304 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / 15 halftones, 2 maps
History / United States - 19th Century | History / African American | Social Studies / Slavery Studies
In the early nineteenth century, Rochester, New York, and St. Catharines, Canada West, were the last stops on the Niagara branch of the Underground Railroad. Both cities handled substantial fugitive slave traffic and were logical destinations for the settlement of runaways because of their progressive stance on social issues including abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and temperance. Moreover, these urban centers were home to sizable free Black communities as well as an array of individuals engaged in the abolitionist movement, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Anthony Burns, and Hiram Wilson. dann j. Broyld’s Borderland Blacks explores the status and struggles of transient Blacks within this dynamic zone, where the cultures and interests of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the African Diaspora overlapped.
Blacks in the two cities shared newspapers, annual celebrations, religious organizations, and kinship and friendship ties. Too often, historians have focused on the one-way flow of fugitives on the Underground Railroad from America to Canada when in fact the situation on the ground was far more fluid, involving two-way movement and social collaborations. Black residents possessed transnational identities and strategically positioned themselves near the American-Canadian border where immigration and interaction occurred. Borderland Blacks reveals that physical separation via formalized national barriers did not sever concepts of psychological memory or restrict social ties. Broyld investigates how the times and terms of emancipation affected Blacks on each side of the border, including their use of political agency to pit the United States and British Canada against one another for the best possible outcomes.
dann j. Broyld is associate professor of African American history at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
“In Borderland Blacks, dann j. Broyld has written a new tale of two cities by centering the experiences of Black people, free and those hoping to be free, in the Niagara international zone—a region that formed an important boundary between Canada and the United States. Broyld uses the Niagara frontier as his conceptual framework and thus employs a transnational methodology to show how during the mid-nineteenth-century Underground Railroad era, Blacks arriving to and living in St. Catharines, Canada West, and Rochester, New York, crafted new identities—British Canadian, American, but ultimately North American—to script new lives and experiences of freedom. He does this by plumbing known primary sources and discovering new ones.
The Underground Railroad movement can best be described as the greatest freedom movement of the modern age. Rochester and St. Catharines were beacons of hope for Black freedom seekers. But this freedom was fought for and highly contested. Blacks fought slave catchers, militias, white racists and supremacists, government hostility, and on the American side, a federal government that sought at every turn to reduce free and freed Blacks to slavery, and keep those already in chains, chained.
Yet Black people as architects of their own liberation, as the premier antislavery activists, and civil rights advocates courageously claimed and preserved their hard-won freedom. And they did so in deliberate ways. Sometimes they remained domiciled in one city or the other. Sometimes, they moved on to places that promised more freedom, while at the same time, and this is a central theme in Broyld’s work, they moved back and forth across the border, creating what he calls a ‘transnational interface.’ But in whatever city they chose to live, these freedom-seekers built communities and created social, cultural, political, and religious institutions that gave them succor. Borderland Blacks chronicles the multilayered life experiences of Black Canadians and Americans at the border.
The Black freedom movement on the Niagara frontier, as exemplified in the story of Black people in these two cities, is a story that was in need of a more expansive theorization, and cogent telling. And Broyld has done this, and more. He has filled a huge gap in the historiography of the Black freedom movement in the Niagara region and made an enduring contribution.
Borderland Blacksis methodologically sophisticated and conceptually rich. With Janus-like perspective, Professor Broyld looks across the border, backward and forward, to tell this story of Black hopes, dreams, successes, and endurance.”
—Dr. Afua Cooper, principal investigator of the project A Black People’s History of Canada, Dalhousie University
“With a balanced approach to communities north and south of the U.S.-Canada border, Broyld expands what history can and should be told about those escaping slavery and seeking freedom in the Underground Railroad era. Broyld demonstrates that Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass were not exceptions but rather that they were part of a larger transnational movement to create a safe space for Black Americans fearing reenslavement. Broyld’s attention to the ongoing, multidirectional connections between individuals, families, and communities on both sides of the border demonstrates the best in borderlands studies. Broyld’s work promises to be an essential citation in Black Canadian, African North American, African American, and U.S.-Canada border studies in the years ahead.”
—Adam Arenson, professor of history at Manhattan College, author of The Great Heart of the Republic: St Louis and the Cultural Civil War, and coeditor of Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States
“dann j. Broyld has gifted us with an outstanding history of the richness and complexity of nineteenth-century Black lives lived on a borderland. This study is destined to become a foundational work.”
—Barrington Walker, professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University and editor of The History of Immigration and Racism in Canada: Essential Readings
“Borderland Blacks demonstrates that the U.S.-Canadian border region was not only a major corridor of Black freedom, but an incubator of abolitionist activism and Black thought. Some of the most consequential nineteenth-century Black activists and intellectuals spent time in this borderland. Broyld is a master researcher who capably amplifies the most ignored voices in the archive. His storytelling skills breathe life into the communities and stories of Black fugitives, activists, women, and abolitionists on both sides of the border.”
—Dr. Nikki Taylor, department chair and professor of history at Howard University
“Broyld reconstructs the connections between these two borderlands communities with insight and empathy, reminding us that cross-border collaborations were continuous and complex, and that the flow of Black people across the line was hardly one-directional. . . . Borderland Blacks is eye-opening and persuasive. It is deeply versed in the literature of transboundary social formation and engages with and successfully challenges a panoply of U.S.-centric scholarship on the Underground Railroad.”
—Journal of Southern History
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