Panel 5: Contested Community and Cultural Spaces

Event Title

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.

Comments

PANEL 5 of the 2013 Graduate History Conference features presentations and papers under the topic of "Contested Community and Cultural Spaces."

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Mar 29th, 10:45 AM Mar 29th, 12:00 PM

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.