That Ray’s newspaper effectively served this purpose is borne out by the responses he received, which suggest that people relished the opportunity for conversation without the hardships of travel.34 For example, African Americans who met in Worcester and Pittsburgh in June 1840 sent records of their proceedings to Ray’s newspaper. Black Pittsburghers found the original call for the New Haven convention too hasty and argued that a national convention should be held no sooner than the spring of 1841 in order to achieve “a union of the whole.” Meanwhile, those gathered in Worcester thought a convention that would promote “united action in our cause” could not be held before September 1841.35 As the meeting date for the New Haven convention approached, a number of black people gathered in the city to protest the gathering. They called themselves “citizens of New Haven,” though some had traveled from Hartford and New York City to express their concerns. They denounced the proposed convention as “inexpedient, and uncalled for,” and noted that organizers even had failed to consult residents of their intended host city. These critics declared that the convention call represented only “a meagre proportion of our people.” If the call did lead to an assembly, they argued that it should not be called a national convention, a title they saw as too important to be claimed prematurely by a political minority.36
Although Ray and others agreed with the New Haven convention organizers that it was critical to oppose colonization, the convention’s critics were also deeply concerned with organizing a geographically diverse political community. Indeed, their desire for such a coalition was so powerful that concerns about unity at times seemed as though they might distract activists from the project of claiming legal protection through citizenship. Beyond the reality that no single free black person or group of people could truly speak for all African Americans, free and enslaved, the desire for unity produced tensions among activists and, at times, efforts to silence alternative viewpoints.
In the end, the New Haven convention failed rather spectacularly. Ten days before it was to begin, some of those who had signed the call publicly withdrew their support.37 On September 7, the appointed opening date, one man arrived in New Haven to sit as a delegate. The next day, the gathering grew to five, two of whom lived in the city, and they met at a private residence on the edge of town. Upon hearing this news, Charles Ray gleefully reported that the convention had been “almost a total failure,” satisfied, perhaps, that his paper had led people to reject the meeting. “The Convention did not come off quite so well as we expected,” Ray quipped. “We thought there would have been two or three others in attendance.”38 Much of his satisfaction arose from evidence (at least in his own newspaper) that black people placed such significance on broad political engagement. They appeared to agree with him that, if a national convention was to be part of black citizenship politics, it should not be planned hastily or called for trivial matters and that it ought to be organized by a representative body and held in a location convenient for people across the free states. Nonetheless, Ray’s humor must have been as bitter as it was biting, given his expressed interest in constructing a citizen status connected to rights and his sense of the value of a national convention for that pursuit.39
In addition to internal strategic differences, racist mob violence presented a serious challenge to reviving the national convention.40 After the New Haven fiasco, for example, black Philadelphians began planning a national gathering in their city to be held in the summer of 1842, but hostile white observers organized to prevent the meeting. In their convention call, activists cited the U.S. Constitution and claimed “the privileges and immunities of citizens.”41 Even in their early planning stages, meetings intensified white opposition. One observer noted that, because of ACS doctrine and black disfranchisement, white Philadelphians were conditioned to believe that their black counterparts were not entitled to any legal protections. He reported that white youths would “justify outrages on the colored children, by [saying] ‘they have no rights.’ ”42 Many people had no context in which they could comprehend the idea of black equality and viewed any work to that end as a destabilizing attack on society.
In the summer of 1842, as black activists planned and white Philadelphians simmered, black people paraded through Philadelphia to celebrate West Indian Emancipation Day. On the morning of August 1, 1842, nearly 1,200 people came together for a celebratory march across the Schuylkill River in the western part of the city.43 One of their banners depicted a black man pointing with one hand to his broken chains and with the other to the word “LIBERTY” writ large in gilded letters above his head. Later, white rioters would claim that the banner bore the more dangerous slogan “Liberty or Death.” Sometime before eleven o’clock, a handful of young white men contrived to block the parade; black marchers at the head of the procession “removed” them, and in the process, one of the white men fell to the ground. “The word was passed round that a white boy had been thrown down by ‘the niggers.’ ”44 A larger crowd gathered, and a street fight ensued. Black and white Philadelphians traded blows for an hour, hurling stones and chunks of bricks and causing severe injuries on both sides. The white mob claimed the streets as their own, scattering the marchers and destroying the offending banners, thus denying that black politics had a place in their community.45
Suppressing the Emancipation Day parade only spurred the mob to further violence. Through the evening and all of the next day, bands of white rowdies roved South Philadelphia, an area with a large African American population, attacking people on streets, smashing windows, barging through locked doors, and setting fire to private homes and public buildings. They threatened firemen with similar brutality, leading those volunteers to stand idly by as flames engulfed a black church and meeting house.46 Finally, on the evening of August 2, the city council and mayor agreed to fund a special police force that patrolled the streets “armed with heavy maces” to suppress the violence. All told, about twenty people were hospitalized with serious injuries as a result of the riots. Perhaps more important, hundreds of black Philadelphians abandoned their homes to mob violence, compelled to seek refuge “in the woods and swamps of New Jersey.”47
That mob was outraged over a specific celebration of black freedom as well as the general prospect of organized African American politics and activists’ claims to rights as citizens. A Philadelphia correspondent to the New-York Daily Tribune blamed the victims in his account of the violence. He argued that protest intensified prejudice because of what he called “the insolent bearing and unbecoming airs” of vocal black activists. That activist minority had pursued “obnoxious measures … indicated most unequivocally in the ‘National Convention,’ which was about to assemble in this city, and to which the late unfortunate procession was probably a preliminary step.” The correspondent quoted the call for the convention, in which organizers denounced colonization and claimed legal protections as citizens, a political project that the correspondent termed “ill-advised.” His account of the riot criminalized black politics, declaring that people who did not engage in activism would remain “entitled to the ample protection of the laws” but that all others were subject to extralegal violence.48 Here again, a white observer promoted a hollow kind of legal belonging that African Americans were working to redefine.
The activist claim that black Philadelphians were American citizens and were entitled to federal protection particularly galled white supremacists. The violent response and its justifications reveal that the choices to pursue national black political organization and claim an American citizen status were distinctly radical and palpably dangerous. The Philadelphia correspondent for the Tribune obscured the reality that black people were protesting precisely because they did not have the protection of the laws, that their “ill- advised” convention call was part of a search for the privileges and immunities his account falsely claimed were already available. The white reporter’s response to the convention highlights the importance of tangible legal change. African Americans needed a fundamentally restructured set of laws that would make real the legal order under which white northerners claimed they lived. The planned 1842 convention did