This is an Ohio Seminar in Early American History & Culture event.
Thomas J. Humphrey is an associate professor of early American History and also the Chair of the History Department at Cleveland State University.
Abstract:
A few years ago, a press asked me to write an annotated bibliography on crowds and crowd violence. But one of the instructions struck me as odd. The editors asked me not to include anything on uprisings or revolts that were led by, or that involved, enslaved people or Black inhabitants of early America. One of the reasons was pragmatic. The editor had already asked someone to write a bibliography that covered slave revolts. But even that decision, while reasonable, highlighted historical thinking that held that crowds of Black people were almost always thought of by rulers as revolts, not crowd actions, and rulers treated crowds that contained Black participants as treasonous. Thus, people, both historical and historian, considered riots and crowd actions that included, or were run by, enslaved people, or Black people, as different.
And that got me thinking. When she wrote about Black Abolitionists, and again in her new book, Kellie Jackson Carter explained that, often, historians embrace the divisions made by their Anglo-European subjects and, as a result, too often study their subjects within the context of their subjects’ relationship to slavery. As a result, historians who characterize “Black violence” as illegitimate, or as a revolt instead of a crowd action, minimize the racism and violence inherent in the social and political institutions their subjects built and then preserved. Those structural legal and cultural institutions pushed inhabitants of the early Americas to divide crowds along lines of cultural heritage and skin tone. In the process, officials who did so gave some crowds a kind of credibility while they erased the legitimacy of other crowds. As a result, I think it is time to at least try redescribing and analyzing crowd action in colonial British North America in a way that avoids dividing crowds based on cultural and geographic heritage. Doing so will, I hope, provide a more nuanced perspective of crowd actions and of the communities in which people used violence to redress their grievances. At the same time, by interrogating how people built institutional and cultural power structures in colonial North America, looking at crowd actions will help uncover how people made race in the eighteenth century.