Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region during the Final Decades of Slavery

Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World

by dann j. Broyld

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

312 pages, Hardcover

Published May 25, 2022

Reviews

[Timothy]

Broyld has written an important book that situates Black consciousness into a framework that is flexible enough to encompass Black Atlantic studies and the concept of the Great Lakes as a region defying national histories.

[Jeremy Lucas]

Predictably academic in its telling, Borderland Blacks offers an unvarnished, yet proud history of two northern cities formed in the 19th Century that were instrumental in the cause of Black freedom and Black justice before and after the American Civil War. As a son of Rochester who moved away too quickly to form any concrete memories of the city or its people, my one return visit during my early twenties proved underwhelming, and for this reason, I've rarely looked on my New York hometown with any degree of affection, other than saying I'm from "upstate." This book, however, has altered my appreciation, knowing, for example, that I was born within five miles of Mount Hope Cemetery, where the bones of Frederick Douglass lay at rest, where his soul may well have lingered and hovered, even a century later, over the streets near the hospital where my parents drove me home to North Chili. As Broyld points out, Rochester should not be deemed a city that ever had racial equality first on its mind, but its willingness to embrace the cause of freedom for those who fled slavery, and Douglass' work to that effect, along with Harriet Tubman (buried nearby in Auburn) and a host of others gives me an unexpected sense of pride in my place of birth. Enough that I'm traveling there in a few days to give it a second and even a third revisit, one grave in particular at the head of my list of things to see.

Last week, I stopped in Anniston, Alabama, where Freedom Riders were once chased, hunted, burned, and beaten out of their buses, simply because they were advocating for the rights and equality of strangers, people they had never met. And the question posed at the Anniston monument, still, is whether the people of today would willingly get on the bus of yesterday, knowing the risks, the danger, and the violent rage of dehumanizing racism that awaited them. I'd like to think I would have been there, especially if the spirit of Douglass is somewhere in me, absorbed years ago, somewhere on the grounds of a brief, unremembered Rochester infancy.