Black Women Making Place in Nineteenth- Century Newspapers

Abstract

This essay argues that letters to the editor are modes of “life storying” that document individual and collective makings of place as a collective Black feminist activism and politics. Using data visualization as a method of research and protocol of reading enables one to see that recalibrating how letters to the editor are understood, from a focus on the individual to one on the collective, reveals their political work across space and scale in the early to late nineteenth century. But digital humanities tools, such as data visualization, need to be used with attention to the foundational assumptions that underlie them and will not, alone, necessarily produce readings that put the individual and collective in generative dialogue. Rather, interscale readings that combine both foundational and new reading methodologies in the humanities may reveal more about Black women’s lives through this press form they used.

Keywords:

• African American women’s lives
• data visualization
• nineteenth-century Black press
• letters to the editor

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for Nicholas van Orden’s generosity in thinking with me about data visualization tools. I thank Bamdad Aghilidehkordi for producing the QGIS data visualization for this essay and the ArcGIS community for building and sharing base layers such as the ones I use here. And I thank the participants at the Across Borders: Print and Periodical Studies in Motion (2016) and Black Print and Digital Cultures (2014) conferences, this issue’s anonymous reviewers, and guest-editor Kimberly Blockett for their incisive questions and feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Long known as the first woman orator in the US, Maria Stewart wrote “Cause for Encouragement” as a letter to the editor in response to William Lloyd Garrison’s description of the second Colored Convention (Philadelphia, 4–15 June 1832).

2 Gaul and Harris “Introduction,” 17; Wahl-Jorgensen, “A ‘Legitimate Beef,’” 91.

3 See Gardner, Unexpected Places, 10; Dahn, Jim Crow Networks, 80.

4 Wahl-Jorgensen, “A ‘Legitimate Beef,’” 90, 91.

5 Anderson, Imagined Communities; Habermas, Structural Transformation.

6 Brooks, “Early American Public Sphere,” 73 (emphasis added).

7 Gardner, Black Print Unbound, 167.

8 Lefebvre urges us to consider abstract or transparent space as enabling ideology to achieve consistency and dominance. The uses of space, spatial practice, and the role of the body within these are central to counter-space, challenging transparent space. Lefebvre, The Production of Space. Crawley has distinguished “making space against the settler logic of taking and claiming and owning space through displacement.” Crawley, “Introduction,” 14.

9 Moody, “New Directions,” 191–192, 193.

10 Foster, “Narrative,” 723.

11 Madera, Black Atlas, 6.

12 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 119.

13 See, for example, Cooper, A Voice.

14 Here, I have in mind acts of appropriation or taking space as Lefebvre writes of them: “potentialities—of works and of reappropriation—existing to begin with in the artistic sphere but responding above all to the demands of a body … which by putting up resistance inaugurates the project of a different space (either the space of a counter-culture, or a counter-space in the sense of an initially Utopian alternative to actually existing ‘real’ space).” Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 341.

15 In using interscale reading, I refer to a practice of reading that moves between scales and, consequently, entails using methods of reading operable at those different scales, such as the detail of close reading, a long-standing literary studies method, as well as the modes of reading enabled by the digital turn, which are used in computational literary studies and make it possible to “read” a large corpus of text. These would include methods referred to as distant reading, surface reading, literary text/data mining, and algorithmic literary study. By pursuing what I call interscale reading, I am neither subscribing to a binary of close versus distant reading nor suggesting that either computational literary studies or interscale reading are correctives to established reading methods in literary studies and the humanities. For debates on digital humanities methods, see, for example, Da, “Computational Case”; Algee-Hewitt et al., “Computational Literary Studies,” responding to Da’s article, in which Mark Andrew Algee-Hewitt et al. participated and Da responded, with an afterword by Stanley Fish.

16 Han, “Making a Black Pacific,” 33.

17 Qtd. in Gardner, Black Print Unbound, 168.

18 Gardner, Black Print Unbound, 170.

19 Ibid., 168–169.

20 Ibid., 167; Gardner, “Remembered (Black) Readers,” 248–249. Similarly, a single letters column in the Southern Workman could occupy half that publication’s print space, and the Southern Workman published several different letters columns in each edition. I offer the Recorder and the Southern Workman as examples since Black women’s letters to them comprise the most significant subset of my data across the largest sweep of time (42% published in the 1860s–1870s).

21 Dahn, Jim Crow Networks, 83.

22 See, for example, Miles and Holland, “Introduction”; Stephens, “Uprooted Bodies”; Jackson, “Humanity”; Kelley, “The Rest of Us”; Byrd et al., “Economies of Dispossession”; Day et al., “Solidarities of Nonalignment.”

23 On possessive individualism and racialization, see Roediger, How Race Survived.

24 Byrd (Chickasaw) has introduced arrivant into Indigenous studies, a term adopted from the work of Brathwaite that disrupts the binary of settler and native. Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xix; Brathwaite, The Arrivants.

25 Work in Black studies on Black life and western ontologies of the human includes that of Saidiya Hartman, David Marriott, Katherine McKittrick, Fred Moten, Jared Sexton, Christina Sharpe, Hortense Spillers, Calvin Warren, Alexander Weheliye, Frank Wilderson III, Michelle Wright, and Sylvia Wynter.

26 Cheng and Shabazz, “Introduction,” 5; Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings,” 22.

27 Brooks, “The Unfortunates,” 52 (emphasis added).

28 Brooks, “Early American Public Sphere,” 75.

29 Madera, Black Atlas, 5.

30 Hague, “‘The Right to Enter,’” 333.

31 Wayne, qtd. in ibid.

32 Hague, “The Right to Enter,’” 334.

33 Cresswell, “The Production of Mobilities,” 19; Larsen, Urry, and Axhausen, Mobilities, Networks, Geographies, 11.

34 Gardner brought Highgate’s letters to light. See, Black Print Unbound, Chapter 8.

35 Gardner, Black Print Unbound, 186.

36 Ibid., 189.

37 Highgate, “Letter from New Orleans.” The First Nations named in this section are determined by consulting Native Land Digital, https://native-land.ca

38 Highgate, “New Orleans Correspondence.”

39 Highgate, “A Spring Day.”

40 Highgate, “On Horse Back.”

41 Madera, Black Atlas, 217.

42 Pride and Wilson, A History, 26.

43 Although anonymous, pseudonymous and initial signatures prove challenging for determining a letter writer’s gender. Gardner’s work with both the San Francisco Elevator and the Christian Recorder, which together comprise 66% of my data set, enables verification of these letters as written by women and not fabricated by editors. Research in Hampton school publications enabled me to verify the letters in my data set from the Southern Workman. Other women in my data set are known Black female activists who signed their names or known pen names.

44 The Black population in the West (dating from the first census in the region) ranged from 0.7% of the total population in 1850 to 0.6% in 1880, the lowest Black population of any region in the country during these decades. Gibson and Jung, “Historical Census Statistics,” 19–23, 25, 28.

45 I rely here on a map produced by a talented research assistant in QGIS with what we would identify as a colonial base layer. Researchers like me using such tools who are not themselves makers are limited by the base layers available in visualization programs, which tend to make present-day and therefore colonial maps as their standard, or unalterable, base layer.

46 Han, “Making a Black Pacific,” 31; Han, “All Roads,” 3, 8. As Fagan documents, nearly half of the North Star’s subscriber base was British readers, testifying to Douglass’s “international agenda” for the newspaper. Fagan, The Black Newspaper, 77.

47 See, for example, the work of Robin D. G. Kelley, Elsa Barkely Brown, Xiomara Santamarina, and James C. Scott.

48 Foster and Haywood, “Christian Recordings,” 22.

49 Newman, “Faith in the Ballot” (emphasis added).

50 See, for example, Lincoln and Mamiya’s foundational assertion: “No other area of black life received a higher priority from black churches than education.” Lincoln and Mamiya, The Black Church, 251.

51 The 206 letters comprising my data set were drawn from the Readex African American Newspapers, 1827–1998, HathiTrust, and Accessible Archives databases. These visualizations do not include letters for which I cannot determine a place of origin.

52 Collier speculates that periodical study requires a combination of close reading, distant or machine reading, and surface reading. Collier, “What Is?”

53 Drucker, “Humanities Approaches.” See also Lavin, “Why Digital Humanists.”

54 Gallon, “Making a Case,” 46–47.

55 Morris, “Document,” 149.

56 McPherson, “Digital Humanities,” 154.

57 Gallon, “Making a Case,” 44.

58 Liddle, “Methods in Periodical Studies.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Teresa Zackodnik

Teresa Zackodnik teaches critical race theory, American literature, and African American feminisms in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her publications include The Mulatta and the Politics of Race (2004) and Press, Platform, Pulpit: Black Feminisms in the Era of Reform (2011), as well as her editing projects: African American Literature in Transition, 1850–1865 (2021), African American Feminisms, 1828–1923 (6 volumes, 2007), and “We Must Be Up and Doing”: A Reader in Early African American Feminisms (2010). Her current research focuses on Black feminisms in the nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Black press.