Panel 5: Contested Community and Cultural Spaces
Hard Scrabble and Snow Town Race Riots: The Vestiges of Slavery in Providence, Rhode Island
Location
Campus Center, Room 3540, University of Massachusetts Boston
Start Date
29-3-2014 10:45 AM
End Date
29-3-2014 12:00 PM
Description
This presentation was canceled.
On an October night in 1824, in a Providence neighborhood known as “Hard Scrabble,” and then again in September of 1831 in “Snow Town,” racially motivated violence rocked the capital of Rhode Island. These incidents shed light on an under-studied aspect of racial history in America: that despite being the first area of the country to outlaw slavery, and despite being a hotbed of abolitionism in the antebellum years, New England remained in the grips of a racial ideology rooted in slavery. I am specifically looking at the spaces in which blacks and whites interacted – in maritime neighborhoods, on the city’s docks, and aboard cargo, fishing, and whaling ships – in order to understand the roots of the unrest. Whereas most contemporary literature surrounding race in antebellum New England references the riots tangentially or anecdotally, my work focuses on the riots as major events indicative of a persistent dichotomy between the tenets of freedom granted by gradual emancipation and the reality of disenfranchisement and social exclusion. It is important for historians to recognize these events and the sociopolitical climate surrounding them because of how prominent, yet forgotten, they are in the larger context of the American conscience – one built upon a tug of war between notions of equality and prejudicial stereotype.
Hard Scrabble and Snow Town Race Riots: The Vestiges of Slavery in Providence, Rhode Island
Campus Center, Room 3540, University of Massachusetts Boston
This presentation was canceled.
On an October night in 1824, in a Providence neighborhood known as “Hard Scrabble,” and then again in September of 1831 in “Snow Town,” racially motivated violence rocked the capital of Rhode Island. These incidents shed light on an under-studied aspect of racial history in America: that despite being the first area of the country to outlaw slavery, and despite being a hotbed of abolitionism in the antebellum years, New England remained in the grips of a racial ideology rooted in slavery. I am specifically looking at the spaces in which blacks and whites interacted – in maritime neighborhoods, on the city’s docks, and aboard cargo, fishing, and whaling ships – in order to understand the roots of the unrest. Whereas most contemporary literature surrounding race in antebellum New England references the riots tangentially or anecdotally, my work focuses on the riots as major events indicative of a persistent dichotomy between the tenets of freedom granted by gradual emancipation and the reality of disenfranchisement and social exclusion. It is important for historians to recognize these events and the sociopolitical climate surrounding them because of how prominent, yet forgotten, they are in the larger context of the American conscience – one built upon a tug of war between notions of equality and prejudicial stereotype.
Comments
PANEL 5 of the 2013 Graduate History Conference features presentations and papers under the topic of "Contested Community and Cultural Spaces."