random thesis-site musings

[strixalba]

Miscellaneous Thesis-Related Thoughts:


black ministers vs. colorism (within a racial paradigm)

I could definitely write a paper about the colorism and paternalism in the way that white people wrote about (and write about, let's be honest) these two ministers in my thesis community. They're both Black ministers who escaped enslavement in the South and ended up leading contemporaneous Black congregations in the 1800s, but the way that white people write about them in newspaper and historical accounts is markedly different.

I was trying to tease out what to say about the heartwarming feelings of "aw man it's nice that literally everyone on the island seems to have really liked Minister 1 (JEC), no one had anything bad to say about him" while also noticing and discussing the tone difference in the way that white people talked about him (how much agency they ascribed to him, what social spaces he was allowed to occupy, the degree to which he interacted with the white community) versus the more dark-skinned Minister 2 (AC) of the neighboring AME Church.

Factors to consider:

• AC mostly surface in white accounts of him in the context of being a fugitive from slave-catchers; white people patted themselves on the backs for rallying around him as a community to keep him hidden when slave-catchers came to the island. This is a commendable thing for them to do. HOWEVER. When that’s the only story that people are telling about him, it obscures so much else about him. Some people don’t even get the name of his wife correct when they talk about the couple hiding with a white Quaker family (his first wife was MC, who escaped with him; one or two people in the later 19th and early 20th century call her LC, his second wife, who escaped from enslavement independently of him and was on the island long before that) which also problematically conflates two women's very different experiences of slavery in America together in the service of white savior narratives.
• JEC also escaped enslavement and came north. His distinguishing feature in the white narrative about him is his ability to pass for white, which enabled him to travel back down south and purchase the freedom of his mother, his wife and his sister-in-law. In writing about him, white authors and newspaper column-writers talk about his actions and his bravery, while not giving the same courtesy to AC and the ways in which his skin color circumscribed his ability to move through the world.
• Their skin color also (obviously) affected how they were treated by the white religious institutions of which they were a part: AC left the First Methodist Episcopal Church and founded an African Methodist Episcopal Church as a result of the racism and exclusion that he and others faced at the MEC. JEC was called from the mainland to preach at the African Baptist Church on the island, but he also took over services at the white Baptist church when necessary, and was their pastor for a year, and was on at least one temperance committee with white pastors. On the other hand, judging by his absence from white recollections, AC seems to have been solely involved in the Black community, and none of the white sources I have talk about specific memories (aside from his escape from enslavement) associated with him the way that they do with JEC.

I could about the specific adjectives used to describe them and the stereotypes/controlling images associated with each of those; the frequency with which they both show up in newspaper accounts and other historical documents or retrospective documents, and in what contexts (JEC was a barber who cut a lot of white peoples’ hair, for instance, in addition to showing up in other social activities; accounts of AC are mostly limited to his escape and a few to his ministry; but if I extrapolate from the ability of JEC’s church to pay a minster's salary, AC probably also had to work in addition to ministering to his own church).

Anyway, it wouldn't be a groundbreaking study, but it would be really nice to contextualize the way that both men get discussed in local histories. Outside of the scope of my thesis, saving this for later because I might actually want to write a paper about it.


women & kinship networks

The degree to which kinship networks that definitely existed are erased on the surface level of census and population data because women took their husbands’ last names, obscuring the degrees of their relationships with each other, and how many hours of work (I stopped formally recording after 100 hours because that’s when my assistantship ended and I switched focus to solely my thesis, but it’s probably been between 100 and 200) it has taken to reconstruct those relationships. And that’s while I’m also leaning on other people’s existing labor reconstructing their own family trees!

There are four or five different family trees on Ancestry.com that I’ve referenced heavily because they made a lot of those connections for me. I synthesized all of those trees and fact-checked them, but they still made connections that I was then much more easily able to track down by knowing that those connections existed in the first place! That is a LOT of work total that went into the reconstruction of female kinship networks that would otherwise look like a group of unrelated married women spending time together at church, rather than a group of sisters and cousins and aunts and grandmothers.