Week Four at MSA

The current phase of the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland program, which is funded by a Department of Education grant, is focused on five counties of the Eastern Shore (Caroline, Dorchester, Kent, Queen Anne's, and Talbot). To support our research of this region, I'm beginning to strip US census records for data about African Americans living in Dorchester County. This information forms part of a database that helps us cross-reference enslaved and free blacks in various state, local, and federal records.

As you know, another project I'm working on is the records of the Maryland State Colonization Society. One of my goals will be to find out who was being successfully recruited to emigrate, what their motivations were, and what the socio-political environment was like in Maryland. As the below letter from a recruiting agent shows, the Society was very particular about recruiting "the right kind" of black person to Liberia. The Society was focused on recruiting industrious, tee-totaling Christians. However, in correspondence from Liberia, Society officials frequently complain about the emigrants' lack of industry. None of the secondary sources that I've read have interrogated this label of laziness, accepting this as an apt description of many of the emigrants. On the other hand, scholarship on freed people in the United States has interpreted this perceived resistance to long-term work commitments in other ways such as a desire to be mobile in order to find dispersed family members or an attempt to avoid exploitative working arrangements. I hope my work with the Society's papers will uncover more of the voices of the black emigrants who exiled themselves from their native United States in hopes of a better future for themselves and

families.¹

From the first paragraph: "The visit of Jackson to this neighborhood has produced a happy influence in behalf of Colonization, and quite a disposition to emigrate on the part of the [illegible] people of color; The probability now is, that we have twenty, at least, from hereabouts, (and these too), of the right kind. By tomorrow we shall have, as many names as it is desirable should go this fall from one portion of our state." (emphasis added)

In my free time, I went to a wonderful panel about race in America organized by the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I had the opportunity to meet Spencer Crew, former director of the National Museum of American History and former president of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. Dr. Crew, a professor at George Mason University, is teaching a course on the Underground Railroad and I hope the Legacy of Slavery website will offer him useful primary sources for Maryland. I also met Nell Irvin Painter, professor emerita at Princeton, who signed my copy of The History of White People.

Nell Irvin Painter, Rex M. Ellis, and Spencer Crew at the NMAAHC panel "America in Black and White"

1.  John H. Kennard to Dr. Easter, October 9, 1838, Maryland State Colonization Society Papers. Maryland State Archives, MSA SC 5977. http://mdhistory.net/msa_sc5977/scm013227/html/msa_sc5977_scm13227-0008.html