Keith Griffler, PhD
Keith Griffler is Associate Professor of African American History in the Department of Africana and American Studies at SUNY Buffalo. His most recent book is The Freedom Movement’s Lost Legacy: Black Abolitionism Since Emancipation, forthcoming from the University Press of Kentucky.
Editorial Note–In light of the recent tragedy in Buffalo, New York, which involved the murder of eleven innocent African Americans by a white supremacist at the Tops Supermarket, we at Historianspeaks see this as a teachable moment. This blog, the first of two, explores the long history of Buffalo, New York beginning in the 19th century. In order to understand the present, we must talk about and engage the past.
Nineteenth century Buffalo represents an easily overlooked microcosm of the American North: at once an important center of the African American freedom movement and a city deeply implicated in the national enforcement of racism and slavery. It lay at the eastern end of a stretch of Lake Erie that served as last stopping points on the Underground Railroad’s antebellum freedom trails to Canada, and it included as near neighbors in Western New York and Canada West such luminaries as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman who maintained close ties. One of Buffalo’s most famous residents, William Wells Brown, made his own escape from slavery in the mid-1830s, for a crucial decade joining its vigilance committee and ferrying freedom seekers across the lake. He and several of his fellow activists attended the landmark 1843 National Negro Convention held in Buffalo, chaired by the city’s own Samuel H. Davis and highlighted by Henry Highland Garnet’s immortal “Call to Rebellion.”
Buffalo was a long way from the pitched battles that too frequently took place along what I have called the front line of freedom that marked the border between the North and South. But it still lay within the boundaries of the U.S., and that was enough to ensure that America’s racist legal regime—made worse by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850—rendered life precarious for Black Buffalonians. That included the attempted kidnappings of freedom seekers. In one notorious case in 1851, local resident Daniel Davis was assaulted and arrested on the waterfront and when subsequently freed like so many others crossed to Canada. It was more than the dogged efforts of slavecatchers that drove them there. Abolitionists like William Wells Brown and Frederick Douglass attested to the realities of northern racism and segregation that, for example, consigned large numbers of Black children in Western New York to separate schools. The vigilant enforcement of racism and slavery in even such a far outpost of the North was enough to send both men into temporary exile in England prior to the Civil War. As the nation braced for that irrepressible conflict, Brown had trouble believing it would usher in meaningful liberty for Black people. He consequently devoted some of his efforts to encouraging them to emigrate to Haiti to enjoy real freedom—joining John Brown’s oldest son and other surviving figures from the Harpers Ferry movement in that endeavor.
William Wells Brown’s pessimism stemmed in no small part from the actions of Buffalo’s most noted white citizen of the era, Millard Fillmore, who as the 13th president signed the Fugitive Slave bill into law. That draconian legislation forced thousands of freedom seekers to take refuge in Canada, making them, as Brown put it, “fugitives from their native land” who were not in any sense “fugitives from justice.” In belated recognition of the devastation this defining act of the Fillmore administration unleashed on African Americans everywhere, my university has removed the name of Fillmore, its founding chancellor, from a building and a constituent college in favor of Buffalo civil rights pioneer Mary Talbert. Her crucial role at the turn of the twentieth century, including in the founding of the Niagara Movement held just down the road, has been carefully documented by my Department of Africana and American Studies colleague Lillian S. Williams. As William Wells Brown had foreseen, Emancipation did not dislodge racism from the fabric of northern life in cities like Buffalo, the nation’s eighth largest city at the end of the nineteenth century. That failure ensured that Talbert’s ongoing work on behalf of the African American freedom struggle would remain indispensable here as much as such activism was across the length and breadth of the nation.
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Previously Published on Historian Speaks
image Narrative of William W. Brown, a fugitive slave – p52.png
William Wells Brown, Public Domain