. Houston. January-November 1918. 41pp. 149 render me any such aid as you may see necessary to be done.”434 James Coker asked J.E. Springarn in a May letter, “Have the members of the Fort Sam Houston trial been forgotton [sic] and are you willing to help those who cannot help themselves?”435 More letters arrived from the men over the span of 1920,436 and the NAACP also received forwards from others. Even Marcus Garvey got involved in October, sending the association’s assistant secretary, Walter F. White, a letter from McDaniel. Garvey let McDaniel know that his Universal Negro Improvement Association “does not deal with such cases” and that he was referring it to the NAACP.437 Notably, though the imprisoned men all repeatedly declaim the injustice of their case and the racism that underlay it, they do not use martyr language to describe themselves as individuals or as a group, instead appealing to the facts they believe exonerate them or the unjust nature of their “kangaroo court-martial.” They saw themselves as wronged, but there is no evidence that at this point in time, they viewed themselves as martyrs or were using that rhetoric to advocate for clemency. The prisoners’ campaign eventually re-ignited the attention of the NAACP, which had been focusing much of its energy on anti-lynching work, including attempts to secure the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, first introduced in April 1918, and to publish a retrospective of the facts of lynching in the United States between 1889 and 1918.438 But on November 17, 1920, Du Bois wrote to James Weldon Johnson a short memo: “Enclosed is a list of the colored soldiers incarcerated at Leavenworth 434 “Ben McDaniel to M.W. Ovington,” 19 April 1920, Papers of the NAACP, Part 09: Discrimination in the U.S. Armed Forces, Series A: General Office Files on Armed Forces’ Affairs, 1918-1955. Group I, Series C , Administrative Files, Subject File--Military. 24th Infantry . 1920. 25pp. 435 “James Coker to J.E. Springarn,” 13 May 1920. Papers of the NAACP, Part 09: Discrimination in the U.S. Armed Forces, Series A: General Office Files on Armed Forces’ Affairs, 1918-1955. Group I, Series C, Administrative Files, Subject File--Military. 24th Infantry. 1920. 25pp. 436 “Isaac A. Deyo to John Haynes Holmes,” 29 September 1920. Papers of the NAACP, Part 09: Discrimination in the U.S. Armed Forces, Series A: General Office Files on Armed Forces’ Affairs, 1918-1955. Group I, Series C, Administrative Files, Subject File--Military. 24th Infantry. 1920. 25pp. 437 “Marcus Garvey to Walter F. White,” 16 October 1920. 438 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States (New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1918). 150 on account of the Houston riot. I am writing an editorial in the December CRISIS. I think we ought to start something.”439 What Du Bois and the NAACP started was the wider understanding of the prisoners collectively as the “Houston Martyrs,” an effort that paired intentional, large-scale appeal to public opinion with the more traditional NAACP strategy of legal activism. Du Bois’s promised editorial in The Crisis was short but powerful. Simply titled “Martyrs,” it reads, Three years ago December 11, at 7:17 in the morning, thirteen American Negro soldiers were murdered on the scaffold by the American government to satisfy the bloodlust of Texas on account of the Houston riot. This was bad enough; but in addition to this there are today languishing in the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kan., 56 colored men sentenced to life imprisonment and 5 men sentenced to imprisonment for 15 years, all for the same alleged offence. This shameful injustice is a trumpet call to every American Negro and we should never rest until these men are freed.440 Whereas previously the 13 hanged soldiers had been sporadically referred to as martyrs in the Black community, now the entire body of prisoners of the 24th Infantry were worthy of the title – and, importantly, it was clear that they had been made martyrs by their own nation. Du Bois underscores the injustice claimed by the soldiers in their letter-writing campaign of the past few years, but he also taps into an emotionally and civically significant tradition by painting the men as Black American martyrs whose suffering is at the hands of a betrayal by their homeland. Du Bois’s brief piece laid out the framework for the organizing, spearheaded by the NAACP, for the next several years, and the case of the Houston Martyrs represents a significant expansion of the methods of the NAACP. The organization had initially “focused on the law and the courts as a primary arena for exposing injustices, publicizing its cause, and obtaining the enforcement of basic legal and constitutional guarantees,” as Patricia Sullivan writes,441 a direction further cemented by its written 439 “W.E.B. Du Bois to James Weldon Johnson,” 17 November 1920. Papers of the NAACP, Part 09: Discrimination in the U.S. Armed Forces, Series A: General Office Files on Armed Forces’ Affairs, 1918-1955. Group I, Series C, Administrative Files, Subject File--Military. 24th Infantry. 1920. 25pp. 440 W.E.B. Du Bois, “Martyrs,” The Crisis, Vol. 21, no. 2 (December 1920), 57. 441 Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: The New Press, 2009), 18. 151 1911 agreement to divide the spheres of activism between the civil and political work of the NAACP and the social and economic work of the Negro Urban League.442 But as Sullivan points out, Du Bois believed that the future and survival of the organization required organizing Black Americans around a “common vision of political social struggle,” and he used The Crisis in the service of this aim.443 In the case of the Houston Martyrs, the NAACP would apply political and legal pressure where it could, but it would also seek to influence public opinion by mobilizing local branches and seeding the Black press with information on the soldiers. As an organization that had, per Manfred Berg, “pledged itself to ‘active opposition’ against the evil of racial hatred and prejudice” primarily through oral and written argument and rhetoric,444 the NAACP began its rhetorical campaign to persuade the nation and its political leaders to pursue justice for the imprisoned men. Importantly, the epithet of “Houston Martyrs” played a key role in branding this effort across a variety of arenas. Within four months of Du Bois’s stated intention to “start something,” NAACP branches all over the country had already held meetings about the men’s circumstances and collected money for a “Houston Martyrs” fund. The Detroit branch of the NAACP held a “Martyr Soldier” mass meeting on March 31, 1921 that a letter to the national office deemed a “great success”445; an update in the April 21 Michigan State News of Grand Rapids reports that by that point, “over 4,000 signatures have been obtained through sending the petitions for the pardoning of the Houston martyrs to churches, societies 442 Susan Carle, Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 275. 443 Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 22. 444 Manfred Berg, ‘The Ticket to Freedom’: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration (Gainesville, FL: The University Press of Florida, 2007), 13. 445 “W. Hayes McKinney to R.W. Bagnall,” 7 April 1921. Papers of the NAACP, Part 12: Selected Branch Files, 1913-1939, Series C: The Midwest. Group I, Series G, Branch File. Detroit, Michigan, Branch, 1921, 86pp. 152 and other organizations and by individual workers.”446 Later that year, Johnson delivered to President Warren G. Harding a 50,000-signature petition asking for clemency for the soldiers.447 The efforts on behalf of the imprisoned soldiers continued448 and reached their zenith in 1923. That year, the Houston Martyrs were all over the pages of the Black press, thanks to the continued organizing of the NAACP, lately joined by the National Equal Rights League. The NAACP aimed for a second petition, this one with 100,000 signatures, to reach President Calvin Coolidge. It asked Black Americans to collect signatures by November 11, Armistice Day, which the organization restyled as “Houston Martyrs’ Day.”449 The association also placed its annual conference in Kansas City so that delegates could visit the imprisoned men. On September 1, 558 members of the NAACP made what The Crisis calls a “now-famous pilgrimage” to Leavenworth Penitentiary;450 there, both Johnson and Arthur B. Springarn addressed the soldiers. Springarn spoke to them in his capacity as the NAACP’s Chairman of the Legal Committee and promised, “We are going to arouse the conscience of that nation and bring pressure on public opinion, on Congressmen, on senators, on newspapers, until there shall be such a storm of protest that it will result in bringing ultimate freedom to these martyrs.”451 As part of this nationwide effort, later that month, Johnson sent a letter to “every colored minister” in America asking for their cooperation in organizing for the soldiers by hosting “Houston Martyrs’ Day” and preaching a sermon about the case.452 The choice by the NAACP to market the 446 “Report from the Detroit Branch of NAACP,” Michigan State News (Grand Rapids, MI), 21 April 1921. 447 Benson, The Prison of Democracy, 110. “Appeals to Clergy in Behalf of Men of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry,” Norfolk New Journal and Guide, 13 October 1923, 7. 448 The “Twelfth Annual Report” of the NAACP, issued in 1922, details the work for “the Twenty-fourth Infantry martyrs.” The Crisis, Vol., 25, no. 1 (November 1922), 23. 449 “Houston Martyrs,” The Crisis, Vol. 27, no. 1 (November 1923), 7. 450 “The Houston Martyrs,” The Crisis, Vol. 27, no. 2 (December 1923), 72-74. 451 “Address of Arthur B. Springarn at Leavenworth Prison,” Fourteenth Annual Conference - NAACP, Papers of the NAACP, Part 09: Discrimination in the U.S. Armed Forces, Series A: General Office Files on Armed Forces' Affairs, 1918-1955, Group I, Series C, Administrative Files, Subject File--Military. 24th Infantry. March, September 1923. 65pp. 452 “To the Christian Ministers of America,” 22 September 1923, Papers of the NAACP, Part 09: Discrimination in the U.S. Armed Forces, Series A: General Office Files on Armed Forces' Affairs, 1918-1955, Group I, Series C, Administrative Files, Subject File--Military. 24th Infantry. March, September 1923. 65pp. 153 soldiers as martyrs is evident not only in such large-scale success, but also in the individual letters accompanying donations on behalf of the men from across the country. Some include the donation and letter of Louise W. Davis of Cleveland, who raised $80.00 for the men by baking and selling fruitcakes,453 while the Harmony Club of Henderson, Kentucky sent $10.00454 and the Philadelphia Branch of the Socialist Party sent their “widow’s mite,” a donation of $3.00.455 In November, the New York Amsterdam News and the Norfolk New Journal and Guide published Johnson’s description of the association’s efforts, as well as its “enthusiastic” reception among Black Americans, crediting particularly the efforts of the press, fraternal organizations and churches and specifying, “Hardly a colored newspaper in the country but has spread the news of this campaign to free the Houston Martyrs.”456 The white press had also been enlisted in support of the men; the Philadelphia Tribune writes that “In the course of the campaign for signatures, the NAACP has appealed through the white press for signatures, with most gratifying results. Letters to the editors of white dailies appealing for the Houston Martyrs have been published in many large cities throughout the country, with the result that white people as well as colored are writing in for petitions and are sending in their names.”457 The NAACP documented their success in the case with several press releases in 1923 and 1924, all of which routinely used the epithet “Houston Martyrs” to describe the prisoners. These releases included everything from providing lists of allowed items for those wishing to “send to Houston Martyrs 453 “Louise W. Davis to NAACP,” 27 December 1923, Papers of the NAACP, Part 07: The Anti-Lynching Campaign, 1912-1955, Series A: Anti-Lynching Investigative Files, 1912-1953, Group I, Series C, Administrative File: Financial Papers--Special Funds, 24th Infantry Fund [Houston, Texas, Soldiers' Riot]. 1923-1924. 18pp. 454 “Mrs. Ora K. Glass to NAACP,” 16 April 1924, Papers of the NAACP, Part 07: The Anti-Lynching Campaign, 1912-1955, Series A: Anti-Lynching Investigative Files, 1912-1953, Group I, Series C, Administrative File: Financial Papers--Special Funds, 24th Infantry Fund [Houston, Texas, Soldiers' Riot]. 1923-1924. 18pp. 455 “Alfred Baker Lewis to NAACP,” 8 November 1923, Papers of the NAACP, Part 07: The Anti-Lynching Campaign, 1912-1955, Series A: Anti-Lynching Investigative Files, 1912-1953, Group I, Series C, Administrative File: Financial Papers--Special Funds, 24th Infantry Fund [Houston, Texas, Soldiers' Riot]. 1923-1924. 18pp. 456 “Enthusiasm for Houston Martyrs,” Norfolk New Journal and Guide, 3 November 1923, 9. “Nation-wide Enthusiasm in Campaign to Release Houston Martyrs,” New York Amsterdam News, 7 November 1923, 3. 457 “Over 23,000 signatures to Houston Martyrs’ petition in hands of NAACP,” Philadelphia Tribune, 8 December 1923, 7. 154 Christmas gifts” to releases as the number of petition signatures steadily increased, peaking at more than 120,000 names by the time it was delivered on February 7, 1924.458 In a little more than three years, the NAACP had waged a war of influence on behalf of the men of the 24th Infantry, both building a grassroots coalition of Black Americans and focusing on influencing governmental figures. This was partially a strategy of necessity, as the case fit the organization’s legal portfolio, but the rules of a court martial did not offer them their typical pursuit of legal strategy and appeals. Thus, the NAACP tried the case of the 24th Infantry prisoners in the court of public opinion,459 letting the groundswell of interest pressure the commander-in-chief of the U.S. Army. Though the NAACP relied heavily on the epithet “Houston Martyrs” beginning in 1920 to motivate support for the imprisoned men, they did not outline their precise understanding of the phrase in any publications. But the National Equal Rights League, an organization also pursuing justice for the soldiers, provided their perspective on the meaning of their martyrdom in a statement printed in the Pittsburgh Courier November 24, 1923. The group was calling for December 11, 1923, to be set aside in memory of the thirteen men hanged six years before. Describing their sacrifice, the statement surfaces the issues of patriotism, prejudice and worthiness of citizenship knotted up in the affair. To the league, the deaths of these men were clearly a failure by a fundamentally racist federal government that denied the esteem and rights earned by brave Black soldiers; what’s more, the hanged men are presented as volitionally dying on behalf of the cause of prejudice: “This day, December 11th, although a day of sadness, should also be set apart as a happy reminder that soldiers who loved their race and country 458 “Imprisoned Men of 24th May Receive Christmas Gifts, Says NAACP,” “President Coolidge Promises War Dept. Inquiry in Houston Martyr Cases”, Papers of the NAACP, Part 07: The Anti-Lynching Campaign, 1912-1955, Series A: Anti-Lynching Investigative Files, 1912-1953. Group I, Series C, Administrative File: Subject File--Lynching--Texas. Houston. 1923-1924. 35pp. 459 Jenny Woodley highlights the importance of public opinion in the work of the NAACP in the early decades of the twentieth centuries, noting that they viewed racial inequality as the result of race prejudice, which could be “eradicated through exposure, education, and persuasion.” Woodley, Art for Equality: The NAACP’s Cultural Campaign for Civil Rights (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 3. 155 were willing to die martyrs for a cause that was and is now sapping the vitals of the nation where exasperating, prejudicial racial animosities are destroying the fabric of our national honor.”460 This is an important insight into the popular understanding of martyrdom rhetoric and demonstrates that while it was useful in mobilizing large-scale empathy for the plight of the men serving harsh sentences at Leavenworth, it also retained some of the emphasis on volitional, brave suffering on behalf of the greater good that had been a hallmark of the Black American martyrdom since its inception in the nineteenth century. The last of the Houston Martyrs, Stewart W. Phillips, was released from Leavenworth April 19, 1938. The Atlanta Daily World wrote that Phillips’s release meant that the NAACP had ended its “long continued and steady campaign for the pardon or parole of the men whom all colored people regard as martyrs, but whom the law branded as rioters.”461 When Walter Wilson wrote an overview of Black American military history in The Crisis in 1939, Crispus Attucks began it, while the Houston Martyrs ended it. Appealing to the transformational nature of their sacrifice, White credits the Houston Martyrs with serving as the impetus for a new order requiring the right of appeal for all death sentences and closes the article by writing, “And today both white and colored men are walking the streets as free men because 13 courageous Negro soldiers went to their death on a cold gray Texas dawn early in December, 1917.”462 Twenty-two years after the initial altercation, the men of the 24th had been memorialized in Black America as brave and worthy members both of the country’s fighting corps and of their race – and symbols of the inequality that plagued the nation. 460 “Houston Martyr Day, Dec. 12 [sic],” Pittsburgh Courier, 24 November 1923, 4; “Houston Martyrs Day Call,” Philadelphia Tribune, 1 December 1923, 16. 461 “Last Houston Martyr freed from Leavenworth Prison,” Atlanta Daily World, 27 April 1938, 1. 462 Walter Wilson, “Old Jim Crow in Uniform,” The Crisis, Vol. 46, no. 2 (February 1939), 44. 156 Martyrdom & the Rise of Postwar Radicalism The spike in martyr rhetoric on the pages of the Black press after 1923, the peak of the NAACP’s campaign on behalf of the men of the 24th Infantry, seems to indicate a new understanding of the connections between seemingly state-sanctioned violence against Black Americans and the status of martyrdom. Over the next two decades, the Black press demonstrates a marked increase in the frequency of claiming Black American martyrdom in a variety of situations, as well as a willingness to ascribe it to living persons suffering as a result of prejudicial treatment. The NAACP’s concerted efforts in partnership with the Black press on behalf of the Houston Martyrs certainly contributed to an awareness of how Black American martyrdom could be understood in both historic and contemporary contexts, but a large part of the ascendancy of martyrdom rhetoric over the following years is connected to the rise of radicalism in the postwar era, itself a foundational component of the Southern civil rights movement, as Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore argues.463 As the years of the twentieth century wore on, Black Americans became ever more secure in the rights of citizenship they were owed – partly because of the rise in racial activism, and not insignificantly because of their service to the nation in two world wars – and the rhetoric of martyrdom found so frequently in the pages of Black periodicals of this time consistently serves to highlight the ways the nation is failing its Black citizens, whether through racist laws and policies or turning a blind eye to racist violence perpetrated by whites. Two specific examples of this appeal to martyrdom arose in the immediate aftermath of the NAACP campaign on behalf of the Houston Martyrs. Notably, these cases are described via themes of uplift and are connected to the folklore of the 1917 hanging of the 13 Houston Martyrs through a similar stress on volition – at the mercy of a racist nation, these men controlled what they could, their own piety and morality. In 1924, Spurgeon Ruck and Will Bettis, two Black men who steadfastly maintained 463 Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008). 157 their innocence after being accused of killing a white woman in Catcher, Arkansas in 1923, died in the electric chair; the Chicago Defender headline describes them as having died “like martyrs” and stressed their piety in the hours before their death.464 Similarly, the Philadelphia Tribune describes as “martyrs” the defendants in the case of the 1925 Ossian Sweet murder trial in which Sweet, a Black Detroit doctor, and ten others were charged with murder for using armed self-defense against a mob attacking Sweet’s home.465 The NAACP handled the Sweet case similarly to that of the Houston Martyrs; as Sullivan points out, the strategy to support Sweet and his co-defendants included a blend of populist, sensationalist journalism designed to evoke sympathy in readers with a hard-nosed legal approach featuring Clarence Darrow.466 This hybrid approach contributed to what Sullivan describes as a “steady upward path” during the 1920s in which the NAACP “had established itself as a major national organization that focused attention on the issue of racial justice.”467 Alongside the growing influence of the NAACP and its push to win the hearts and minds via the rhetoric of martyrdom was the rise of radicalism, which created an increasingly diverse coalition for racial justice in America and, as August Meier and Elliott Rudwick have argued, precipitated the rise of interracial direct action as a protest strategy in the fight for Black civil rights.468 Sugrue describes the vast array of northern race activists and activism in the era, noting that by the beginning of the “rights revolution” in the 1930s, a wide range of activists were “bound together by a common belief in the inseparability of questions of race and class.”469 He elaborates that activists overcame political, cultural, and social differences, forging a remarkably united front to demand full political and economic citizenship. Devout churchwomen, lawyers, laborers, 464 “Deny guilt, go to death chair game: Ruck and Bettis die like martyrs,” Chicago Defender, 5 July 1924, 5. 465 “Sweet trial will cost over $15000: Clarence Darrow gets on the job to free eleven martyrs,” Philadelphia Tribune, 31 October 1925, 1. 466 Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 120. 467 Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 144. 468 August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, “The Origins of Nonviolent Direct Action in Afro-American Protest: A Note on Historical Discontinuities,” in Meier and Rudwick, Along the Color Line: Explorations in the Black Experience (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 379. 469 Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, xxv. 158 Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, and Communists marched together on picket lines, lobbied public officials, and joined in lawsuits against segregated housing and schools. … Interracial organizing was never easy: It was plagued by misunderstanding and miscommunication and riddled with compromises. But it was also fruitful.470 One of the fruits of this cooperation was the proliferation of martyrdom language in the Black press. Over the next two decades, Black newspapers would attach martyrdom language to the panoply of causes across emerging civil rights activism, from the fight against school segregation in the North471 to lynching victims in the South.472 But most notably and thoroughly, radical labor activism was connected to discussions of martyrdom on the pages of the Black press – and not without controversy. Although the array of radical causes was swelling the numbers of those fighting for racial justice, the nexus of race, martyrdom and labor at times drew suspicion or outright ire among Black activists. Red Martyrdom & Black Activism Labor activism, particularly that connected to the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), tended at this time to utilize the rhetoric of martyrdom in an attempt to build a canon of labor martyrs to their cause. The language of martyrdom had been applied sporadically to those killed during labor strikes and protests,473 most prominently concerning the deaths resulting from the Haymarket riot in Chicago in 470 Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, xviii. 471 Eustace Gay, “Twentieth Century Martyrs,” Philadelphia Tribune, 2 November 1933, 4: “Negro parents, refused the right of sending their children to the nearest school, have gone to jail rather than pay the fine imposed upon them for allegedly violating the truancy law. They are truly martyrs, if ever there were any. They have the spirit that attracts the attention of the world. Last Wednesday two WOMEN went to jail, rather than put the brand of inferiority on their offspring.” For more on school desegregation activism in this period, see Jeanne Theoharis, “The Long Movement Outside the South: Fighting for School Desegregation in the ‘Liberal’ North,” in A More Beautiful and Terrible Struggle: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), 31-61. 472 Associated Negro Press, “Minister lynched by Mississippi mob was martyr for people: Rev. Marks is lauded highly,” Atlanta Daily World, 20 April 1935, 1. This article tells of Rev. T.A. Allen, who had been working to form a sharecroppers union in Mississippi and Arkansas: “There are Negro martyrs in the State of Mississippi, and they are giving daily examples that they are worthy of emulation. The Negro minister is giving evidence to the world that he is faithfully following the admonition of the Prince of Peace, that the greatest love that man can show for his fellowman is exemplified in his giving his life for his friend. The Rev. T.A. Allen, Negro minister of Marks, is among the latest of the martyrs of this state who have given their lives for their people.” 473 “‘Labor martyr’ is honored: Striking steamfitters, with band, attend funeral of slain man,” The New York Times, 30 March 1910, 7. This is the only instance of the use of “labor martyr” in the Times until 1942. 159 1886.474 But the language circulated anew in 1921 with the work of Socialists and Communists to declare as martyrs Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the two Italian anarchists sentenced to death for robbery and murder in a controversial trial marked by anti-immigrant and anti-radical sentiment. The tendency started early in their trial, with the issuing of a pamphlet in the pair’s defense by the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee of Boston in which, as the Montreal Gazette describes, “the two men are pictured as martyrs, who have been chosen by the capitalist class to die because they were active in strikes among Italians in New England.”475 The imagery persisted; in one of its first editions, the May 24, 1924 issue of the labor-focused newspaper The Daily Worker published “A Voice from Prison,” a short piece composed by Vanzetti. There, he styles himself a martyr after the fashion of ancient Christians, writing, “Vain were the chains and the gallows, vain the pyres, the crosses and the arenas where martyrs have been flung to wild beasts. …There is a cosmic virtue that transcends the power of all tyrants. For this I bear manly my cross, I know not to have suffered in vain.” In a nod to the instrumentally motivational power of martyrdom, the accompanying instructions tell the reader, “Clip this out. When you feel like becoming a ‘Tired Radical’ read over it and remember that Vanzetti was in prison four years when he wrote it. Then put it away till you need it again.”476 In 1927, the legal arm of the CPUSA, the International Labor Defense (ILD), published Sacco and Vanzetti, Labor’s Martyrs in another attempt to marshal the influence of martyrdom to their cause.477 Despite the stated commitment to racial equality of Socialists and Communists, there was occasional friction with Black activists – particularly over whose representatives deserved the title of “martyr” in an unjust America. A blurb in the August 20, 1927 Chicago Defender addresses another stay of execution in the Sacco and Vanzetti case and the fervent interest around its injustice, but attributes 474 For a fuller history, see Bruce C. Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago’s Anarchists (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988. 475 “Aid for radicals in United States,” Montreal Gazette, 30 May 1921, 7. 476 “A Voice from Prison,” The Daily Worker, 24 May 1924, 10. 477 Max Schactman, Sacco and Vanzetti, Labor’s Martyrs (New York: International Labor Defense, 1927). 160 the interest in the case to the men’s whiteness. The author points out that “in hundreds and hundreds of unmarked graves throughout the South lie victims of America’s lynch orgies – men, women, and children who were denied all semblance of trial” and asserts, “It is they who are the martyrs, not Sacco and Vanzetti.”478 Tensions between the Communists and Black activists over martyrdom heightened with the case of the Scottsboro boys, nine Black teenagers charged in Alabama in 1931 with the rape of two white women. The Norfolk Journal and Guide described the case as an “unheard of spectacle” that has “aroused national resentment because of the questionable nature of the charges and because mob hysteria dominated the trial of these boys, which amounted to nothing short of a legal lynching.”479 The NAACP did not immediately take the case, but the ILD did, with Black Communists taking a keen interest in the Scottsboro case.480 But the NAACP eventually took an interest, and for much of 1931, the two organizations battled for the right to represent the accused boys.481 This struggle came in the midst of a decade when, as Jenny Woodley points out, the Communist Party “threatened not only the NAACP’s position as chief protector of black rights but also its role as champion of African American culture,” though she points out the irony that both sides “used culture in similar ways during this decade.”482 One of these shared approaches was certainly the use of martyrdom rhetoric to further their respective causes. Black activists had cultivated a tradition of martyrdom to inequality, and they were not interested in having their claims muddied, even when the claimants had some overlapping goals. Accordingly, the Black press of the time conveys a deep skepticism of the Communists’ tactics and motives, with the question of martyrdom – and what was best for the Black teenagers – at its 478 “Voice of the lynched,” Chicago Defender (National Edition), 20 August 1927, A2. 479 “War in Alabama,” Norfolk New Journal and Guide, 25 July 1931, 6. 480 Walter T. Howard, “Introduction: Background and Context,” Black Communists Speak on Scottsboro, ed. Howard (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 10. See also Harry Haywood’s memoir, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978). 481 Howard, “Introduction,” 12. 482 Woodley, Art for Equality, 98. 161 center. As the Journal and Guide pointed out, “The color of these defendants is sufficient handicap, without the burden of Communism.”483 A different article in the same edition observes that the tactics of the ILD, which “had tried to make the affair an incident in class struggle” rather than relying on the obvious issue of racism, “seem to be utterly misguided.”484 As the Atlanta Daily World published in January 1932, When the ILD first entered its case, the negro press as a class gave it loyal support. But as soon as kindly intended criticisms were directed their way, they immediately turned loose the full force of their invective against anyone who had the audacity to even think the Reds might not be conducting things for the best interest of all concerned. The NAACP – an organization which has done more for the Negro than any other of its purpose yet founded – was berated and attacked in the most vicious manner Communistic brains could devise. As a result, the race's newspapers have gradually drifted away and today only an unthinking few can be found to rally around its banner.485 The press continued to fret over whether the Communists wanted to create martyrs to their cause and did not care what happened to the youths,486 with Floyd J. Calvin claiming in the Pittsburgh Courier that the “Scottsboro victims will now become double martyrs. They will not only become martyrs to the cause of justice in the courts of law, but they will also become martyrs to the cause of the Negro trying to maintain his own leadership against an invasion of lawless, destructive forces as bad if not worse than the denial of justice and legal rights.”487 When in 1933 Angelo Herndon, a 19-year-old Black Communist, was arrested and charged with insurrection for attempting to organize Black and white laborers in Georgia and sentenced to 18-20 years of hard labor in a chain gang, the Black press was prepared to make sure that the messaging around Herdon focused more on his race than on his politics. Many Black Americans saw Herndon’s 483 Ibid. 484 Coleman Hill, “The Scottsboro Martyrs,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, 25 July 1931, 6. 485 “The NAACP withdraws,” Atlanta Daily World, 6 January 1932, 7. 486 Vera Caspary, “What price martyrdom? Prejudice will be nourished, not defeated by the sacrifice of the Scottsboro boys,” Chicago Defender, 9 January 1932, 7; “Lawyers debate fate of Ala. lads: Boys in battle to save lives,” Pittsburgh Courier, 16 January 1932, 1. 487 Floyd J. Calvin, “Scottsboro Muddle,” Pittsburgh Courier, 16 January 1932, A2. 162 prosecution as further evidence of legal injustice in the South, and after his sentencing in January 1933, the Black press routinely described him as a martyr. The January 25 edition of The New York Amsterdam News placed a headline-sized “martyr” above his front-page photo, and the accompanying article opens with a claim that histories thirty years hence will extol Herndon as a martyr.488 The young man went on a speaking tour in 1935 as his case was appealed, which led to more press coverage and more martyrdom rhetoric. The Pittsburgh Courier tells of one of his tour stops and highlights Herndon as a martyr to “Dixie’s vicious code of ‘justice,’”489 while other articles focus on the huge numbers of the crowds acclaiming him as a martyr. An Associated Negro Press story printed in multiple newspapers in October and Novemer stresses, “Speaker after speaker at the farewell program proclaimed Herndon as martyr and a victim of tyranny,”490 while the Baltimore Afro-American referred to him as a “youthful schoolboy martyr to Georgia’s sedition laws.”491 He was also explicitly placed among the canon of U.S. martyrs by an editorial in the Baltimore Afro-American, which wrote, “So Herndon must go back to Georgia and to the chain gang, a martyr to his cause. … That he is willing to give his freedom or his life for his cause is the finest demonstration of moral progress in the present century. Here is a new Nat Turner and a new John Brown. Here is a man who loves liberty well enough to sacrifice for it, live for it, or die for it.”492 The power of martyrdom to inspire a strong response was noted by Herndon’s attorneys, who closed their 488 Associated Negro Press, “Seek new trial for Herndon: Young red defiant in statement: ‘Do with me as you will, thousands to take my place,” The New York Amsterdam News, 25 January 1933, 1. The same story ran on p. A8 of the Pittsburgh Courier January 28. 489 “Thousands Hear Angelo Herndon Here: Victim of Georgia ‘Justice’ Cheered,” Pittsburgh Courier, 17 August 1935, 1. 490 Associated Negro Press, “Herndon Acclaimed a martyr by 2,000,” Pittsburgh Courier, 2 November 1935; “Herndon hearing set for November twelfth: Herndon lauded as martyr by thousands,” Atlanta Daily World, 29 October 1935, 1. 491 “Better to be dead in Hell than in a Georgia chain gang,” Baltimore Afro-American, 9 November 1935, 23. 492 “Why Angelo Herndon Cannot Jump His Bail,” ILD Press Service, 12 November 1935, 4. The Claude A. Barnett Papers: The Associated Negro Press, 1918-1967, Part 3: Subject Files on Black Americans, 1918-1967, Series H: Politics and Law, 1920-1966. Series H, Politics and Law, 1920-1966, Topical Files: Correspondence, Newsclippings, and News Releases (Unless Otherwise Labeled). Left Political Groups and Parties Communists, ILD, etc.--News Releases and Newsclippings, Box 343, Folder 1. 163 statement in his appeal with, “When you limit freedom of speech you invite violence and when you make a martyr of a man like Herndon you create a real danger to democracy.”493 The “martyr” designation followed Herndon until April 1937, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Georgia insurrection law under which he had been charged. Notably, Black America understood the value and responsibility of martyrdom, even as many questioned Herndon’s use by the Communists to further their cause. Under the headline “Herndon Un-Martyred,” Frank Marshall Davis wrote for the Associated Negro Press wrote of the legal victory, “Although he no longer has a threat of death or worse hanging over his head, he can no longer be paraded by the Communists as a martyr.”494 But even as many Black authors were willing to write of their skepticism of the ways that radical organizations used Black figures as martyrs to their causes, they still sought to capitalize upon the value of Black martyrs in seeking racial justice in America. Davis closes his piece with a wink, writing, “Herndon has the nerve and the ability to embarrass other commonwealths as he has Georgia. This suggestion is offered to the Communist brain trust gratis.”495 Also focusing on his value to the race, an Atlanta Daily World editorial urges Herndon not to commercialize his martyrdom and, instead, to perform respectability politics through gainful employment. The author claims that “all lovers of liberty” of any race or class hope that Herndon “not detract from his martyrdom” by commercializing his ordeal and fame.496 Such a sentiment demonstrates the instrumental value of martyrdom at this time – it was not merely a splashy, sensationalist headline in the Black press, but instead, an identity through which status was conferred, and it was to be used properly to further the progress of the race. By both claiming 493 Associated Negro Press, “Herndon Case Considered by Georgia Supreme Court,” Associated Negro Press News Service, 27 January 1935, 18. In The Claude A. Barnett Papers: The Associated Negro Press, 1918-1967, Part 1: Associated Negro Press News Releases, 1928-1964, Series A: 1928-1944. January 1936. 494 Frank Marshall Davis, “Herndon Un-Martyred,” The Associated Negro Press Feature Release, 5 May 1937, 10. In The Claude A. Barnett Papers: The Associated Negro Press, 1918-1967, Part 1: Associated Negro Press News Releases, 1928-1964, Series A: 1928-1944. May 1937. 495 Ibid. 496 Jesse O. Thomas, “Angelo Herndon, What Now?,” Atlanta Daily World, 30 April 1937, 6. 164 Herndon as a race martyr from the beginning of his legal troubles and bringing him back to the respectability politics that had long been deemed essential to the advancement of the race, Black Americans were reclaiming their martyr as both a clear symbol of their best characteristics and a visceral reminder of the harm of the racist laws of the South. The tendency of Black America to claim labor-affiliated victims as martyrs to the race continued later that year via the reaction to the death of Black Chicagoan Lee Tisdale. Tisdale’s death, which happened at a Memorial Day labor demonstration in 1937, was presented as a martyrdom at his funeral and on the pages of the Chicago Defender, which claimed that he ranked “with the martyrs of liberty throughout the ages.” Describing the funeral, the piece says that he was “likened to Crispus Attucks, who gave his life so that the colonies might shake off the oppression of English imperialism; he was likened to Nat Turner, who gave his life that his people might be freed of the shackles of slavery. Tisdale, they said, will go down as one who gave his life that all workers might be freed from industrial slavery.”497 Even as Tisdale was clearly presented as a martyr to the cause of labor rights, those memorializing him took care that his service to his race was not eclipsed. As the campaigns for the rights of workers and of Black Americans minted more martyrs and occasionally cross-pollinated, the Black press took care to make sure that these figures’ martyrdom to their race was highlighted. Though the focus on racial uplift was diminishing as the decades wore on and a more militant form of protest grew, martyrs nevertheless continued the long tradition of being exemplary members of the race within a specific canon of figures whose suffering and deaths contributed to furthering the progress of Black freedom. 497 “Funeral for slain steel worker held: Man killed in Memorial Day massacre called martyr at service,” Chicago Defender (National Edition), 3 July 1937, 6. 165 The Ambiguity of Lynch Martyrdom It is clear that over the 20th century, the rhetoric of martyrdom was increasingly visible and motivational in the pursuit of racial equality. However, the respectability politics underpinning Black American martyrdom presented somewhat of a quandary when it came to addressing the huge, persistent and pernicious problem of lynching. Lynching plagued the United States in the aftermath of the Civil War as Southern whites sought to reassert their dominance over their newly freed Black neighbors, and while these deaths were both grotesque and unjust, it took some time for the language of martyrdom to be consistently applied to lynching victims. This division can be seen in the careful division between the NAACP’s anti-lynching efforts and their support of the Houston Martyrs. Scholars such as Zoe Trodd and Michelle Kuhl have pointed out the connections between martyr imagery and responses to the epidemic of lynching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,498 but the pages of the Black press do not reflect a larger-scale explicit connection between martyrdom and lynching victims until after the NAACP had socialized the notion of the Houston Martyrs. Despite the fact that the case of the soldiers could be interpreted as a federal lynching, the NAACP conspicuously did not mix their anti-lynching rhetoric with their work to have the federal government lessen the harsh sentences of the members of the 24th Infantry – perhaps because victims of lynch mobs were accused of criminal behavior, the very premise the NAACP vehemently argued against in the case of the 24th Infantry soldiers. The consistent use of the “Houston Martyrs” epithet in the Black press and in the large-scale campaign to support the men had certainly brought the language to the fore of Black American discourse, but the specific claim of martyrdom for individual lynching victims took longer to emerge as a consistent trend. The 1937 murder of Roosevelt Townes in Duck Hill, Mississippi, demonstrates one of 498 Zoe Trodd, “John Brown’s Spirit: The Abolitionist Ethic of Emancipatory Martyrdom in Early Antilynching Protest Literature,” Journal of American Studies 49 (2015): 305-321; Michelle Kuhl, “Modern Martyrs: African-American Responses to Lynching, 1880-1940 (Ph.D. diss., SUNY Binghamton, 2004). 166 the earliest instances of a claim of martyrdom for victims of racist violence – but that was initially tentative, with Townes’ photo captioned “Martyr?” on the front page of the April 24, 1937 issue of the Baltimore Afro-American.499 But again, the presence of military sacrifice could be drawn upon to bolster claims of martyrdom. The coverage of the murder of four Georgians – Roger and Dorothy Malcolm and Willie Mae and George Dorsey, who, it is repeatedly underscored in the press, had fought in World War II – in 1946 calls the victims “martyrs of a senseless prejudice”500 and details an anti-lynching demonstration responding to their deaths where Rev. Wade McKinney advocates for stronger action on fighting lynching and says that the “price paid by these martyrs cannot be avenged or stopped by mere words, or mere prayer alone.”501 Visiting the victims’ graves, Dr. Leonard George Carr, President of the Pennsylvania Baptists, remarked, “We came to place a wreath on this grave because we believe that there is still hope for that democracy for which George Dorsey fought” and hopes for the child of Roger Malcolm to be able to “exemplify the desires of freedom of these martyrs.”502 As this framing suggests, violence against Black Americans was increasingly read as contrary to the ideals and values of democracy – a major problem in the context of the Cold War. Thus, the signifiers of Americanness like military service were useful in creating a respectable figure and in showing anti-Black violence to be fundamentally anti-American. As Black Americans continued to solidify their claims to American citizenship and rights – and insist that attacks on those claims were attacks on democracy itself – white Southerners demonstrated some unease about the growth of martyr rhetoric as it applied to Black Americans who were the victims of prejudice, whether through lynch mobs or through unjust legal treatment. A letter from the white 499 “Eye-witness tells story,” Baltimore Afro-American, 24 April 1937, 1. 500 “Tragedy road – and where it led,” Chicago Defender, 10 August 1946, 7. 501 “Marchers, 500 strong, effective in anti-lynching demonstration,” Cleveland Call and Post, 17 August 1946, 13A. 502 Ruth Cornelius, “Baptists in pilgrimage to lynch victim’s grave,” Atlanta Daily World, 8 September 1946, 1. 167 mayor of Texarkana, Texas, purportedly in response to a Chicago church’s letter to the town about the lynching of Willie Vinson, was printed in the Chicago Defender in 1942. The mayor says that the victim knew what legal and extralegal consequences might exist were he to assault a white woman, and he asserts that the church “is taken up trying to make a martyr out of a criminal, which is damn hard to do.”503 Such an exchange highlights the claims and counterclaims about whose lives mattered in America, and they owed a great deal to the repeated, intentional work of Black Americans’ invocation of martyrdom language to make the case for the status of their race in the nation – and to morally indict the authors of racist violence. Conclusion Throughout the first few decades of the twentieth century, Black Americans continued to embrace martyrdom rhetoric in the fight to define themselves as American citizens deserving of full equality. Barely 100 years before, the tradition of martyrdom rhetoric had begun among white abolitionists who saw their volitional suffering as different than the suffering of the enslaved, but by the 1930s, Black activist organizations were utilizing the language and meaning of martyrdom as a weapon in the Northern and radical activism that formed the roots of the civil rights movement. The reformers of this period such as the NAACP were as intentional and innovative as their predecessors when it came to depicting Black Americans as martyrs, but they now had shifted the expectations of the relationship between Black citizens and their nation. As the middle of the twentieth century drew ever nearer, Black American martyrdom – even when invoked by different activist groups – had evolved into a clear and unflinching criticism of the failures of America premised upon a clear understanding of what the nation owed its Black citizens. While for years the foundational Black, American martyr was Attucks, who had stood up for America at its very foundation, the Black American martyrs in the period after World War I 503 “Justifies Vinson Lynching: Texarkana mayor writes in defense of lynching,” Chicago Defender, 29 August 1942, 1. 168 were now those who had been cut down by America and its systems of intractable racism. And yet, like Attucks, these figures were both thoroughly Black and thoroughly American, their sacrifice attributed to a sacrifice on behalf of the nation’s cherished ideals of democracy and equality as depicted in its founding documents. Over the next two decades, these connections would be drawn ever more explicitly by civil rights activists, resulting in an increasingly solidified canon of Black American martyrs whose suffering and death called America to account for its failure to live up to its own most treasured ideals. Chapter 5 “A Time for Martyrs”: Martyrdom in the Black Freedom Struggle, 1952-1968 “It’s a time for martyrs now. And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country.” Writing of Malcolm X’s February 21, 1965 assassination, Life photojournalist Gordon Parks attributed these words to X a mere two days before his death.504 They were also cited in Alex Haley’s epilogue to 1965’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X505 and made a dramatic appearance in Spike Lee’s 1992 film Malcolm X, where star Denzel Washington mutters “It’s a time for martyrs now” pensively in a dressing room before taking the rostrum for what would be X’s final oration.506 In the age of social media and the Internet, this statement floats devoid of context online and appears frequently in tributes to the slain leader. The consensus understanding of these words is taken to be X’s volitional acceptance of his impending assassination, acting the part of the acquiescent martyr cognizant of the sacrificial redemption his death will bring. I read them differently. While it’s certainly possible that X was accepting the likelihood of his untimely death when talking to Parks, especially because threats and attacks had ramped up in recent 504 Gordon Parks, “The Violent End of the Man Called Malcolm,” Life, Vol. 58, no. 9, 5 March 1965, 28. 505 Alex Haley, “Epilogue,” The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Mass Market Edition (New York: Ballantine Books, 2015), 436. 506 Malcolm X, directed by Spike Lee (40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 1992), 3:01. 169 days, what is certain is that he was contrasting his present, tempered views with his former militancy. The full quote tells the story: Parks explains that the conversation came up when the two were reminiscing about their time traveling together two years prior, when violence, passion and “the constant vilification of the ‘white devil’” marked X’s rhetoric. Parks writes that after the two had reminisced about X’s earlier activism, “Malcolm said to me now, ‘That was a bad scene, brother. The sickness and madness of those days – I’m glad to be free of them. It’s a time for martyrs now. And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country. I’ve learned it the hard way – but I’ve learned it. And that’s the significant thing.’”507 That it was a “time for martyrs” was a frank, factual observation of recent history – in the previous decade, many had been proclaimed martyrs to the ideas of equality and civil rights. But more importantly, the “time for martyrs” X observed was the increasing success of the nonviolent activism and specific ideology advocated by King and his allies – the opposite of the militancy embraced by the Nation of Islam and, until recently, X himself. This chapter historicizes the shift X recognized in his famous quote and describes how the predominant understanding of Black American martyrdom in the era of the modern civil rights movement changed, eventually coming to represent the Kingian ideology in a way that has had lasting influence on subsequent American understandings of martyrdom. In this era, the rhetoric of civil rights martyrdom was first the explicit domain of the NAACP, which organized a campaign of martyrdom rhetoric after the assassination of Harry T. Moore in 1952 and continued it with the death of Medgar Evers in 1963. In this period, the NAACP was again, as it had in the case of the Houston Martyrs campaign in the 1920s, intentionally steering Black American martyrdom rhetoric to support its specific goals. The NAACP’s utilization of martyrdom initially represented a continuation of the Black American 507 Parks, “The Violent End of the Man Called Malcolm,” 28. 170 martyrdom tradition that was deeply reliant upon the politics of respectability, prized individual excellence and value-signaling, and was premised upon an idea that racism could be legislated and educated out of America. Just as it had with the Houston Martyrs, the NAACP of the modern civil rights era held up valorous American Black men as examples of the ill effects of racism on exemplary Americans. This time, the association also relied on martyrdom rhetoric to help it defend its historic role as the nation’s preeminent civil rights organization amid challenges by groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Overall, though, the NAACP’s rhetoric of Black American martyrdom represented a legible continuation of the strain of Black American martyrdom that began with efforts to highlight the valor, value and Americanness of the race. But beginning in late 1963, as King’s voice grew increasingly dominant on the national stage, the rhetoric of martyrdom within the Black freedom struggle morphed to align with King’s theology and ideology as King put forth a rhetoric of what I have termed “melodramatic martyrdom” in which flattened, morally absolute figures were cast as instrumental players in a grand moral struggle. Whereas the NAACP, drawing on traditions of uplift that had underpinned its foundational ideas, saw martyrs as opportunities to prove the worthiness and Americanness of the race, King saw unmerited suffering as redemptive and martyrs as the inevitable victims of a national sickness of racist hate. Characteristics of a martyr, and even race, mattered less than the meaning of a death – although the identity markers that led to a legibility of martyrdom for white America certainly were valuable. In this vision of narratively persuasive martyrdom, each ensuing death connected to the movement – increasingly visible outside the Black press as the mainstream media escalated its coverage, and particularly so when white activists were killed in 1964 and 1965 – was proof of the failures of America that could only be corrected through immediate and unreserved racial equality. With King’s death in 1968, the long tradition of Black American martyrdom completed a paradigm shift and reached its pinnacle amid this American racial 171 drama with King its chief martyr. The story of Black American martyrdom during the modern civil rights era is thus one of both continuity and change, but its shift in the 1960s – and the role of King as America’s preeminent martyr – ultimately concretized a relatively novel understanding of the tradition. X’s assessment was right – the 1960s was a time for martyrs, and, with the lasting impact of King and his perspective, it served to set the terms of martyrdom thereafter. The NAACP’s Rhetoric of Respectable Martyrdom, 1952-1963 Numerous scholars have located a politics of respectability in the Black culture and activism of the early 20th century, whether, as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham influentially posited, within the women’s movement in the Black Baptist church,508 or, as Susan Bragg notes, within the era’s Black print culture, where activists responded to racialized stereotypes via examples of “visible respectability” that “provided evidence of black racial ‘progress’ and modernity.”509 Bragg argues that the visual imagery of respectability in the early 20th century was particularly important and that W.E.B. Du Bois’s editing of The Crisis reflected this concern, seeking to avoid “ugly Jim Crow imagery seen in other newspapers and magazines of the era” and instead aiming to “provide evidence of African American respectability and civil rights readiness.”510 Of course, appropriate gender performance is central to respectability, and Bragg details the ways in which such standards were reinforced through the art and messages of The Crisis.511 The rhetoric and imagery of martyrdom gave the NAACP another avenue for crafting a message about the race, and they had done so successfully in the 1920s via the Houston Martyrs campaign detailed in Chapter 4 of this volume. As lynchings and racialized violence continued into the middle of 508 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), especially Ch. 7, “The Politics of Respectability.” 509 Susan Bragg, “Race Women, Crisis Maids, and NAACP Sweethearts: Gender and the Visual Culture of the NAACP in the Early Twentieth Century,” American Studies Vol. 59, no. 3 (2020), 78-80. 510 Bragg, “Race Women,” 80. 511 Ibid. 172 the 20th century, the NAACP faced these issues alongside Cold War suspicions of anti-democratic views and decreasing influence within the sphere of Black culture and activism, particularly amid the ascendancy of direct action activist groups. With the high-profile murders of two NAACP employees, the NAACP had a potent opportunity to argue for both the Americanness of the organization and its centrality to the Black experience. As utilized to interpret and steer the conversations around the deaths of Moore and Evers, the organization’s rhetoric took on explicit ideals of respectability as the NAACP martyrs were used to prove both the loyalty and value of the organization. This strategy, and the intention behind it, is evident in the language used by the NAACP about these movement martyrs, as well as in the organization’s silences about other figures, such as Emmett Till, who were called martyrs by others but who did not fit the organization’s rhetorical model or serve its aims. Ultimately, the NAACP’s respectable martyrs of the civil rights era represent a predictable evolution of the history of Black American martyrdom, which had focused on individual valor and excellence in its creation of martyr figures, even as the rhetoric of martyrdom accreted new dimensions designed to meet the needs of the moment. Harry T. Moore, the “Martyr of Florida” The NAACP enrolled its first mid-century martyr with the death of Moore, a Florida executive of the association who was killed when his house was bombed on Christmas night of 1951. Moore’s wife, Harriette, was also hurt in the blast and died of her injuries in January of 1952. The Moores’ deaths are not among the most famous of the movement – indeed, they are not inscribed on the SPLC’s Civil Rights Memorial – but at the time, the NAACP waged a thorough public relations campaign that promoted Harry as a martyr to the civil rights struggle and, importantly, a respectable symbol of both Black American manhood and the good work of the organization on behalf of its abiding commitment to defending American democracy. 173 The bombing was immediately covered in the Black press, with nearly 400 articles addressing it appearing before the end of January. The news reports in the days immediately after the blast gave plenty of details of the death of Moore, who is most frequently described simply as an “NAACP official,” “NAACP head” or “NAACP leader,”512 but these initial pieces did not invoke the language of martyrdom. Even the earliest calls to action and rhetorical responses to the murder were demands for accountability for the crime,513 as well as some comparisons of the bombing to the scourge of lynching,514 but Moore was demonstrably not immediately considered to be a martyr by the Black press at his death. Amid the avid news coverage, the NAACP acted quickly to steer the narrative advantageously. Within the week after Moore’s death, the organization’s national offices and branches in the South had coalesced around a clear message: Moore had been killed because of his thorough belief in the democratic ideals of America. As William M. Boyd, the president of the Georgia NAACP wrote in a letter to the Atlanta Daily World on January 3, “His crime was that he believed [so] firmly in the American dream, the beneficence of a [sic] democratic institutions, freedom and justice that he wanted them extended to all persons in America.”515 This was a useful message for the Cold War-era NAACP; it came at the end of a year in which, as Kenneth R. Janken notes, the national office had explicitly embraced liberal anti-Communism in exchange for the promise of influence in domestic race relations policy.516 Furthermore, accusations of pro-Communist and other radical beliefs had dogged the movement for 512 e.g, “Wife of Fla. NAACP official is seriously injured by bomb which killed her husband,” Atlanta Daily World, 27 December 1951, 1. “Terrorism in Florida,” New York Times, 28 December 1951, 20. Reprinted as “Terrorism in Florida,” Atlanta Daily World, 29 December 1951, 6. “NAACP leader dies as bomb blasts home,” Cleveland Call and Post, 29 December 1951, 1A. “NAACP head killed,” Pittsburgh Courier, 29 December 1951, 1. “Latest bomb kills civic leader,” Norfolk New Journal and Guide, 29 December 1951, D1. “Fifth blast in Florida,” New York Amsterdam News, 29 December 1951, 1. 513 “Walter White hands FBI data on Florida bombers: Complacency of Gov. Warren hit,” Atlanta Daily World, 1 January 1952, 1. “NAACP protests Moore’s death,” Atlanta Daily World, 2 January 1952, 1. 514 “Our Challenge in 1952,” Atlanta Daily World, 1 January 1952, 6. A. Phillip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters called the murder “lynching by bombing” in a telegram sent to President Truman: “Randolph wants Truman to investigate Fla. bombings,” Atlanta Daily World, 2 January 1952, 1. 515 “Dr. Boyd joins with nation in deploring Moore’s death,” Atlanta Daily World, 3 January 1952, 1. 516 Kenneth R. Janken, “From Colonial Liberation to Cold War Liberalism: Walter White, the NAACP and Foreign Affairs, 1941-1955,” Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 21, no. 6 (1998), 1074-1095. 174 racial justice for years, particularly because of the tendency of Socialists and Communists to embrace issues of racial equality in the years of ascendant radical organizing after World War I. As Kevin Allen Leonard argues, top NAACP brass saw claims of Communism leveled at the organization as politically motivated by those attempting to discredit the association and its mission.517 Unsurprisingly, then, in a move to leverage anti-Communism for influence and fight off accusations of disloyalty, several of the organization’s earliest responses to Moore’s death explicitly tackled the issue by underlining the democratic ideals they embraced and Moore had died for. Boyd said, “In time, no doubt, many Americans will try to solve their conscience by calling Moore a Communist” before dismissing those claims and doubling down on the NAACP’s commitment to democracy, writing, “Moore’s death will crystallize the efforts and strengthen the determination to seek democracy for all according to democratic means.” 518 The NAACP’s demand for action sent to President Truman spelled out the murder as an attack on democracy, too, reading, “The killer of Harry T. Moore is the assassin of the American ideal.”519 Similarly, the Birmingham branch of the NAACP sent a telegram to Attorney General J. Howard McGrath spelling out the argument that democracy was threatened by the killing both at home and abroad: American prestige has been hurt abroad by a series of ugly acts of violence and hate in the state of Florida. The Christmas night murder of Harry T. Moore, a patriotic leader and fine citizen at his home in Mims, Florida spotlights a week in our democracy. The way Moore was killed reveals a new type of unlawful violence worse than lynching. Unless this type of terror and murder is 517 Kevin Allen Leonard, ‘“I Am Sure You Can Read between the Lines’: Cold War Anti-Communism and the NAACP in Los Angeles,” Journal of the West 44, no. 2 (2005), 16-23. Eric Arnesen complicates the narrative of Black activists’ embrace of anti-Communism in the late 1940s and 1950s as opportunistic or cowardly, arguing that hostility to communism (and other forms of radicalism) had a longer history in Black activist thought than is generally recognized. Arnesen, “The Traditions of African-American Communism,” Twentieth-Century Communism Vol. 6, no. 6 (2014), 124-148. For this chapter’s purposes, the reasons for the embrace of anti-Communism by the NAACP are less important than the fact that at the time of the Moores’ deaths, anti-Communist rhetoric was an important part of the organization's messaging. 518 Ibid. 519 “Wife of Florida bomb victim dies: Doctors say Mrs. Moore died from blood clot after relapse,” Atlanta Daily World, 4 January 1952, 1. 175 curbed it will spread until we are engaged in so much internal violence that we cannot defend against foreign enemies and ideologies.520 The organization's agitation was not subtle: They sought to frame racial violence as a new scourge that threatened to enervate America on a global scale, and NAACP spokesmen repeatedly returned to the message, making sure to underscore the patriotism and citizenship of Moore in their condemnation of his murder. And by the time NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White prepared remarks for Moore’s funeral, he had decided to double down on this message by invoking the language and imagery of martyrdom. Concerned he might not be able to make the service, White sent a telegram to Moore’s wife, still alive at the time, and asked that it be read in the case of his absence. In it, White blends the NAACP’s anti-Communist, pro-democracy rhetoric with a clear emphasis on martyrdom and what it means, writing in part, Those who committed this foul deed and those who in official or private capacity fail to do their utmost to punish the perpetrators of this crime and to prevent its repetition are rendering Communism invaluable assistance in undermining democracy. Harry Moore is as true a martyr of the fight for a world free from dictatorship as any soldier who had died on the battlefields of Korea. … never has it been more true than in this case that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Over his fallen body let us rededicate ourselves to the principles of human freedom for which he lived and in whose service he died.521 White’s statement is clever, conflating the perpetrators of the crime and anyone who does not aggressively pursue justice for it as abettors of Communism, strengthening the connection to Americanism by comparing Moore to American soldiers, and, finally, connecting his martyrdom to the martyrs of Christianity. What was a savvy rhetorical framing of the issue to meet the needs of the moment both drew on previous NAACP successes and framed its understanding of the relationship between the association, its martyrs and the Black freedom struggle. This is perhaps unsurprising: White had been working for the NAACP since 1918, first investigating lynchings on the ground and moving to his role as Executive 520 “Harry T. Moore slaying to bring Southwide protest,” Atlanta Daily World, 4 January 1952, 4. 521 C.A. Irvin, “Last rites for victim of bombing: Atmosphere tense as 600 mourn for NAACP head slain in Florida,” New York Amsterdam News, 5 January 1952, 1. 176 Secretary in 1929.522 He had seen the success of the organization’s Houston Martyrs campaign, particularly when it came to influencing public opinion and mobilizing action. As Jenny Woodley observes, the organization’s strategy for fighting lynching “was an extension of the NAACP’s idea that racism was formed by the attitudes of white Americans. Therefore, the solution was the same: education and persuasion.”523 Leaning into the persuasiveness of the martyrdom of Moore to the democratic ideals of America was the ideal blend of White’s past rhetorical tactics and his current ideological needs. The Black press quickly picked up on the eulogy’s forceful portrayal of Moore as a pro-democracy Black American martyr, and coverage of the story began to incorporate “martyr” into headlines and calls for action. Noting, “Another martyr has been added to the thousands who have died to advance the cause of freedom, justice and democracy,” an editorial in the Pittsburgh Courier called for a Black boycott on Florida oranges,524 while Clifton L. Williams wrote in the Norfolk New Journal and Guide that Moore was “at eternal rest among this nation’s martyrs…numbered among those noble souls who carried the torch of freedom to the end of their days, and whose pursuit of social and democratic ideals brought them persecution and death. And like theirs, Harry Moore’s spirit ‘goes marching on,’”525 a direct connection to the storied legend of the martyred John Brown. Explicitly tying Moore’s death to his cause, the Cleveland Call and Post ran large photos of the Moores’ bombed-out house under the bold header, “Where martyr for civil rights died.”526 A week later, the New York Amsterdam News ran the headline, “A martyr is born as Florida death drama ends,” calling the Moores “two of Negro America’s finest citizens”527 in an indication of the importance of respectability politics to claims of martyrdom. This is key: While uplift 522 Robert L. Zangrando and Ronald L. Lewis, Walter F. White: The NAACP’s Ambassador for Racial Justice (Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 2019), 4. 523 Woodley, Art for Equality, 97. 524 “Do you have to buy Florida oranges?,” Pittsburgh Courier, 5 January 1952, 1. 525 Clifton L. Williams, “Looking in on Norfolk,” Norfolk New Journal and Guide, 12 January 1952, A11. 526 “Where martyr for civil rights died,” Cleveland Call and Post, 5 January 1952, 1A. 527 “A martyr is born as Florida death drama ends,” New York Amsterdam News, 12 January 1952, 1. 177 ideology was outmoded by this time, respectability politics – particularly in the context of the Cold War American consensus – were essential to creating legible Black American martyrs. The next week, White’s regular column in the Chicago Defender added to the developing martyrology – and its reliance on respectability – even more explicitly as he detailed his last encounter with “the widow of the martyr of Florida.” There, he evocatively describes Harriette Moore’s injuries in sentimental language reminiscent of classical Christian martyrdom texts, contrasting the ugliness of her suffering with her inward and outward beauty. He wrote, “Pain – dark, shooting agony – kept her in agony from the time of the blast on the birthday of the Prince of Peace for nine days” and noting that her “large, beautiful brown eyes were bloodshot from her suffering. But even pain could not dim the inner radiance which came from inward strength and character.” Later in the article, he returns to the theme of her ethereal composure and beauty, writing that her “beautiful face was lined with pain and fatigue” and that the “last rays of a setting sun lighted up her gray hair until it looked like a halo.” White also describes in the article his introduction to the Moores, which took place at the Florida State NAACP Conference the month before. He recounts memories of Harriette laughing “gaily” at witty remarks, whereas her “lovely, brown face had clouded when other speakers and I mentioned the horror” of a Florida lynching.528 Such a description blends classical martyrdom motifs with the respectability politics of Black womanhood that are at play in her memorialization. As Elsa Barkley Brown has observed, Black women of Jim Crow America “relied on constructing not only a respectable womanhood, but, in large measure, an invisible womanhood” due to the denial of the “protections of womanhood” by the nation.529 In White’s retelling of his encounters with Moore, she – while notably not given the honor of the title of martyr, as her husband is – nevertheless quietly embodies the strength, beauty and propriety required of 528 “Walter White tells of last time he saw the widow of the martyr of Florida,” Chicago Defender, 19 January 1952, 11. 529 Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” in Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Bryant Simon, eds., Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 52. 178 respectable, middle-class Black womanhood of the era. Such a reading is strengthened by the fact that White quotes her only once in the article, detailing her response to his telling her to “be good” and obey her doctor’s orders: “‘I will be good,’ she said. ‘I feel stronger now that you’ve put aside all the things you have to do to come down here to Florida to help us. I am not discouraged for the things Harry died for.’” This is a particularly era-appropriate stylization of Moore and a rhetorical feat for White, who utilizes the widow’s voice only to express thanks to and faith in the NAACP. While White may not have gone so far as to call Harriette a martyr, she was nevertheless portrayed in his article as an exemplary Black woman – perhaps the highest praise a conservative, assimilationist middle-class organization could give her. The NAACP martyrology continued in the February 1952 edition of The Crisis, where NAACP Director of Branches Gloster B. Current wrote the centerpiece 9-page article, “Martyr for a Cause,” about the Moores’ lives, work for racial justice, and deaths. Again, though, the “martyr” is singular – Harry Moore is the martyr, though both he and his wife had died. The piece, headed by John 15:13 (“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”), has on its facing page a close-up portrait of Moore’s mother, Rosa A. Moore. Rosa is a picture of maternal Black grief and is captioned as “mother of the martyred Harry T. Moore, hate-bomb victim.” After describing the work of the Moores, the article concludes, “Why would anyone want to murder him? The answer lies in his continued fight for justice and his willingness to sacrifice himself for a cause.”530 The implication is that Moore’s commitment and tenacity in the pursuit of racial justice is the most threatening thing about him, underscoring the power of the NAACP and its operatives. In a little more than a month, the NAACP had thus created in the Moores a compelling and religiously resonant drama of suffering, with each figure – Harry, the head of household and NAACP man; Harriette, the paragon of respectable womanhood and commitment to the 530 Gloster B. Current, “Martyr for a Cause,” The Crisis, Vol. 59, no. 2(February 1952), 73-81, 133-134. 179 cause; and Rosa, the composed, if grief-stricken matriarch who accepted her son’s sacrifice – speaking to the extraordinary abilities of the race in a tableau evoking a Black, American Pietà. For the rest of 1952, the NAACP continued to lean into the martyrdom imagery and the idea that Moore had died for “the cause,” posthumously awarding him the organization’s 37th annual Springarn Medal, an event covered extensively in the Black press. The citation accompanying the medal returned to the same themes the NAACP had promoted earlier, averring that his martyrdom “in the truest sense exemplifies the truth that ‘Greater Love hath no man than this, than a man lay down his life for his friends.’ ….He was a man dedicated to a cause.”531 It is significant that Moore was a man dedicated to a cause: The sole focus on Harry as the “martyr of Florida,” despite his wife’s death as a result of the same incident, is perhaps unsurprising amid the context described by Michele Mitchell as “the masculinization of African American activism that began in the 1890s and became all the more palpable from the 1930s onward.”532 As the rhetoric around Moore-the-martyr developed, it reaffirmed the importance of respectable masculinity in Black American martyrdom and folded in the newest requirement for martyrdom: a Black American martyr was a good, respectable man, and he was actively working on behalf of civil rights amid an environment that relegated the race to the status of second-class citizens. This presentation of masculine martyrdom continued over the next several months, and references to Moore’s martyrdom cropped up repeatedly in the Black press, provoking powerful responses in its readers. As the first anniversary of the bombing drew near, a sibling pair, Alma Teele Whitaker and James E. Teele, wrote letters to the New York Amsterdam News and the Chicago Defender that show the emerging role of martyrdom in the civil rights struggle: Our martyrs are not recognized for what they are and given the lasting acclaim due martyrs. The late Mr. and Mrs. Harry T. Moore of Florida are martyrs if there ever were any. We need these symbols if we are to coalesce into a solid, purposeful group. If is for this reason that I believe that openly and fearlessly Negro newspapers should lead the way in proclaiming Harry T. Moore Day 531 “Springarn Medal awarded to martyr Harry T. Moore,” Cleveland Call and Post, 7 June 1952, 1B. 532 Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 245. 180 and in making of this couple who died for us all mourned martyrs. I propose then that on Dec. 25 each year at 11 a.m., regardless of where we are or what we are doing, Negroes all over America and the world bow their heads in silent prayer for two minutes. This I am sure will strengthen us in heart and increase our purposefulness as a group in the long, torturous fight for freedom.533 It is notable that in this letter, Harriette is explicitly described as a martyr alongside her husband, likely because of its co-authorship by a woman. Perhaps more notable, though, is the explicit sense here that martyrs are a necessary component of advancing the cause. The sentiment had cropped up here and there before; for example, Chester B. Himes had written a forceful (if pro-Communist) article titled “Negro Martyrs Are Needed” in the May 1944 issue of The Crisis which, though not particularly influential, was prescient in its insistence that change would only come if a white-supported, middle-class Black leader were to fall in the course of “the denial of some right guaranteed to every citizen of the United States.”534 But despite such occasional theoretical ideas about martyrdom, until Moore’s death, the Black American martyrdom tradition as it had emerged in the 20th century was a bit scattershot, being applied fairly widely and unevenly in the Black press even as it organically developed a sense of martyrdom as an accusation against a systematically racist nation. But with the national recognition of Moore as a martyr who had died because of his activist work, the NAACP had successfully folded into the long tradition of Black American martyrdom a necessary dimension of rights activism. Accordingly, the martyrology of “the martyr of Florida” continued to accrete details that demonstrated Moore’s volition and valor, as well as the uniquely important work of the NAACP. In a front-page interview with the Cleveland Call and Post nearly two years after Moore’s death, Moore’s mother Rosa is quoted as describing his commitment to his work in 533 Alma Teele Whittaker and James E. Teele, “Memorial to Moores,” Chicago Defender, 13 December 1952, 11. A similar, though not identical, letter by the same two authors and with the same message had run in the New York Amsterdam News the week prior. “Pulse of the public: Asks memorial period for Harry T. Moores,” New York Amsterdam News, 6 December 1952, 20. 534 Chester B. Himes, “Negro Martyrs Are Needed,” The Crisis Vol. 51, no. 5 (May 1944), 174. This sentiment and language is easily compared to much of the immediate abolitionist rhetoric highlighted in Chapter 1 of this volume. 181 the face of danger; the author notes that even as she spoke, she “fondled the Springarn Medal awarded her son posthumously by the NAACP last June,” apparently valuing the honor so much she had traveled with the token of the organization’s esteem. Asked if the sacrifice her son had made was worthwhile, she said yes: “[M]y son’s death has bettered conditions in Florida. I know, because I have seen it with my own eyes.” Most interestingly, Rosa Moore recounts a conversation she and her son purportedly had a few days before his death, reporting that he said, “I feel that I may lose my life over my strong convictions against racial conditions. .. But someone will have to be sacrificed. Some blood must be shed if we are to accomplish full rights in the United States. Jesus Christ, Lincoln, and many clothes have died. I’m willing to die if that is required to gain freedom and equality for my people.”535 It seems likely that this conversation is apocryphal, or, at minimum, embellished – not least because many of the earliest responses to Moore’s murder repeatedly stressed how surprising it was – which echoes the practice of embellishing the stories of Black martyrs in the historiography of the late nineteenth century with additional narrative detail, as described in Chapter 3 of this volume. Nevertheless, it provides a blueprint for how this masculinized martyrdom would thread through the civil rights movement, as well as how it relied upon a long tradition of martyrdom in creating meaning. In a little more than 18 months, the NAACP had nurtured a martyrology that stressed the importance of the organization in the work for equal rights, and it had put a death in the cause of the ideals of democracy at the center of this work. Along the way, the martyrology of the Moores had also underscored the Black, middle-class respectability of the couple and had affirmed their acceptable performance of their gender roles. With the rhetorical efforts around the memorialization of Harry Moore, the NAACP – with the help of the Black press – had reinforced the model of the valorous Black [male] American martyr that chimed with the martyr tradition cultivated amid the decades-long struggle for equal rights. Importantly, this 535 Thaddeus T. Stokes, “‘My Harry did not die in vain’: Mother of NAACP martyr proud of son’s sacrifice,” Cleveland Call and Post, 12 September 1953, 1A. 182 martyr promoted the tireless work for civil rights as a component of his fundamentally Black and fundamentally American martyrdom, and this martyr belonged to the NAACP. Medgar Evers, “Martyr in the Crusade for Human Liberty” As the 1960s dawned, the NAACP faced what Manfred Berg describes as a “paradoxical situation: black civil rights activism was soaring, but the association seemed to be falling into the rearguard of the movement and its methods began looking outdated.”536 A 1958 letter from NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins to Whitney Young conveys Wilkins’ view that the organization had been successful at fulfilling its founding goals: “We have won our propaganda battle. It is no longer a tenable or fashionable policy to discriminate racially. Those who do so are on the defensive. We have nailed down the propaganda victory with legal decisions.”537 Yet as activist groups favoring direct action grew more influential in the wake of initiatives like the Montgomery bus boycott, the Albany movement and the Birmingham Campaign, the NAACP was losing its iron grip on its status as the premier civil rights organization in America. Meier and Rudwick have argued that the organization was a victim of its own success, and that the ascendant nonviolent direct-action movement of the 1960s “arose not so much because of the earlier work of [A. Philip] Randolph and CORE, not so much because of King’s charismatic appeal, but because blacks were growing impatient with techniques of legal and legislative action.”538 Whereas the NAACP might have won its propaganda battle in making racism unfashionable and untenable, the organization was fighting for relevance among other activist groups. I suggest that with the murder of Evers on Jun 12, 1963, the NAACP again embraced and promoted its specific view of masculine martyrdom amid the media attention around the event, recalling its similar rhetorical efforts in the wake 536 Manfred Berg, The Ticket to Freedom: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration (Gainesville, FL: The University Press of Florida, 2005), 167. 537 “Roy Wilkins to Whitney Young,” 5 December 1958, quoted in Berg, ‘The Ticket to Freedom,’ 166. 538 August Meier and Elliott M. Rudwick, “The Origins of Nonviolent Direct Action in Afro-American Protest,” in Along the Color Line: Explorations in the Black Experience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 388. 183 of the death of Harry T. Moore nearly 12 years earlier. But this time, the NAACP utilized the press even more effectively in the service of creating their specifically organizationally aligned martyr, which placed the association back into the realm of relevance. Evers’ widow, Myrlie, realized this shortly after his death, describing in her autobiography her dawning realization that “Medgar’s death had given the NAACP an opportunity to reestablish itself as the preeminent civil rights organization. …In short, the children and I became a powerful public relations tool, which was just what the NAACP needed.”539 Evers had a long history with the NAACP. He had been hired as field secretary in 1954, setting up the NAACP’s first Mississippi field office in January of 1955.540 Since then, he had been a major figure in NAACP activism, with dozens of mentions in the Black press of his presence at the organization’s activities. He had already been intimately connected to the issue of race violence; in the year before his death, Evers had conducted the NAACP’s field investigation of the shooting death of Cpl. Roman Duckworth, a Black soldier and father of six who was killed by a Mississippi police officer when he did not move his seat on the bus he was traveling on541 and is now one of the civil rights martyrs inscribed upon the Civil Rights Memorial. Evers and Wilkins responded to Duckworth’s case after the typical fashion of the NAACP – working the legal angles and calling for justice – but notably, did not evoke the rhetoric of martyrdom in his slaying.542 As Evers biographer Michael Vinson Williams avers, “It is apparent that Medgar’s investigations helped to nationalize Mississippi’s previously ignored patterns of racial violence.”543 Racial violence was nationalized astronomically more dramatically by Evers’ murder in June of 1963. As his widow wrote, “There had been other violent deaths in the movement, but Medgar’s was the 539 Myrlie Evers-Williams, Watch Me Fly: What I Learned on the Way to Becoming the Woman I Was Meant to Be (Boston: Little, Brown, 199), 121. 540 Michael Vinson Williams, Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2011), 87. 541 “16-gun salute for soldier killed on bus by Miss. cop,” Chicago Daily Defender (Daily Edition), 24 April 1962, 4. 542 “Full military honors are afforded Negro soldier killed in Mississippi,” The Louisville Defender, 26 April 1962, 8. 543 Williams, Medgar Evers, 94. 184 first of national interest.”544 This national interest was quickly – and intentionally – stoked by a blend of the NAACP’s rhetoric of respectable martyrdom and a sentimental, image-driven narrative featuring Evers’s wife and children. The sentimental sensationalism started quickly: In one of its first pieces on his death, the Chicago Defender ran an article headlined, “NAACP chief’s 3 tots beg dad not to die,” chillingly describing Evers’s children begging their father to get up from the ground and graphically detailing the way his blood drenched the family station wagon and driveway, in which the NAACP t-shirts Evers had been carrying lay scattered.545 That Evers had been murdered within a day after Kennedy had delivered a radio and television report to the American people on civil rights, explicitly calling on Congress to enact legislation to protect equality,546 further dramatized the incident.547 Indeed, the Cleveland Call and Post ran both stories above the fold, knowingly twinning the bold headline “Mississippi NAACP leaders shot in back” with “JFK tells nation: Racial bigotry must be stopped.”548 Some among the Black press moved quickly to frame Evers as a martyr in a long tradition of martyrs to racial justice. Two days after his death, the Pittsburgh Courier had highlighted “wanton murders” in the South going back decades, opening their article with, “Add the name of Medgar Evers and the date June 12, 1963 to the blue-ribbon list of Negro and white martyrs who have paid with their lives on the altar of civil rights.”549 On the same front page, a different headline blared, “Miss. NAACP leader slain by assassin; on martyrs’ roster,” and opens, “Medgar Evers’ name was added to a long list of Negro martyrs when he was assassinated here Tuesday night as a coward shot him in the back as he stepped from his car outside his home.”550 At the same time, the NAACP’s earliest response to Evers’s death 544 Evers-Williams, Watch Me Fly, 121. 545 “NAACP chief’s 3 tots beg dad not to die,” Chicago Defender (Daily Edition), 13 June 1963, 3. 546 “Excerpt from a Report to the American People on Civil Rights, 11 June 1963, accessed 30 December 2023, https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/televised-address-to-the-nation-on-civil-rights. 547 “Kennedy shocked by ‘barbaric’ murder of Evers,” Chicago Defender (Daily Edition), 13 June 1963, 3. 548 Cleveland Call and Post, 15 June 1963, 1. 549 “Evers joins dead heroes,” Pittsburgh Courier, 15 June 1963, 1. 550 “Miss. NAACP leader slain by assassin; on martyrs’ roster,” Pittsburgh Courier, 15 June 1963, 1. 185 predictably condemned the slaying as the murder of a true American who believed in the ideals of democracy, chiming with longstanding organizational priorities. Wilkins said, “Every Negro citizen has lost a valiant leader in the death of Medgar Evers. The entire nation has lost a man who believed in America and died defending its principles.”551 But at a memorial service in Jackson June 15, Wilkins dialed up the martyrdom rhetoric, opening his speech with with a clear description of Evers as a martyr: “There have been martyrs throughout history…in every land and people, in many high causes, and we are here today in tribute to a martyr in the crusade for human liberty, a man struck down in a mean and cowardly fashion by a bullet in the back.”552 Later in his speech, he stressed the specific sacrifices of his organization, claiming, “The NAACP has had its shares of suffers,” and listing organization workers who had been beaten and/or killed for their work.553 Evers was afforded a full military burial at Arlington National Cemetery June 19; at this second service, the language of martyrdom was again emphasized. In his eulogy, Bishop Stephen Gill Spottswood called Evers a “martyr to the cause of racial justice,” elaborating, “He laid down his life for Negro Americans, that we might be free. God grant that he may be the last black American to give his life in the struggle to make the United States Constitution alive for all citizens.”554 Mourners in Washington, D.C. handed out handbills with his photo and the inscription, “He sacrificed his life for you.”555 This language of sacrificial martyrdom spread into editorials, with the Los Angeles Sentinel calling him “Medgar the Martyr” repeatedly in the next day’s editorial.556 The imagined influence of his death grew, too: Picking up on a common refrain that promised Evers would not have “died in vain,” Horace Sheffield compared the 551 “Mississippi NAACP leader shot in back,” Cleveland Call and Post, 15 June 1963, 1, 13A. 552 Ray Abrams, “Violence follows funeral: U.S. aide blocks cops in Jackson,” Baltimore Afro-American, 22 June 1063, 1. 553 Ibid. The remarks also ran in “Evers funeral sparks racial demonstration: College professors lead anti-segregation march,” Atlanta Daily World, 16 June 1963, 1. 554 “Evers is buried in Arlington,” Atlanta Daily World, 20 June 1963, 1. 555 Dan Day and Ernest Withers, “Full military rites for Medgar Evers,” Cleveland Call and Post, 22 June 1963, 2A. 556 “To a martyr,” Los Angeles Sentinel, 20 June 1963, A6. 186 shooting of Evers to the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, claiming, “His royal blood notwithstanding, the last remains of the Archduke Ferdinand did not receive any more attention and notice than did the earthly remains of Medgar Evers.” He went on to describe the funeral attendees a a “veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of Negro and white America,” including Ralph Bunche, Wilkins, James Farmer and Martin Luther King Jr. 557 The message was clear: Medgar-the-Martyr was an exemplary race man whose death would serve an instrumentally valuable role in obtaining Black freedom. This sentiment was reinforced several days later, when Bunche, then undersecretary at the U.N. and a member of the NAACP Board of Directors, wrote an essay on his return trip from Evers’s funeral that was published in the Atlanta Daily World, Chicago Defender, Cleveland Call and Post and Michigan Chronicle. In it, Bunche says that he attended the funeral “to thank a dedicated and courageous man who died for a cause as righteous as any cause can be, and who was a hero and is a martyr in the truest and noblest sense.”558 The NAACP continued its memorialization of Evers as a martyr when they posthumously awarded him the 1963 Springarn Medal, just as they had done for Moore in 1952. The citation accompanying this medal has developed significantly since Moore’s. It spells out not only what the organization believed about Evers, but how they saw his and others’ martyrdom in relation to their mission, reading in part, ...Medgar Wiley Evers joins those other NAACP leaders martyred in the Fight for Freedom – Harry T. Moore at Mims, Fla., 1951, and the Reverend George W. Lee, at Belzoni, Miss., 1955. … A veteran of World War II, he knew the meaning of danger and the need to face it without fear. He sacrificed his life not only for his race but also for his country – for the American dream of freedom, justice, and equality for all. This 48th Springarn Medal is awarded posthumously to Medgar Evers with our vow that his supreme sacrifice shall not have been made in vain, that there shall be no turning back from the struggle, which ended for him on June 12, 1963, until every American is truly a free man enjoying equal rights and privileges with all his fellow citizens.559 557 Horace L. Sheffield, “Death of Medgar Evers inspires fight for rights: Medgar Evers has not died in vain,” Michigan Chronicle, 22 June 1963, 1. 558 Ralph Bunche, “Why I Went to Jackson,” Atlanta Daily World, 23 June 1963, A4. Also ran as “Ralph Bunche Wisdom,” Chicago Daily Defender, 26 June 1963, 12; “Why I Went to Jackson,” Cleveland Call and Post, 29 June 1963, 1C; “Why I Went to Jackson,” Michigan Chronicle, 29 June 1963, 6. 559 “Citation for Medgar W. Evers, 48th Springarn Medalist,” The Crisis, Vol. 70, no. 7, 404. 187 In this laudatory statement, the NAACP accomplished several rhetorical tricks. It reinforced its own martyrology, drawing in even figures like Lee, who had not been widely lauded by the organization at the time of his death, likely because of its proximity to the unexpected death of Walter White and the resulting leadership change to Roy Wilkins;560 furthermore, it aligned the association with the shared pro-democracy civic ideals of the Cold War consensus and again underscored the appeal to American ideals and identity at the center of their mission. Importantly, this appeal to Evers as a great American extended outside of the Black press and community. The media focus on Evers – and his martyrdom – was picked up by the national media in ways that had not yet happened as widely, if at all, for other cases of Black American martyrdom. Emmett Till had appeared in a brief Life editorial October 10, 1955, but in it, he was described primarily as an innocent child worthy of protection – not a martyr.561 But for Evers, the New York Times ran a brief piece, quoting him as saying, “If I die, it will be in a good cause. I’ve been fighting for America just as much as the soldiers of Vietnam.” Connecting his Americanness – and value – to his military service, the article says, “He knew, this veteran of World War II, what it meant to serve his country. Does this country know how to serve him, how to make his sacrifice worthwhile?”562 560 Despite the outcry over his death, in the immediate days after Lee’s murder, he was depicted not as a martyr, but rather as a lynching victim. The NAACP came out forcefully against the “atmosphere of racial hatred and intimidation” nurtured by the White Citizens’ Councils in the South (“Tension mounts as Roy Wilkins flays Mississippi lynching,” Michigan Chronicle, 28 May 1955, 1), but the national organization conspicuously did not call Lee a martyr as it had so consistently and carefully done for Moore three years before. I attribute the initial absence of martyrdom rhetoric in the case of Lee’s murder primarily to the change in leadership at the NAACP; White had died suddenly that March, and Wilkins had been unanimously voted in as Executive Secretary only a month before Lee’s death. White, the architect of the anti-Communist, pro-democracy, masculine NAACP martyr, was no longer the author of the statements about high-profile deaths. Instead, Wilkins – who, per biographer Yvonne Ryan, “believed that responding to a single event would have little effect” and instead pursued wider reforms via civil rights legislation and the promotion of civic equality– was the officer of the organization who would speak on these matters. In responding to such incidents, Wilkins preferred targeted action in the halls of power. Yvonne Ryan, Roy Wilkins: The Quiet Revolutionary and the NAACP (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 51-52, 55. 561 “In memoriam, Emmett Till,” Life, 10 October 1955, 48. 562 “Medgar Evers,” The New York Times, 15 June 1963, 22. 188 Most consequentially, Life magazine paid a significant amount of attention to Evers. It first ran a short, sensational piece June 21 featuring a large photograph of the bloodstained driveway where he was shot next to an even bigger photo of Evers escorting Lena Horne into a Jackson desegregation rally,563 twinning celebrity and gore in a way sure to provoke the interest of its readers. But the next week’s issue offered a much more subdued and respectful take on his death. On its cover was a poignant photo of Myrlie Evers and her son at the funeral; dressed in a simple black dress, pearls and white, elbow-length gloves, the widow comforts her crying son under the headline “A Martyr – and the Negro Presses On.”564 Inside, Myrlie had penned her own memorial of her husband, which ran across four pages and was accompanied by photographs from his Arlington burial, where the casket was surrounded by uniformed soldiers in a perfect tableau of American valor. The piece is thick with personal detail, including Myrlie’s account of a foreboding sense of Medgar’s potential to die for the cause, and while she does not explicitly refer to her husband as a martyr, she writes, “He was so willing to give his life that I feel his death has served a certain purpose.”565 Her essay made an impression on some of Life’s readers, who wrote to the magazine about how it had impacted them. Again appealing to the respectability politics and gender roles of the era, one writer called Evers’s son a “manly boy” and his wife a “dignified mother,” sharing that the image “cannot help but win support for the cause his father espoused”;566 another identified himself as 84 years old and noted simply, “your true story by Myrlie Evers was to me the best and saddest story I have ever read.”567 Brenda Tindal calls the significance of this moment “profound” and suggests that Myrlie Evers’s portrayal in Life “had the uncanny ability to make legible both the cost and legitimate aims of the 563 “A trail of blood – a Negro dies,” Life, 21 June 1963, 28-29. 564 Life, 28 June 1963, cover. 565 Myrlie Evers, “‘He said he wouldn’t mind dying – if…,” Life, 28 June 1963, 37. 566 “Mrs. Arthur S. Moore to Life,” 19 July 1963, 21. 567 “Sam T. Morrison to Life,” 19 July 1963, 21. 189 black freedom struggle. It refashioned notions of black motherhood and suggested that even in the face of tragedy, black women could emerge as paragons of strength and ladyhood.”568 I suggest that, in addition, it helped to disseminate and solidify in the wider American zeitgeist the idea of a Black American martyrdom in which its martyrs (and their loved ones) necessarily performed respectable Americanness and respectable Blackness. Thus, for example, while some white Americans of the time could connect emotionally with the death of Till and the grief of his mother, he was not an exemplary martyr to white America. But Evers, the World War II veteran, hardworking provider and devoted family man whose martyrdom was reinforced by specific and repeated rhetoric from the most powerful figures in the NAACP, was a legible martyr to a wider swath of America. This respectability was underscored by the honor shown to Evers’s family by President Kennedy, who invited his brother, widow and children to the White House, a visit covered thoroughly in the Black press, which described the family as “signally honored by President Kennedy in a gesture combining sympathy and respect.”569 While he was another figure in what I have argued was a long, connected tradition of Black American martyrdom – and would thus have been easily understood by the community that understood and nurtured that tradition – the presentation of Evers in the Black and white press, bolstered by a photogenic family and eloquent widow who had been personally invited to the White House by the President, allowed for white America to see a Black civil rights activist as capable of martyrdom to America and its principles of democracy. This rhetorical feat was exactly what the NAACP had been arguing since 568 Brenda Tindal, “‘Its Own Special Attraction’: Meditations on Martyrdom and the Iconicity of Civil Rights,” in ConFiguring America: Iconic Figures, Visuality, and the American Identity, ed. Klaus Reiser-Wohlfarter, Michael Fuchs, Michael Eileras, Michal Phillps, and Karina Eileraas (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2013), 268. Rebecca Ann Wanzo tackles the larger question of which stories of Black women’s suffering are privileged in America and why, noting that those that do often reinforce white-coded heteronormativity (as Evers’s story certainly did) in The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009). 569 Adolph J. Slaughter, “Widow visits JFK: 25,000 view remains, 600 cars in Evers cortege to Arlington,” Baltimore Afro-American, 29 June 1963, 1; “Evers’ family visits JFK in White House,” Cleveland Call and Post, 29 June 1963, 4C. 190 the death of Moore more than a decade earlier. In this context, Evers’s martyrdom was both a strategic boon for the movement (and, of course, the NAACP) and a way of appealing to shared civic values to further the message and aims of the Black freedom struggle. As Wendy L. Wall has argued, while the issue of race had somewhat complicated the carefully built American consensus of the mid-century, civil rights activists increasingly utilized the “cultural lever” of the “language of individual rights, faith and freedom”570 in their efforts to bring about racial justice. Evers as a Black American martyr in 1963 is just such an example of the combined power of rhetoric, imagery and the midcentury American consensus, and the success of his public reception contributed to the furtherance of still more widely disseminated martyrdom language in the years to come. As the martyrdoms of Moore and Evers demonstrate – as does the organization’s lack of interest in claiming martyrdom for Till571 – between the years of 1951 and 1963, the NAACP had influentially built its own remarkably consistent organizational martyrology from which they derived racial authority and through which they argued for the respectability of Black Americans and 570 Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the ‘American Way’: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 285. 571 Even when pressed for action and comment, the NAACP, despite mobilizing meetings and collections to address the epidemic of racist violence that led to Till’s murder (“Lynch case verdict stirs whole nation,” Baltimore Afro-American, 8 October 1955, 9) still did not issue statements about the boy’s martyrdom; instead, Wilkins offered “in response to numerous inquiries from all sections of the country about the role of the NAACP in the Emmett Till case” a “seven-point program of action,” noting that the NAACP’s hands were tied in terms of the trial, but that they would work on a “long-range program” that addressed discrimination more widely (“Mississippi terror,” The Crisis Vol. 62, no. 10 (December 1955), 623-624). In fact, the coverage in The Crisis in November and December of 1955 was the opposite of sensationalism, offering minimal information about Till or his murder except the above strategic plan and a roundup of the way the French press had responded to his death (“L’affaire Till in the French press,” The Crisis Vol. 62, no. 10 (December 1955), 596-602). Further distancing their messages, in November, the organization had also called off Bradley’s appearances on an NAACP-sponsored tour to 11 West Coast cities, reportedly over a disagreement about compensation, and replaced her with Till’s great-uncle Moses Wright. Notably, the organization’s focus on the respectability politics of martyrdom may have played a role in the decision – as the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser reported, “But at least a contributing factor [to the cancellation] must have been the revelation after the Till trial that the boy’s father did not, as had been said, die a hero’s death fighting for American freedom, but was instead executed for rape and murder in Italy.” The article, though appearing in a white paper in the South, takes care to clarify that Till’s father’s alleged crime does not justify his murder or besmirch his mother – but it does note that “it tends to lessen her value to the NAACP as a touring martyr” (“Tour canceled,” Montgomery Advertiser, 9 November 1955. In Papers of the NAACP, Part 18. Special Subjects, 1940-1955, Series C: General Office Files: Justice Department-White Supremacy, Group II, Series A, General Office File, Mississippi Pressures-Witness Fund, 1955). 191 justified their pursuit of equal rights under the auspices of the tenets of American democracy. But the NAACP’s specific, activism-based and respectable vision of Black American martyrdom would not go unchallenged in American discourse for much longer. As 1963 wore on, two key events – the murder of six children in Birmingham and the assassination of Kennedy – would allow King and the SCLC to reshape the rhetoric of Black American martyrdom in lasting ways. The Melodramatic Martyrdom of Martin Luther King Jr. In November of 1963, a year that saw the murders of Evers, six Birmingham children and President John F. Kennedy, the editorial board of the Michigan Chronicle wrote, “These victims are the martyrs of peace, justice and freedom,” describing their deaths as the result of a “society sick from the gnawing, infectious cancer of hate.”572 This was a stark change: No longer was Black American martyrdom derived from a valorous commitment to America and its ideals – it was a symptom of the rampant, unchecked national disease of racism. The trajectory of Black American martyrdom during the 20th century had slowly been shifting from its 19th-century origins of exemplary Black figures performing their Americanness via civic duties and the embrace of national ideals to Americans performing their Blackness via their suffering. But in 1963, the unparallelled national visibility of Martin Luther King Jr. as the spokesperson for the Black freedom struggle resulted in King’s remarkably consistent view of the causes and meaning of movement martyrdom dominating the national discourse. And while King certainly drew on themes of respectability in the way he presented the movement, its figures and its goals, his innovation was that civil rights martyrs need not be representatives of Black American excellence to be effective rhetorically. Instead, King was a proponent of a melodramatic martyrdom that utilized martyrs as figures for good in a cosmic battle of good versus evil, and over time, this view became the dominant vision of Black American martyrdom. 572 “Virulent hate led to Kennedy’s death,” Michigan Chronicle, 30 November 1963, 1. 192 King had spent the earlier part of 1963 winning movement victories and building his national reputation, in the process partnering extensively with the national media. Indeed, the SCLC’s Birmingham Campaign that April and May had been celebrated as a success largely because of the media attention it had garnered. As S. Jonathan Bass notes, King had “succeeded in his quest to focus the nation’s attention upon the injustices of southern segregation, as well as to gain publicity for himself, the movement, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King had won a tremendous public relations victory in Birmingham.”573 A large piece of that victory was King’s penning in April of his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which Bass argues was, at its essence, “a press release” targeting the media and the American public.574 In it, King – ostensibly speaking to eight white religious leaders who had criticized his campaign as “unwise and untimely” – rejects this criticism and castigates white moderates and gradualists for not working actively to end segregation and racial injustice; in a key example of the way that the media buttressed the movement, it was printed in part or full that year by several publications, including the New York Post, Liberation Magazine, The New Leader, The Christian Century and The Atlantic.575 In 1963, the world was listening to what King said, which positioned him to, among other things, individually steer the narrative of Black American martyrdom in unprecedented ways. It is important to note here that for all the postmortem discussions of King himself as a martyr, before late 1963, he had not regularly utilized martyrdom rhetoric to describe either his own dangers and trials or the sufferings of others. Indeed, when pressed by Christian Century editor Harold Fey in 1960 to include in his essay “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” a reflection drawn from his own personal experiences – Fey said, “You have been maligned, arrested and detained. You were stabbed. You say 573 Ibid. 574 Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers, 227. 575 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” The Atlantic, The King Issue (Spring 2018), 74-81. 193 nothing about such sufferings, which must surely have had some influence on your thought”576 – King carefully sidestepped claiming his own martyrdom and insisted that his personal experiences had instilled in him the “value of unmerited suffering.” He wrote, “A person who constantly calls attention to his trials and sufferings is in danger of developing a martyr complex and of making others feel that he is consciously seeking sympathy. It is possible for one to be self-centered in his self-denial and self-righteous in his self-sacrifice. So I am always reluctant to refer to my personal sacrifices.”577 This is a very different understanding than the one posited by Naveh in Crown of Thorns that describes King as “yearning for martyrdom” – and does so on the strength of misattributing to King Malcolm X’s “It’s a time for martyrs now” statement.578 While Hoffman’s “Holy Martin: The Overlooked Canonization of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” accuses Naveh of confusing the distinct personae of “martyr” and “Christ” via his reading of the quote, he does not catch the attribution error,579 resulting in the two most frequently cited works theorizing King’s martyrdom relying on a statement King never uttered. I suggest that a more accurate understanding of King’s relationship to martyrdom rhetoric relies on a shift he made in 1963 in the wake of the death of Evers and in response to the bombing of Birmingham, Alabama’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Of course, King had responded to the deaths of those described as movement martyrs before. In 1955, a sermon he preached at his Montgomery church described Till’s murder as “what might be considered one of the brutal and inhuman crimes of the twentieth century,” but he focused there not on martyrdom and suffering but on the perils of 576 “Harold Fey to Martin Luther King Jr.,” 31 December 1959, accessed 27 January 2024, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/suffering-and-faith. 577 Martin Luther King Jr., “Suffering and Faith,” Christian Century 77 (27 April 1960), 510. 578 Naveh, Crown of Thorns, 183. Naveh’s error seems to stem from a misreading of Stephen B. Oates’s Let The Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 341, which correctly attributes the statement to Malcolm X. 579 Scott W. Hoffman, “Holy Martin: The Overlooked Canonization of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” in Religion and American Culture, Vol. 10, no. 2 (2000), 135. 194 millions of people “worshiping Christ emotionally but not morally.”580 He was interviewed on Atlanta’s WSB-TV June 12, 1963 and asked to respond to Evers’s death, and while he sees it as motivational for the movement – “I’m sure it will cause them (Black Americans) to rise up with righteous indignation” – he does not invoke the language or imagery of martyrdom.581 But a few months later, King began an emphatic embrace of the rhetoric of martyrdom that remained remarkably consistent throughout the rest of his life and that set the terms for how much of the national and the Black press discussed deaths connected to the civil rights movement before and after King’s own death. The “Martyred Heroines” of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and Melodramatic Martyrdom On September 15, a bomb ripped through Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four Black children; two others were shot elsewhere in town that day. The Black public and press were aghast, and the earliest rhetoric around the deaths focused on the senselessness of the killing, the innocence of the children and the necessary governmental response to the bombing. Following his rubric for events like these, the Wilkins sent a strongly worded telegram from the NAACP to the White House, asking Kennedy to make the “fullest use of federal anti-bombing statutes” and calling “anything less than a strongly reinforced civil right[s] bill” a confession of the government’s disinterest in its Black citizens. King also sent telegrams – his leaning into more pathos-laden, emotional language – promising Kennedy he would “plead with [his] people to remain nonviolent in the face of this terrible provocation” and telling Alabama Governor George Wallace that “the blood of four little children…is on your hands” 580 Martin Luther King Jr., “Pride Versus Humility: The Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican,” Sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, 25 September 1955, CSKC-INP, Coretta Scott King Collection, In Private Hands: Sermon file, folder 59, “Pride Versus Humility (Parable of Publican and Pharisee),” The Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, accessed 27 January 2024, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/pride-versus-humility-parable-pharisee-and-publican-sermon-dexter-avenue. 581 WSB-TV (Television station: Atlanta, Ga.), "WSB-TV newsfilm clip of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. responding to a reporter's question about president John F. Kennedy's speech on civil rights and the murder of Medgar Evers, Atlanta, Georgia, 1963 June 12,” accessed 27 January 2024, http://crdl.usg.edu/do:ugabma_wsbn_wsbn40931. 195 due to Wallace’s contribution to “the atmosphere that has induced continued violence and now murder.”582 It was King’s eulogy for three of the bombing victims that marked his express embrace of martyrdom rhetoric. Many parts of the message were consistent with King’s campaign to call out complacency in the struggle for racial justice. But in a new turn, he infused his eulogy with the explicit language of martyrdom, saying, “These children – unoffending, innocent, and beautiful – were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. And yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity.” That the children were “martyred heroines” is a strong, surprising statement that both invested their death with a larger meaning and pushed at the established boundaries of Black American martyrdom. These children had certainly not willingly embraced martyrdom, nor were they explicitly involved in advocacy for civil rights like the activist martyrs of the NAACP, but King had nevertheless unflinchingly depicted them as heroic martyrs in the crusade for freedom. The sentiment was also shared by the eulogist of Carole Robertson, memorialized separately from the other girls. The Norfolk New Journal and Guide quotes the Rev. C. E. Thomas has having said at her service, “Grant that her blood may be a symbol of Crispus Attucks,” then notes for its readers, “Attucks, a Negro, was the first American killed in the Revolutionary War.”583 As Black America struggled to make sense out of the senseless violence in Birmingham, they reached for the Black American martyr tradition as a heuristic. But King’s eulogy, like all of his speeches, was carefully considered messaging, and it interpreted the martyrdom of the bombing victims in ways that furthered his specific rhetorical aims and helped to reshape the boundaries of Black American martyrdom. 582 “Bombing causes horror, shock all over world,” Chicago Defender (Daily Edition), 17 September 1963, 20. 583 William Bryant, “Sad, angry Birmingham buries its bomb dead: Funeral rites for four children who were murdered in Sunday School,” Norfolk New Journal and Guide, 21 September 1963, A1. 196 Importantly, while King’s eulogy for the bombing victims first laid out what would be his consistent and powerful rhetorical response to the movement-related deaths of the era, King’s understanding of the martyrdom of the Birmingham bombing victims was not empty rhetoric. Like the immediatist abolitionists from more than a century before, his rhetoric was both efficacious and animated by a theological commitment to justice and freedom. Throughout his career, he returned time and again to a theological belief in the redemptive quality of unmerited suffering. In King’s funeral oration, the death of the bombing victims was instrumentally powerful, both rhetorically and cosmologically. He argued that their death stood as a rebuke to anyone who had “passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice”; furthermore, the girls did not die in vain, because “God has a way of wringing good out of evil. And history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive.”584 He later called the event a “crucifixion” and wrote, “In every battle for freedom there are martyrs whose lives are forfeited and whose sacrifice endorses the promise of liberty. The girls died as a result of the Holy Crusade of black men to be free.”585 Elaborating further – and implicitly acknowledging the existent bounds of Black American martyrdom – King pointed out that the girls “were not civil rights leaders, as was Medgar Evers. They were not crusaders of justice – as was William Moore, a Baltimore postman who was gunned down as he sought to deliver the message of democracy to the citadel of injustice.”586 But, he insisted, “they became the most glorious that they could have become. They became symbols of our crusade. They gave their lives to ensure our liberty. They did not do this deliberately. They did it because something strange, something incomprehensible to man is reenacted in God’s will, and they are home today with God.”587 584 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Eulogy for the Young Victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing,” in A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson and Kris Shepard (New York: IPM, 2001), 95-96. 585 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Death of Illusions,” in The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson (New York: Warner Books, Inc.), 229-230. 586 King, “Death of Illusions,” 230-231. 587 Ibid. 197 In recognizing that the girls were not activists or knowing, intentional martyrs who had counted the cost, King acknowledges that their martyrdom went beyond the criteria of martyrdom promulgated by the NAACP anew in the case of Evers just three months earlier. Instead, he offers an adjusted understanding of martyrdom, advancing the idea that martyrs need not be brave activists, exemplary Americans, or even adult to be instrumental to the struggle. I suggest that this melodramatic martyrdom was cannily wielded by King in support of his overarching strategy that relied on powerful narratives to achieve activist goals. In explicating King’s view of martyrdom, I follow Michael Osborn and John Bakke’s contention that the often-derided literary genre of melodrama can serve a rhetorical purpose outside of the domain of fiction and can be a way of “seeing or sizing up” a historical event or situation.588 In Osborne and Bakke’s view, the use of melodrama can explain to an audience “how and why certain events occur,” ruling out coincidence and chance as their cause and thereby investing events with meaning and purpose.589 They propose that melodramatic characters have several key traits, including embodying moral absolutes, representing a portrait of a class or group, and justifying arguments.590 Relatedly, Linda Williams argues that a specific melodrama of race is more essential to American culture than previously understood, and she suggests (though admits that exploring this idea is outside the scope of her text) that it is in the period of the civil rights movement that Black Americans “began to fashion their own role according to a self-conscious awareness of the power of the public spectacle of racialized suffering” as “the melodrama of black and white moved from the domain of fictional text to historical events.”591 I contend that King’s vision of melodramatic martyrdom was an essential part of his rhetorical strategy, serving as what Williams calls a “mode of storytelling crucial to the establishment of moral 588 Michael Osborn and John Bakke, “The Melodramas of Memphis: Contending Narratives During the Sanitation Strike of 1968,” Southern Journal of Communication, Vol. 63, no. 3, 221. 589 Ibid. 590 Osborn and Bakke, “The Melodramas of Memphis,” 222-223. 591 Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 298. 198 good.”592 This tactic represented a significant departure from the historical evolution of Black American martyrdom, aligning more closely with the efficacious martyrdom of the final days of abolitionism than with the uplift-coded, citizenship-focused martyrdom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whereas the martyrdom championed by the NAACP via the deaths of Moore and Evers, which had itself grown out of a long tradition concerned with proving the capability, value, and Americanness of the race, focused on the merits of the individual, melodramatic martyrdom tended to diminish or even erase the details of individual, emphasizing instead on what he or she represents within a battle between moral absolutes. In this schema of martyrdom, a fourteen-year-old need not be a civil rights activist to be a martyr. Instead, within the rhetoric of melodrama of the civil rights movement, she could be a character representing goodness and self-sacrifice simply through her death, a powerful representation of the morally absolute good in the great Manichean struggle for freedom and justice. The Formula of the Kingian Martyr Eulogy The formula for martyrdom and meaning that King first proposed via his eulogy for the Birmingham girls remained a consistent fixture in his responses to high-profile deaths over the next few years. In addressing the ensuing murders of figures ranging from President John F. Kennedy to a panoply of activists, King returned time and again to the structure – and sometimes, verbatim words – of his eulogy for the girls killed in Birmingham, casting these new deaths via his vision of melodramatic martyrdom. I argue that this unity of message, paired with an increasing focus in the national press on both the movement itself and on King as its interpreter, resulted in the wider understanding of Black American martyrdom as aligning with King’s views than with its previous history of valorous Americanness. King quickly had another major opportunity to reinforce his message about martyrdom with the death of Kennedy in November. Kennedy’s assassination ushered in a new wave of mourning and an 592 Williams, Playing the Race Card, 12. 199 increase in the rhetoric of martyrdom in both the nation as a whole and, in particular, within the Black community.593 On December 21, King published an essay in the New York Amsterdam News titled “What Killed JFK?” The short answer, to King, is that Kennedy was “assassinated by a morally inclement climate” in which dissent is expressed through violence. In this essay, King explicitly notes that this climate was the same one that “murdered Medgar Evers in Mississippi and six innocent Negro children in Birmingham, Alabama.”594 He also notably recycles several lines verbatim from his eulogy for the Birmingham bombing victims, positioning Kennedy, like the children, as having “something to say” by his death and inveighing against silence, complicity, and actions that fall short of working to “rid or nation of the vestiges of racial segregation and discrimination.”595 By broadening the question of who killed JFK to what killed JFK – and placing blame for both his death and the other high-profile murders of 1963 on the nation’s hate-filled climate – King had drawn a clear line that connected the deaths of figures as disparate as Black children and a white U.S. President, and he had positioned the martyrs within a schema of melodramatic martyrdom in which individuals mattered less than their symbolism. Over the next two years, King had several more instances to remark upon movement martyrdoms, and his formula remained the same. In 1964’s “Freedom Summer” in Mississippi, a coalition 593 Both the national presses and the pulpits tended to refer to Kennedy with the language of martyrdom immediately after his death. Analyzing Protestant sermons in the wake of the assassination, Melissa Mathes sees an immediate trend of ministers describing Kennedy as not a victim, but a martyr in their remarks to their congregations (Melissa M. Mathes, When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 85). Sharron Wilkins Conrad has written about the intensity of Black Americans’ sorrow at the death of Kennedy. She argues, “While Americans of every race, religion and class grieved Kennedy’s death, African Americans experienced the loss differently,” concluding that the outpouring of grief was largely due to their connection to the “New Kennedy,” who had just that year begun to support civil rights gains, and that “African Americans forge powerful bonds with their political heroes and bequeath their legacies to the next generation in hopes that the future may be made better by cherishing the memory of their sacrifices” (Sharron Wilkins Conrad, “More Upset Than Most: Measuring and Understanding African American Responses to the Kennedy Assassination,” American Quarterly Vol. 75, no. 2 (June 2023), 279, 286, 303.) 594 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Who Killed JFK?,” New York Amsterdam News, 21 December 1963, 12. The essay also appeared in the SCLC newsletter under the title, “Epitaph and Challenge” and ran on the front page of the special “Brotherhood Edition” of the Michigan Chronicle on 22 February 1964 under the headline “Rev. King writes epitaph of JFK.” 595 Ibid. 200 of SNCC, the NAACP, the SCLC and CORE, working under the banner of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), mounted a large-scale and interracial voter registration effort, aided by an influx of white college student workers.596 When on June 21, only a week into the project, an interracial group of CORE workers – James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner – did not return from investigating the burning of a Black church, movement organizers and activists around the country knew that they had been killed long before their bodies were discovered in an earthen dam five weeks later. In July, 1,000 civil rights demonstrators massed in Los Angeles to demand governmental protection for voter registration workers and Black citizens in the South, invoking the recent movement martyrdoms in their messaging. As Los Angeles Friends of SNCC chairman Levi Kingston said of the trio’s disappearance, “The American people are becoming aware for the first time that Medgar Evers, the Birmingham children and William Moore are not the only martyrs whose murders have remained unpunished.”597 When the men’s bodies were discovered on August 4, King again brought home his consistent message about martyrdom: He told an audience that night that he believed that the FBI was capable of locating who had killed Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, but, just as he had emphasized in his remarks on the deaths of the Birmingham bombing victims and Kennedy, he was more concerned with what had done so. He underscored to his listeners that anyone who was complacent and failing to act to end racial discrimination, or even to vote, had a hand in creating the animus that killed the men.598 As the rhetoric of martyrdom was increasingly associated with the civil rights movement, so was King’s understanding of these deaths: the national miasma of violence was the result of the cancer of racist hate, and inaction by any American citizen contributed to this national disease. 596 Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 107-111. 597 “Marchers demand U.S. protection,” Los Angeles Sentinel, 2 July 1964, A2. 598 “Martin Luther King Jr.’s statement following the missing civil rights workers’ death,” 4 August 1964, accessed 3 January 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=207Z5qVFJu0. See also The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, “Freedom Summer,” accessed 3 January 2024, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/freedom-summer. 201 King’s platform for sharing his understanding of movement martyrdom and its relationship to the state of the nation grew exponentially in 1965 with several high-profile deaths connected to the voting rights marches in Alabama. In February, Jimmie Lee Jackson, a Black Alabamian, was shot at a night march in Marion and died of his wounds the next day. King again steered the conversation, eulogizing Jackson from the pulpit of Selma’s Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church at a funeral described repeatedly by the Black press as a “martyr’s funeral”599 and a service “befitting a martyr.”600 Importantly, though, even as King offered a new ideology of martyrdom, he did not discard the long tradition of Black American martyrdom. The service explicitly connected Jackson to the historic canon of Black American martyrdom; as the Baltimore Afro-American described it, “To the strains of ‘God Will Take Care of You,’ the emotional audience heard Jackson praised as a civil rights warrior who ‘takes his rightful place among Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, Medgar Evers and Emmet [sic] Till.”601 The Norfolk New Journal and Guide reported that King had referred to Jackson as a “martyred hero of the civil rights movement,”602 and Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy proclaimed in Jackson’s televised service in Marion that “Jimmie Jackson has joined the ranks of the many martyrs who have fallen along the way in building this great nation and in bringing us to this hour,” listing Lincoln, Brown, Evers and Attucks as fellow martyrs.603 This rhetoric initially stayed confined to the movement discourse and the Black press. In the national press, references to Jackson’s martyrdom appeared, though they are notably always in quotations – “King eulogizes slain Negro as rights martyr”604 599 “Hundreds file past bier of Jimmy Lee Jackson,” Chicago Defender, 4 March 1965, 3; Leon Daniel, “Jimmie Lee just wanted to be a voter: Riot victim gets martyr’s funeral,” Baltimore Afro-American, 13 March 1965, 13. 600 “MLK eulogizes Alabama martyr,” Los Angeles Sentinel, 4 March 1965, A1. 601 Daniel, “Jimmie Lee just wanted to be a voter.” 602 “‘Martyr’ mourned in Dixie,” Norfolk New Journal and Guide, 13 March 1965, 11. 603 Robert G. Spivack, “Dignity at a funeral: Negro revolt evolves into Crusade,” Charlotte Observer, 15 March 1965, 20. Also ran as Spivack, “The ‘Negro Revolt’ now a Crusade,” Norfolk New Journal and Guide, 20 March 1965, 8. 604 Jack Nelson, “King eulogizes slain Negro as rights martyr,” Los Angeles Times, 4 March 1965, 1. 202 or “Alabama victim called a martyr: Dr. King and others speak at Marion funeral,”605 for example – and never, as in the Black press, assessments by the author of his status, demonstrating that the specific rhetoric of martyrdom embraced by King and his allies had not taken hold in greater American discourse. But the national discourse of martyrdom shifted significantly with the death in March of white Unitarian minister James Reeb. Reeb had been attacked March 9 on the streets of Selma on the day he and other clergy had arrived, at the request of King, to support the Selma to Montgomery voting rights march. He died of his injuries on March 11; the next day, his hometown paper, The Boston Globe, led the charge of his martyrdom, running as its page 1 headline, “Rev. Reeb dies, a martyr to rights beliefs,” alongside an entire page dedicated to the movement and Reeb’s connection to it. An inset photo of Reeb under the header “Real Martyrdom” centered the above-the-fold coverage and featured a statement by Unitarian-Universalist Association president Dana Greeley.606 Across the country, that day’s Los Angeles Times demonstrated just how sensational Reeb’s death was, noting, “Eulogized last week as a martyr in the civil rights struggle, Jimmie Jackson has been all but forgotten since the beating of Mr. Reeb, the latest civil rights martyr.”607 Strikingly, the front pages of the major Black newspapers looked quite different from those of the national media. Reeb’s death made the front page of the Chicago Defender, but it was below the fold and under the simple headline, “Rev. Reeb dies.”608 On the next page, martyrdom is mentioned, but it is an assessment quoted from King, not an editorial choice,609 as so many other instances of martyrdom had been on the pages of the Black press. The rhetoric and tone of the immediate coverage of Reeb’s death within the spheres of the press is perhaps not surprising – it was easier for white Americans to see as a “martyr” a white figure, whereas the Black press had a long history of the rhetoric of 605 Roy Reed, “Alabama victim called a martyr: Dr. King and others speak at Marion funeral,” The New York Times, 4 March 1965, 23. 606 “Rev. Reeb dies, a martyr to rights beliefs,” The Boston Globe, 12 March 1965, 1. 607 Jack Nelson, “Selma beating victim: MINISTER DIES, four men charged; Johnson telephones sympathy to widow,” Los Angeles Times, 12 March 1965, 1. 608 “Rev. Reeb dies,” Chicago Defender, 13 March 1965, 1. 609 “King lists Rev. Reeb in martyr’s Hall of Fame,” Chicago Defender, 13 March 1965, 2. 203 Black American martyrdom and did not necessarily need Reeb to serve any rhetorical purpose for its readers. To a larger audience of white Americans, Reeb’s death was incredibly important for the movement. King knew this and tailored his rhetoric around the minister’s death to meet the moment. Eulogizing Reeb from the pulpit of Selma’s Brown Chapel on March 15, King in many ways returned to his now well-worn script in responding to movement martyrdom, averring that the minister “has something to say to all of us in his death” and that more important than who killed Reeb is what killed Reeb. The eulogy again shares several passages verbatim with his memorials for the Birmingham bombing victims, Kennedy and Jackson, including that God has a way of “wringing good out of evil” and that “unmerited suffering is redemptive” in that Reeb’s death could contribute to lasting change. But, clearly conscious of his nation- and world-wide platform, King’s rhetoric grew more expansive and pluralistic when he spoke of Reeb. Unlike in his other martyr eulogies, he now asserted that “James Reeb was martyred in the Judeo-Christian faith that all men are brothers,” appealing more broadly to the theme of a tri-faith America610 than he had in previous eulogies limited to primarily Black audiences. In this oration, King’s rhetoric of melodramatic martyrdom reached its pinnacle. He claims, “The world is aroused over the murder of James Reeb. For he symbolizes the forces of goodwill in our nation. He demonstrated the consciousness of the nation. He was an attorney for the defense of the innocent in the court of world opinion. He was a witness to the truth that men of different races and classes might live, eat, and work together as brothers.”611 In this understanding of Reeb’s death, King’s morality play – with the martyred white minister and family man representing the forces of good – was performed on a world stage. Though Reeb had not been central to the Southern movement and indeed was attacked 610 For more on the intentional consensus-building underpinning the conception of a “tri-faith America” in the mid-20th century, see Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 611 Martin Luther King Jr., “A Witness to the Truth [Eulogy for the Rev. James J. Reeb, March 15, 1965],” UU World XV, no. 2 (May/June 2001), 20. 204 before he could even participate in a march, what mattered most is that he was a martyr to the cause. Secondarily, though, the politics of respectability that made him – a white man of the cloth with a nuclear family – legible as a martyr figure to white Americans underpinned King’s ability to effectively hold Reeb up as an effective and motivational figure. While King’s message around martyrdom had stayed overwhelmingly the same as when he first offered it in response to the deaths of four Black girls in Birmingham, it was supercharged by the white, male, Christian identity of Reeb. That night, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s address to Congress echoed this theme. Though more rhetorically restrained than King’s, it rests on the same understanding that the death of a good, [white] man was a turning point for history. Johnson had already shown significant and unprecedented support for Reeb’s family, placing a phone call and sending a bouquet of yellow roses to the widow612 and ordering an Air Force jet to return her to Boston from Alabama.613 Calling for Congress to pass what would become the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Johnson urged partnership across political parties, races and religions; he did not call Reeb a martyr, but he did say, “One good man, a man of God, was killed,” its gravitas opening the speech, which forcefully called for action on civil rights and cross-country cooperation in embodying the ideals upon which the United States had been founded.614 The emphasis on national cooperation in pursuit of Black freedom continued in press coverage. Life’s March 19 issue had covered the Selma protests thoroughly and included a small photo of Reeb on a gurney alongside a short, but vivid, description of his attack and death,615 but the next week’s issue featured him heavily, explicitly described as a martyr amid a large photojournalistic spread on the surge of support for the movement that emerged nationwide, including from the White House. The cover features 612 “Lyndon told of Reeb death; calls widow,” Chicago Tribune, 12 March 1965, 8. 613 “U.S. jet sent Reeb family,” The Austin Statesman, 12 March 1965, 10. 614 Lyndon B. Johnson, “Special Message to the Congress,” The American Promise Online: The American Presidency Project, ed. Gerhard Peters and John T. Wooley, accessed 4 January 2024, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-the-american-promise. a 615 “Selma’s faces of defiance – and death,” Life, 19 March 1965, 36. 205 an explicitly interracial shot of King standing alongside Greek Orthodox primate Archbishop Iakovos and United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther, its caption noting, “Martin Luther King holds a wreath to the martyred Reverend James Reeb.”616 Inside, that week’s editorial avers, “Thanks to the stupid actions of uniformed thugs in Selma and Montgomery, no less than King’s marchers and martyrs black and white, Southern negroes now stand an excellent chance of getting that vote.”617 This claim was backed up that week’s center spread, headlined by “The people and President react in strength to oppression in Alabama” and “The nation surges to join the Negro on his march.”618 The photos in that week’s issue show an abundance of white activist faces doing everything from leading sit-ins across the country to dodging billy clubs in Montgomery. Capitalizing further on the nationwide interest in the movement and Reeb, the SCLC ran advertisements in several large-circulation newspapers under the header “A heartfelt ‘thank you’ from Martin Luther King, Jr., the Negroes of Selma, Alabama, and the SCLC staff,” ostensibly to express gratitude for the “sympathy expressed in all parts of the nation on behalf of our struggle” and noting that of the clergy who flocked to Alabama to support the movement, “[o]ne, James Reeb, has already died, a martyr.” The ad then called for financial support for the movement, promising each contribution, “large or small, will be a message of unity and a pillar of strength.”619 The spectacle of white death had worked to attract both large-scale attention to and participation in the movement, it was again being invoked as an instrument of furthering the mission of the Black freedom struggle. This is the genius of King’s melodramatic martyrdom – while still relying on the long, important tradition of Black American martyrdom, its ability to elevate the deaths of individuals into avatars of morality in a cosmic fight between good and evil allowed for figures like Reeb to be deployed effectively and widely. 616 Life, 26 March 1965, cover. 617 “Year of the Vote: The How and Whither,” Life, 26 March 1965, 4. 618 “The nation surges to join the Negro on his march,” Life, 26 March 1965, 30-33. 619 “A heartfelt ‘thank you’ from Martin Luther King, Jr., the Negroes of Selma, Alabama, and the SCLC staff,” ad, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 17 March 1965, 18. The ad also ran in that day’s Washington Post on p. 13 and on p. 15 of the St. Louis Dispatch on 16 March 1965. 206 King’s melodramatic martyrdom is also essential for understanding his response to the death of Malcolm X, who had died just two weeks before Reeb. The men differed greatly in their approaches to both religion and the pursuit of Black freedom, and the tenets of melodramatic martyrdom are evident in a close reading of King’s response to X’s murder. This came via the essay “The Nightmare of Violence,” which ran in the New York Amsterdam News in late March of 1965. There, King described Malcolm X as “a victim of the violence that spawned him,” mourning his death – like the movement martyrdoms he had so frequently and recently eulogized – as the tragic outcome of a violent society. But X’s death, to King, is not in any way a martyrdom.620 Importantly, the death of Reeb so quickly after X served as an important background, stated and not, to interpretations of both men’s murders. In that same day’s mainstream press, the deaths of X and Reeb were explicitly compared. A Philadelphia Inquirer editorial by John M. Cummins that called X a “preacher of hate” and the “self-styled leader of a Muslim sect.” Cummins contrasts the messaging of King and X and claims, “It was while whites had joined Negroes, in support of the King philosophy, that the clubs of Alabama police provided the movement with a martyr. And a white one, at that. … This was the act, one of many, that aroused the country and sent so many prominent Northern men and women rushing to the Alabama battlefront.”621 The white martyrdom of Reeb was proof of the concept that movement deaths would provoke action, even as it was a disappointing reminder to Black Americans that their lives were not grieved publicly in the same way as those of whites, particularly because of the long list of deaths of Black activists that preceded Reeb’s. A frustrated Stokely Carmichael said, “It’s almost like, for this to be recognized, a white person must be killed.”622 That was certainly a reasonable conclusion to draw from the response and action associated with the death of Reeb, but the centering of whiteness in 620 Martin Luther King Jr., “The Nightmare of Violence,” 13 March 1965, 10. 621 John M. Cummings, “And the winner? Not hate at all,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 21 March 1965, 4. 622 Later, Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Ture. Quoted in Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 233-234. 207 American society is not the sole explanation for the meteoric ascendancy of Reeb’s martyrdom. In two further deaths of white activists in central Alabama later that year, again in the tradition of civil rights martyrdom, response was relatively muted. Viola Liuzzo, a housewife from Detroit, was killed by the Ku Klux Klan while ferrying marchers from Selma to Montgomery March 25, while seminary student Jonathan Daniels was shot in Hayneville that August. At the time, they were each sporadically called martyrs, and both are now listed on the SPLC’s Civil Rights Memorial, but neither death attracted the same level of national fanfare as had Reeb’s earlier that year. This is almost certainly related to the inherent respectability politics that have always underpinned all strains American martyrdom: Despite their whiteness, Liuzzo as an unaccompanied woman and Daniels as a seminary student did not have the baked-in cultural respect as an male, ordained minister and head of household. Ultimately, the responses to these varied deaths highlight the fact that identity is key to American martyrdom. Whether in the explicit invocation of Americanness, Black excellence and valor invoked by much of the 19th- and early 20th-century Black American martyrdom and carried forth by the NAACP in the 1950s and 1960s or King’s vision of melodramatic martyrdom that simultaneously downplayed specific characteristics of martyrs even as it relied on them to make the martyr legible to the larger public, identity has been a crucial component of this particular phenomenon. Conclusion: Black American Martyrdom at the Mountaintop The rapid gains in civil rights of the mid-1960s coincided with a rapid evolution in the long tradition of Black American martyrdom. As a rhetorical tradition, it has always been concerned with proving the worthiness of citizenship – ultimately the Americanness – of a martyr, and that centered conversations about the earliest figures associated with the modern civil rights era of the long Black freedom struggle. Furthermore, Black American martyrdom has always been a tradition centered on agency, creativity and persuasive rhetoric, and with the cases of Moore and Evers, the NAACP successfully adopted into the tradition the requirement that a martyr be actively engaged in civil rights 208 work as a part of that respectable Blackness and Americanness. But where the tradition of Black American martyrdom both radically evolved and became an essential and instrumental part of rights activist rhetoric was in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s embrace of the language and imagery of melodramatic martyrdom. No longer as concerned with proving a martyr’s individual merit as a credit to the race and an argument for his or her (but far more often his) martyrdom, King made martyrs the stars of his larger-than-life Manichean morality play. They were more rhetorically successful with broader white America when they were legible as representatives of the midcentury American consensus, as was Reeb, whose character and significance were all the more readily understandable by his white fellow citizens as they observed the melodrama. Here was an American – “one good man – a man of God,” as Johnson assured Congress and the nation – whose characteristics were familiar and good, and he had been struck down by what King repeatedly described as a sickness of hate. That his martyrdom was supported further by his participating in a civil rights action showed the influence of the version of martyrdom championed by the NAACP, but the instrumentality of civil rights martyrdom ultimately came down to the respectability and legibility of these figures whose sacrifices were skillfully and repeatedly cast as cosmologically significant. That these figures could be added to a long and increasingly interracial tradition of martyrs in the strain of Black American martyrdom, as was often referenced in the discussion of their sacrifices and observable in efforts by Black Americans to remember these figures as a cohort,623 invested them with even more meaning and suggested a positive progression in the arc of history. 623 See, e.g.,“Suggests ‘Negro Martyrs Day’ to remember heroes,” Michigan Chronicle, 3 February 1968, 9. In this letter to the editor, a reader writes, “It seems to me that a special day should be set aside to honor not only those who were martyrs but also who braved the living martyrdom of wrath and contempt to widen the frontiers of freedom in the United States,” going on to cite such figures as Attucks, Evers, Lamar Smith, Rev. Herbert Lee, Chaney, Schwerner, Goodman, the Birmingham bombing victims, and living martyrs such as Rosa Parks and James Meredith. 209 Such was the context of Black American martyrdom when King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. The Black press had prognosticated his martyrdom for years,624 and when it happened, the rhetoric of martyrdom immediately appeared across the media. “Atlanta weeps for its martyr,” said the Boston Globe,625 while Senator Robert F. Kennedy reassured a Cleveland audience that “no martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by his assassin’s bullet.”626 Life covered the funeral and placed an iconic photo of King’s widow, in a black veil and profiled in front of a stained glass window on its cover; inside, an editorial titled “The legacy of Martin Luther King” described him as a “visionary who thought often in terms of his own martyrdom and who believed that the cause of the Negro poor could mean the whole of American society.”627 In May, Ebony magazine published a longform article, “The Martyrdom of Martin Luther King Jr.,” accompanied by photos of his memorial services that highlighted the respected role the leader played not only in the Black freedom movement, but in America, as emphasized by the photos of King’s widow Coretta being comforted by luminaries such as Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey and Jacqueline Kennedy.628 There is no question that King is considered an American martyr, as scholars have argued in great detail,629 but what has been previously unremarked upon is King’s outsized role in creating the understanding of martyrdom that he eventually inhabited as Black America’s – and eventually America’s – preeminent martyr. 624 See, e.g. Alfred Duckett, “Is Rev. Martin Luther King a marked man?,” Chicago Defender, 13 April 1957, 1 and Duckett, “Will bigots assassinate Rev. King?,” Michigan Chronicle, 11 May 1957, 8. 625 David B. Wilson, “Atlanta weeps for its martyr,” Boston Globe, 6 April 1968, 1. 626 “‘Violence stains our land’ - RFK,” Boston Globe, 6 April 1968, 4. 627 “The legacy of Martin Luther King,” Life, 19 April 1968, 4. 628 Lerone Bennett Jr., “The Martyrdom of Martin Luther King Jr.,” Ebony, 173-181. 629 e.g., Naveh, Crown of Thorns, esp. 177-190; Hoffman, “Holy Martin,” 123-148; Christopher D. Rounds, “‘Dead Men Make Such Convenient Heroes’: The Use and Misuse of Martin Luther King’s Legacy as Political Propaganda,” Journal of Black Studies Vol. 51, no. 4 (2020), 315-331. 210 Conclusion Martyrs and Race in America: Rethin(King) American Martyrdom The death and subsequent martyrdom of Martin Luther King Jr. occupies a strange place in the history of the American martyr tradition. It is a constant reference point for national martyrdom rhetoric, simultaneously serving both as a pinnacle and a launchpad. For the tradition of Black American martyrdom discussed in this project, King’s 1968 assassination was its summit. His death in the cause of Black freedom was yet another in a tradition considered to have begun at the very roots of America itself, and his role in shaping the rhetoric of civil rights – including, as I have argued, his presentation of movement deaths as melodramatic martyrdom – meant that King had stepped into a category he was instrumental in shaping. His death capped the sacrifices for freedom that had been the spiritual and rhetorical core of the movement narrative most publicly promoted during the 1960s, and it was a major event in the wider United States. But this time, King was not around to translate this particular martyrdom for either the movement or the nation. This created a vacuum for interpretation, and predictably, many weighed in on the significance of his death, using it to inform everything from tactics within the fight for racial justice to other groups’ conception of their own martyrs and what that sacrifice meant about their place in the nation. In that sense, his death was also a point of departure for a new way of understanding martyrdom in broader American society. These interpretations of his death, as well as the use of Kingian melodramatic martyrdom in arguments for other groups and classes, contributed to new, broad understandings of secular martyrdom that both branched out and relied upon – in previously unobserved ways – the long and intentionally cultivated tradition of Black American martyrdom. Black America and the Legacy of King The veneration of King as a martyr, even within the movement for racial justice, is somewhat complicated. After major legislative gains in civil rights in the early 1960s, he had turned his attention to 211 less popular causes, promoting economic justice and opposing America’s involvement in Vietnam. As James Cobb points out, elsewhere in the movement, young people were tired of his commitment to nonviolence, and all of these factors contributed to his having “died with a public disapproval rating of nearly 75 percent.”630 The pulpits were pessimistic, too: Summarizing Protestant sermons given after the death of King, Melissa M. Mathes argues that most, unlike their approach to Kennedy’s assassination, “did not celebrate King’s death as an opportunity to fulfill his dream.”631 She suggests that because of the violent aftermath of King’s assassination in many American cities, “it was difficult for either Black or White Americans to interpret his murder as in any way redemptive.”632 But despite these complications, the tradition of Black American martyrdom in many ways moved on as it always had. On the night of King’s death, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey said to a gathering of Democratic members of Congress, “Martin Luther King stands with our other American martyrs in the cause of freedom and justice. His death is a terrible tragedy.”633 Many Black Americans shared that sentiment. In the days, weeks and even years after, the Black press regularly referred to King as a martyr and predictably ran editorials, memorial pieces and letters to the editor, particularly in the first year after his assassination and around his dates of birth and death.634 Many of these pieces place King within – and primarily atop – the familiar canon of Black American martyrs, as in a poem sent in to the Cleveland Call and Post during the holiday season of 1968. Titled “Before We Extend Our Season’s Greetings,” the poem reads, 630 James Cobb, “Why Martin Luther King had a 75 percent disapproval rating in the year of his death,” Zocalo Public Square, 4 April 2018, https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2018/04/04/martin-luther-king-75-percent-disapproval-rating-year-death/ideas/essay/. 631 Mathes, When Sorrow Comes, 123. 632 Mathes, When Sorrow Comes, 124. 633 “President’s plea: On TV, he deplores ‘brutal’ murder of Negro leader,” New York Times, 5 April 1968, 1, 24. 634 See, e.g., Faith Christmas, “To Dr. Martin Luther King – For a Martyr, a Holy Day: Leader, statesman, brother to mankind,” Chicago Daily Defender, 15 January 1970, 19; “Editorials: In Memory of a Martyr,” Cleveland Call and Post, 1 April 1972, 2B; “Community Consensus: King Didn’t Die in Vain,” Los Angeles Sentinel, 6 April 1972, B6. 212 Before we extend our Season’s Greetings, We bow our heads as is befitting To memories that sorrows bring: To honor Martin Luther King, John F. and Robert Kennedy, Victims of hate and perfidy, Rev. Daniels, Vernon Dahmer, Chaney, Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Viola Liuzzo and Rev. Reeb of Selma – Our grief is overwhelming. James Jackson and Edgar [sic] Evers, In our hearts they live forever. George Lee and Moore and all the rest For they were surely our best. Men will die but dreams remain For martyrs do not die in vain. They were the Nation’s hope and pride Let’s build the dream for which they’ve died.635 This poem offers valuable insight into the memory of civil rights martyrs at the time. Rubin clearly prioritizes King first, then the Kennedys, but also manages to include quite a large number of other lesser-known martyrdoms, reaching all the way back to the death of Moore in 1951 to do so. The couplet that closes the poem is particularly noteworthy; drawing on the era’s very common refrain of Black martyrs as not having “died in vain,” Rubin sees hope and progress in the deaths of these figures, exhorting his fellow citizens to continue to build the dream of racial equality they pursued unto death. Memorials of the entire canon of Black American martyrs continued. The next month, the Louisville Defender ran a special package called “A Salute to Black Progress” that included pencil drawings of King, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Emmett Till on the front page under the script, “Martyrs to the Cause of Freedom.”636 Each figure had a short biography beneath him, but King’s face dwarfed 635 Louis S. Rubin, “Before We Extend Our Season’s Greetings,” in “Plans for New Year,” Cleveland Call and Post, 4 January 1969, 5B. 636 “Martyrs to the cause of freedom,” Louisville Defender, 13 February 1969, A1. 213 the others on the page, taking up a full quarter of it in a signal that his death was the most important of them all. On the next page, a drawing of Abraham Lincoln sat over quotes from the Declaration of Independence, Emancipation Proclamation and Thirteenth Amendment titled “Foundations of Freedom.”637 King’s death the previous year had been a crushing blow, but he nevertheless fit perfectly into a canon of Black American martyrs that were notably tied to the very foundational ideals of America. The NAACP got back into the business of martyrs, too, running a full-page ad designed to drive membership in The Crisis in 1970 and 1971. The ad features eight figures’ faces on stylized buttons – Lincoln, Gandhi, John Brown, King, John F. Kennedy, Viola Liuzzo, Medgar Evers and Robert F. Kennedy – with a ninth bearing only an asterisk. The asterisk, the ad says, represents “those unknown Black Men and Women who have died or are destined to die.” It also underscores again the NAACP’s organizational sacrifices, calling by name their martyrs - the Moores, Lee, Evers, Vernon Dahmer and Wharlest Jackson. The ad tells readers, “YOU can give life to the cause these dedicated martyrs were unable to fulfill by a gift of an NACCP life membership to yourself, a relative, friend or child.”638 The ad serves as evidence for the motivational power of martyrdom at this time, as well as the sense that martyrdom was a necessary part of the struggle for racial justice. At the 64th Annual NAACP Convention held in Indianapolis in 1973, the convention theme was styled as “Lest We Forget – Our Fallen Heroes,” and keynote speaker Dr. Buell G. Gallagher listed off movement martyrs, beginning with the 1951 death of Moore and ending with the death of King. Describing the speech, the Los Angeles Sentinel reports, “In a litany to Medgar Evers and the other 32 martyrs of the civil rights movement, Dr. Gallagher called each name, how the person was slain, and what legal action was taken against the killers.”639 The full complement of the 637 “Foundations of Freedom,” Louisville Defender, 13 February 1969, A2. 638 “Give a life!,” ad, The Crisis, Vol. 77, no. 10 (December 1970), 390; also in The Crisis, Vol. 78, no. 2 (March 1971), 40. 639 “NAACP convention speaker demands fulfillment of civil rights martyrs,” Los Angeles Sentinel, 12 July 1973, A14. A similar article, “Civil rights - 1973,” ran in the Norfolk New Journal and Guide, 28 July 1973, 10. 214 recitation is important, as it demonstrates the increasingly important role of martyrdom in highlighting injustice, underscored by the enumeration of the all-too-often paltry legal actions responding to the deaths. In this context, the motivational rhetoric of martyrdom is not simply concerned with a death in the pursuit of an ideal: The failure of America to obtain justice for the martyr is another powerful layer of the meaning and impact of these martyrdoms. Outside of the press and campaigns of national organizations, there is also a clear sense that martyrs of the tradition of Black American martyrdom were preserved at the individual, familial and local level, as well. Sharron Wilkins Conrad has termed the constellation of Jesus, Kennedy and King “the Trinity” and notes that these photos were increasingly displayed together in the living rooms of Black Americans in a tradition that lasted from the 1960s well into the 1990s.640 Remembering her grandmother in a December 2023 article in The Atlantic, A.J. Verdelle writes that “She was like other Black Americans passing by that same picture of Jesus as one of the triumvirate of martyrs: Jesus, John F. Kennedy, Jr., and Martin Luther King, Jr.”641 Martyrdom – and its various interpretations – also played a role in debates about violent vs. nonviolent protest amid the increasing mobilization of the Black Power movement. While there had certainly been disagreements between the nonviolent branch of the civil rights movement and the militant Black nationalists, King’s death was used as a cudgel by “younger, more militant black spokesmen who had spurned King’s commitment to nonviolence and peaceful negotiation” but nevertheless “proceeded to stoke outrage over the slaughter of someone so un-menacing and well-intentioned.”642 As Joshua Bloom points out, the establishment response – both of the government and 640 Conrad, “‘He Gave His Life for Us,’” 228-229; Conrad, “More Upset Than Most,” 294. 641 A.J. Verdelle, “Why Black Jesus Made My Grandmother Uncomfortable,” The Atlantic, 24 December 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/black-jesus-christmas-story/676925/. 642 Cobb, “Why Martin Luther King had a 75 percent disapproval rating.” 215 of moderate or conservative rights groups – to King’s death seemed to many young Black activists a way to claim his sacrifice for the principles of democracy – not the cause of racial justice.643 But the death of King was nevertheless an important ideological and rhetorical touch point. The Black Panthers quickly drew inspiration from King’s death in memorializing one of their own, Li’l Bobby Hutton, who was killed by Oakland police two days after King. But instead of the assimilationist, Americanist memorialization of their martyr that was ongoing for King, the Panthers had a “martyr for revolution” – even if that meant through violent means.644 In a worldview reminiscent of what I argued in Chapter 5 was Malcolm X’s view of Kingian nonviolence being the “time for martyrs,” the New York branch of the Black Panthers codified their view on the relationship between martyrdom and revolution via a letter to the Weather Underground published in the East Village Other in January of 1971. They wrote, “We have had too many martyrs. We desperately need more revolutionists who are completely willing and ready at all times to KILL to change conditions. Just to be ready to die does not make a revolutionist – it just makes martyrs – ‘revolutionary suicide’ and ‘only those who die are proven revolutionaries’ – are bullshit – tripping escapist bullshit.”645 After the death of King, martyrdom clearly was understood by many as shorthand for his movement. The “militants vs. martyrs” rhetoric continued even in more traditional venues. In February of 1970, columnist Preston Yancy wrote in the Baltimore Afro-American that he wanted Black America to better honor its controversial – and sometimes violent – figures. He writes that he objected to the “failure to honor those who had the courage to stand up and fight for that in which they believed” – not necessarily to “endorse their violent actions,” but to provide “fitting tributes to those who stood up and 643 Joshua Bloom, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016), 118. 644 Bloom, Black Against Empire, 119, 138. 645 “Open Letter to Weatherman Underground from Panther 21,” reprinted in Breakthrough: Political Journal of Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, October-December 1977, 63, https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC501_scans/Break/501.break.3.oct.1977.pdf. Original article referenced in Bloom, Black Against Empire, 359. 216 dared to challenge racial injustice.” Yancy closes the piece by concluding simply, “I want to honor militants and martyrs.”646 Similarly, Vernon Jarrett wrote a column in 1973 printed in both the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Sentinel that addressed to “all the dedicated youths of America who are willing to sacrifice their lives for a just cause.” Jarrett warns them not to get carried away by the “oratory of the death worshipers,” and he argues that “[l]iberation movements are all about life, not death, unless there is no other alternative,” insisting that King never intended to “make himself a sacrificial lamb.”647 Perhaps the greatest part of the efficacy of martyrdom is its interpretability, and King’s is no exception. Scott W. Hoffman has carefully detailed the martyrdom of King as a popular American icon, seeing “martyr” as one of King’s multiple biblical personae.648 Amid this memorialization, his memory has continued to be utilized to advance all sorts of social and political causes. As Christopher D. Rounds points out, “perhaps the most telling indication of his stature is the manner in which he is called upon, again and again, by proponents of varying political parties and ideologies as somebody who would, were he alive, support their candidacy, position, or initiative.”649 Other scholars, among them Jeanne Theoharis, Jason Sokol, Lewis V. Baldwin and Rufus Burrow, Jr., have also addressed the manipulations of the legacy of King.650 And while it is certainly easy to decry the bad-faith manipulations of King’s legacy and message, I suggest that his martyrdom itself is perhaps his most impactful legacy, for better or for worse. That is the feature, not bug, of martyrdom – as Gary McCarron notes, “the authority to 646 Preston Yancy, “It Seems to Me: Let’s Honor the Militants,” Baltimore Afro-American, 14 February 1970, 17. 647 Vernon Jarrett, “Beware of the Death Worshipers,” Los Angeles Sentinel, 25 January 1973, A8. 648 Scott W. Hoffman, “Holy Martin: The Overlooked Canonization of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Vol. 10, no. 2 (Summer 2000), 123-148. 649 Christopher D. Rounds, “‘Dead Men Make Such Convenient Heroes’: The Use and Misuse of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Legacy as Political Propaganda,” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 51, Iss. 4 (May 2020), 315. 650 Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History, xxiv, esp. 20-23; Jason Sokol, The Heavens Might Crack: The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 2018); Lewis V. Baldwin and Rufus Burrow Jr., eds., The Domestication of Martin Luther King Jr.: Clarence B. Jones, Right-Wing Conservatism, and the Manipulation of the King Legacy (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013). 217 apply the title [of martyr], let alone the authority to enforce it, is neither given nor attained but largely assumed.”651 Particularly because King represents the pinnacle of the long tradition of Black American martyrdom that is fundamentally rooted in a belief in the ideals of America, King’s martyr legacy has been public property since 1968. The Impact of Black American Martyrdom on Other Groups Understanding the tradition of Black American martyrdom, quickly and broadly nationalized with the seismic death of King, as the starting point for other groups who claimed martyrdom for their cause offers new ways of thinking about this rhetoric in different settings. I suggest that in the cases of several other groups and causes ranging from (ironically) the Ku Klux Klan to gay rights, Black American martyrdom serves as the inspiration and point of departure in ways previously unacknowledged. Understanding this relationship both demonstrates the wider impact of Black activism on American society and allows for the interpretation of these instances outside the strict confines of religion. Perhaps the most bizarre example of the appropriation of Black American martyrdom comes from the Ku Klux Klan, who, at a November 6, 1965 gathering in Maryland of approximately 2,000 people “for an evening of race-baiting and cross-burning” also memorialized via black-draped wreaths two Klan members who had died that year. One, Dan Burros, was described by Frank Rotella of the New Jersey Klan as a “white martyr for the white race.”652 Burros had shot himself twice, according to the Baltimore Sun, when his “Jewish heritage” was discovered;653 coverage of the event in the Baltimore Afro-American notes that some at the gathering insisted he was framed and was not, in fact, of Jewish descent. The Afro-American includes the detail that Burros as “white martyr for the white race” was 651 Gary McCarron, “John Allen Chau and the Designative Authority of Martyrdom: An Analysis,” Journeys 22, no. 2 (2021), 56. 652 Douglas D. Connah Jr., “Klan convenes at Rising Sun: 2,000 hear Burros called a martyr for white race,” The Baltimore Sun, 7 November 1965, 28. 653 Ibid. 218 explicitly because he “wanted to protect the Klan…That took courage.”654 This martyrdom rhetoric came around seven months after the national furor over the death of James Reeb, the white martyr for Black freedom, and almost certainly influenced the rhetoric of this peculiar Klan martyrdom. Additionally, as Richard J. Jensen, Thomas R. Burkholder and John C. Hammerback argue, César Chávez of the United Farm Workers (UFW) also drew on the language and imagery of martyrdom in the 1970s and 1980s in eulogies for five different people killed during union activism. Drawing on the language of Lacey Baldwin Smith,655 the authors refer to these five figures as “Accidental Martyrs” specifically because they did not intentionally choose death.656 Their main point is that rhetoric was key to the “transformation” of these deaths into martyrdoms – as they write, “they were not true martyrs because they did not go knowingly and willingly to their deaths. Their status as martyrs could only be created rhetorically.”657 While I quibble with the normativity underlying this discussion of “true martyrs,” the authors are right that rhetoric is essential to the creation of martyrs. But I think that they miss the fact that Chávez, who was clearly inspired by King’s nonviolent activism in his own work,658 had a rich tradition of secular activist martyrdom from which to draw his inspiration. Finally, Brett Krutzsch argues that publicly mourned gay deaths in the U.S. have drawn on religious martyrdom rhetoric in pursuing a strategy of “gay assimilation” that sought to “present gays as normal Americans who were virtually identical to straights.”659 He argues that this strategy promoted monogamy and marriage in an attempt to promote “respectable sexual citizenship”660 as a politics of 654 Mae Rankin, “Stranger in a cow pasture: Eyewitness report of Klan hate rally in Rising Sun,” Baltimore Afro-American, 27 November 1965, 14. 655 Lacey Baldwin Smith, Fools, Martyrs Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World (New York: Alfred A. Knopff, 1997). 656 Michael P. Jensen, Thomas R. Burkholder, and John C. Hammerback, “Martyrs for a Just Cause: The Eulogies of Cesar Chavez,” Western Journal of Communication 67, no. 4 (2003), 337. 657 Jensen, Burkholder, and Hammerback, “Martyrs for a Just Cause,” 338. 658 See, e.g., “Good Friday Letter, 1969,” in The Words of César Chavez, Richard J. Jensen and John C. Hammerback (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2002), 34. 659 Krutzsch, Dying to Be Normal, 6. 660 Krutzsch, Dying to Be Normal, 10. 219 inclusion amid a “white Protestant vision of ‘normal’ American citizens.”661 Krutzsch critiques the LGBTQ+ community’s historic tendency to depict as “model LGBT citizens as white, male, gender-normative, monogamous, and Christian” because of its creation of a “profoundly limiting political dynamic” that excludes many community members.662 While his work provides valuable research on questions of identity and activism, I suggest that he, too, suffers from a lack of understanding of the influence of the tradition of Black American martyrdom on progressive causes. As this project has demonstrated, this tradition of martyrdom is unique to the United States, secular (if religiously informed), and fundamentally about claiming citizenship status (literal or metaphorical) within a nation and society. While the gay activists of the late 20th century can be critiqued for their adherence to Protestant-informed respectability politics, they were clearly following a playbook written by activists pursuing identity-based justice beginning more than 100 years before. What This Understanding of Black American Martyrdom Suggests – and What It Complicates I advocate for any work on martyrdom that exists outside of a specific religious context to use the tradition of Black American martyrdom as a starting point for its analysis. Many scholars turn to specifically religious explanations for the rhetoric of secular and/or activist martyrdom, and while I would not suggest a full abandonment of that lens, religion by itself is simply insufficient for understanding and explaining instances of cultural American martyrdom. I argue that a far better approach is to assess the impact and influence of the tradition of Black American martyrdom on other instances of martyrdom rhetoric utilized in social, political and/or cultural causes. But at the same time, the rhetoric of martyrdom is a double-edged sword: While it functions as a powerful rhetorical tool for structurally weaker groups and individuals, it ultimately requires assimilation and consensus to unleash its full rhetorical power. Martyrdom is necessarily in dialogue with prevailing norms in order to attempt 661 Krutzsch, Dying to Be Normal, 14. 662 Krutzsch, Dying to Be Normal, 162. 220 to persuade the audience of a martyr’s value and sacrifice – it is a tool of assimilation, not revolution. While it can be powerful and useful, it (intentionally or unintentionally) reifies societal standards and attitudes that might foreclose truly progressive aims. In this way, Black American martyrdom and the movements and figures it influenced are historical artifacts reflective of a different time in the U.S. Nevertheless, I propose that attention to this rhetorical tradition has much to offer the study of Black history and American history. Amid arguments for a longer periodization of the Black freedom struggle, the tradition of Black American martyrdom offers an example of a long, cohesive and intentionally and creatively nurtured Black tradition. And while the authors of this tradition were certainly primarily elite men who most frequently appealed to a martyrdom rooted in the respectability politics that reflected patriarchal, Christian and Western norms, they nevertheless gave voice and meaning to many forgotten stories and figures, daring to claim far before the height of the civil rights movement that Black lives have value in America. Other Paths for Scholarship Starting from an understanding of the history of Black American martyrdom opens multiple avenues for further scholarship. There is plenty more to analyze in the tradition of Black American martyrdom, not least of which is the role of gender in its construction. While I have highlighted the way in which some women both used the rhetoric of martyrdom and were described themselves as martyrs, their vanishingly small presence compared to men deserves further scrutiny to investigate the historical intersection of race, religion and gender. The Catholic- and spiritualist-inflected martyrdom of New Orleans in the late 19th century also deserves fuller examination; while it relied on different influences than the Protestant-coded martyrdom promulgated by the Garrisonian abolitionists and did not influence as directly further developments in this martyrdom tradition, it certainly was also indebted to the martyrdom rhetoric of immediatist abolition. Evaluating the agreements and divergences in Black 221 Catholic abolitionist martyr rhetoric, as in the case of André Cailloux, will add depth and dimension to the understanding of the strain of Black American martyrdom studied in this project. As I set forth in the introduction to this volume, I contend that grasping the whole tapestry of American cultural martyrdom is possible only through understanding its individual threads, and there are many more to examine in addition to Black American martyrdom. For example, what of the tradition of commemorating assassinated Presidents as martyrs? Does this also derive from the first assassinated Commander-in-Chief being Lincoln, someone who could (and did) easily fit in the established tradition of Black American martyrdom? Or is Presidential martyrdom a different tradition with different influences entirely? And what is the relationship between white guilt and white martyrdom for racial justice? After the death of Reeb, the Unitarian-Universalists leaned heavily into his martyrdom as a way of centering their social and religious beliefs, publishing several texts (including two in 1966 alone)663 and venerating his sacrifice for decades. What does this say about the role of martyrdom as expiation of America’s national sin? And what happens when, as in the case of the Unitarian-Universalists, a martyrdom tradition jumps from the socio-political world into the church, rather than vice versa? Finally, scholarship would benefit from an evaluation of secular martyrdom in an increasingly pluralistic society that has stepped away from America’s Cold War consensus, the site of some of the most impactful Black American martyrdom rhetoric. This is particularly necessary because of the presence in discourse of the martyrdom of Islam, particularly in a post-9/11 (and now, post-October 7) world. How has the Muslim conception of martyrdom, especially as deployed in political struggle, interacted with America’s inherent understanding of what I have argued is the Protestant-informed 663 See, e.g., Duncan Howlett, No Greater Love: The James Reeb Story (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); Jack Mendelsohn, The Martyrs: Sixteen Who Gave Their Lives for Racial Justice (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), Richard D. Leonard, Call to Selma: Eighteen Days of Witness (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2002). 222 tradition of Black American martyrdom? And what of this continuing rhetoric in a nation increasingly populated by the “nones” – Americans who do not identify with any religion?664 This project has grappled with questions of identity and who, and what, is valued in America, often finding that the successful veneration of martyrs, while influential in the pursuit of racial justice, nevertheless depended upon a scaffolding composed of the exclusionary systems it opposed. But I suggest that nevertheless, the analysis of martyrdom rhetoric and its influence on questions of identity and belonging in America has illuminated new avenues for understanding not only the way that Black Americans fought for their rightful place in their country, but also how their efforts were instrumental in building the lenses through which the nation and its citizens understand themselves, their neighbors and their nation. 664 Matthew S. Hedstrom, “The Rise of the Nones,” in Faith in the New Millennium: The Future of Religion and American Politics, ed. Matthew Avery Sutton and Darren Dochuk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 250-268. 223 Bibliography Papers & Collections Claude A. Barnett Papers: The Associated Negro Press: 1918-1967, microfilm of Archives and Manuscripts Department of the Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Illinois. Colored Conventions Project Digital Records, https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/. Ida B. Wells Papers: 1884-1976. 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