William Cooper Nell

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William Cooper Nell

William Cooper Nell (born December 16, 1816 in Boston , Massachusetts ; † May 25, 1874 ibid) was an African-American journalist , publisher and author, who worked full-time as an employee of the Boston city administration in the postal service. He was an abolitionist and was committed to the merging of schools and public institutions, which until then had been strictly separated for blacks and whites. He published his views in the newspapers The Liberator and The North Star , thereby helping to publicize and spread the anti-slavery movement.

Nell also helped found the New England Freedom Association in the early 1840s, and later helped found a vigilante group to protect escaped slaves. The vigilantes supported, among other things, the resistance to a new law that increased the penalties for citizens in free states who helped escaped slaves.

Nell's Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812 (1851) and The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855) were the first published studies of African Americans in the United States. He was also the first African American to work in an American federal agency.

Life

William Cooper Nell was the son of Louise Cooper from Brookline, Massachusetts and William Guion Nell from Charleston, South Carolina , who had supported the founding of the Massachusetts General Colored Association as early as the 1820s and played an important role in the anti-slavery movement .

Support abolitionism

Inspired by the founding of The Liberator magazine by William Lloyd Garrison and influenced by the remarks of Wendell Phillips , Nell decided to continue his father's commitment and fight racism and racial segregation . In particular, he promoted the intellectual and social wellbeing of young African Americans. A major goal of his work was also to bring together the various abolitionist organizations, in which until then either only whites or only blacks were involved in the same cause. He even dissolved the Massachusetts General Colored Association founded by his father .

William Cooper Nell studied the early 1830s law , but could not use it professionally, because he refused to the Constitution of the United States swear allegiance - in his view concerned it is a slavery POSITIVE document. It was around this time that Nell began working for Garrison and The Liberator and continued his struggle for Garrison's ideals until the paper was discontinued in 1865.

He was able to collect 2,000 black signatures for a petition calling for the abolition of the school separation between blacks and whites in Massachusetts. In fact, Nell and his associates won a victory in 1855 when segregation was officially abolished in Boston schools. William Garrison said of him that "possibly no one has done so much for the intellectual and moral improvement of the situation of young people of color". Among other things, he founded the Adelphia Union and the Young Men's Literary Society together with John T. Hilton in Boston to provide young African Americans with a better education. Nell also led campaigns calling for the desegregation to be desegregated in 1843 with the Boston Railroad and in 1853 with the Boston Performance Halls.

Despite his efforts to unite blacks and whites in the fight against racial segregation, William Cooper Nell played a major role in founding the black-only New England Freedom Association , which helped slaves escaped in the free northern states. He supported this because he was convinced that this matter was much closer to blacks than to whites.

From 1847 to 1851 Nell was editor of the newspaper The North Star by Frederick Douglass and temporarily moved to Rochester, New York for this activity . There he joined anti-slavery associations and founded a literary society . After Douglass fell out with Nell's good friend Garrison, Nell ended the collaboration and returned to Boston. He finally broke off contact with Douglass when the latter spoke out in favor of retaining the Colored National Council and the Manual Labor School , both of which belonged to the racial segregation model that Nell strictly opposed. Douglass, however , relentlessly attacked Nell and other leading activists such as Robert Purvis and Charles Lenox Redmond , who supported Garrison.

In 1850, Nell stood as a Free Soil Party candidate for a seat in the Massachusetts General Court , but lost the election. With the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 , federal agencies were forced to aid in the capture of escaped slaves and to impose harsher sentences on citizens who had helped the fugitives. This resulted in William Cooper Nell taking up his fight against slavery again. He founded a Boston vigilante ( Committee of Vigilance ), whose members pledged to support escaped slaves. The organization pursued the same goals as the Freedom Association of 1842, but was illegal under the latest legislation. Nell also supported the Underground Railroad , whose numerous supporters helped escaped slaves to reach the northern states.

In 1851, Nell and other supporters filed a petition with the General Court demanding the erection of a memorial to Crispus Attucks - one of the first martyrs of the American Revolution . In 1888, the Boston City Council erected a monument to commemorate the Boston Massacre on the Boston Common , giving Attucks a prominent position. However, Nell, who had died 14 years earlier, did not experience his late success.

In 1855, racial segregation in public schools in Massachusetts was abolished, largely due to Nell's efforts. As an employee of The Liberator , he was touring the Midwest at the time to study African-American efforts to abolish slavery. He graduated from Oberlin College , where he felt very comfortable due to the casual way the students got along with one another.

When the United States Supreme Court in 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford ruled that African races had no rights in the United States because they were not considered citizens under the United States Constitution , Nell was extremely upset. The following year he organized a memorial service for Crispus Attucks at Faneuil Hall and worked with supporters to establish an annual "Crispus Attucks Day" in Boston. He was a reminder of the involvement of African Americans in the Revolutionary War and was instrumental in bringing Attucks' name to the Boston massacre. In the same year, Nell organized the Convention of Colored Citizens of New England , which, contrary to his previous beliefs, was only accessible to blacks - he argued that the Scott judgment was such a massive insult to blacks that they now had to act separately from the whites .

Civil War

After the outbreak of the Civil War, Nell worked to ensure that African Americans could serve as soldiers in the Union Army . In 1861 he accepted a post as a postal clerk in Boston, becoming the first African American in the United States to have a job in a federal civil service. On April 14, 1869, Nell married the then 26-year-old Frances Ann Ames and had two sons with her, who died at the age of 9 and 22 respectively.

William Cooper Nell died of a heart attack in 1874 at the age of 58 . His wife survived him by more than 20 years and died in Nashua, New Hampshire in 1895 .

Heritage and Honors

His Boston House, where he lived in the 1850s, is today under the name of William C. Nell Residence as a National Historic Landmark in the National Register of Historic Places entered.

Own works (selection)

  • William C. Nell: Services of colored Americans, in the wars of 1776 and 1812 . Prentiss & Sawyer, Boston 1851, OCLC 34068998 .
  • William Cooper Nell: The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution: With Sketches of Several Distinguished Colored Persons: To Which is Added a Brief Survey of the Condition and Prospects of Colored Americans. Robert F. Wallcut, 1855, accessed on August 3, 2017 (English, digitized).
  • William C. Nell: Triumph of equal school rights in Boston: proceedings of the presentation meeting held in Boston, Dec. 17, 1855, including addresses by John T. Hilton, Wm. C. Nell, Charles W. Slack, Wendell Phillips, Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Charles Lennox Remond. RF Wallcut, Boston 1856, OCLC 24988712 .
  • William C. Nell, Edward Lawrence Balch: Faneuil Hall commemorative festival, March 5th, 1858. [...] (=  Archive of Americana; American broadsides and ephemera . Volume 1 , no. 10213 ). Edward Lawrence Balch, Boston 1858, OCLC 920446668 .
  • William C. Nell, Thomas Hamilton: Property qualification or no property qualification: a few facts from the record of patriotic services of the colored men of New York, during the wars of 1776 and 1812, with a compendium of their present business, and property statistics. Ed .: Susan B. Anthony Collection, Library of Congress. Thomas Hamilton and Wm. H. Leonard, New York 1860, OCLC 9114327 .
  • William C. Nell: Colored Americans in the wars of 1776 and 1912 . HT Kealing, Philadelphia 1902, OCLC 990502137 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Herbert G. Ruffin II .: Nell, William C. (1816-1874). Blackpast.org, accessed August 3, 2017 .
  2. ^ A b c d e f g h i Robert P. Smith: William Cooper Nell: Crusading Black Abolitionist . In: The Journal of Negro History . tape 55 , no. 3 . Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, July 1970, ISSN  0022-2992 , pp. 182-199 , doi : 10.2307 / 2716420 , JSTOR : 2716420 (English).
  3. ^ A b c d Roy E. Finkenbine: Nell, William Cooper. In: American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2005, accessed September 12, 2008 (English, user account required). doi : 10.1093 / anb / 9780198606697.article.1601194
  4. ^ A b Dorothy Porter Wesley, Constance Porter Uzelac: William Cooper Nell. Dorothy Porter Wesley Archives, 1999, archived from the original on April 12, 2008 ; accessed on August 3, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Jessie Carney Smith: African American Firsts. In: African American Almanac. January 1, 2008, archived from the original on May 5, 2016 ; accessed on August 3, 2017 .
  6. ↑ New Hampshire Marriage records 1637-1947 , New England Genealogical and Historical Society, Boston, Mass.
  7. ^ A b New Hampshire Deaths and Burials 1784-1949 , New England Genealogical and Historical Society, Boston, Mass.
personal data
SURNAME Nell, William Cooper
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nell, William C.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION African American journalist, publisher, and author
DATE OF BIRTH December 16, 1816
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH May 25, 1874
Place of death Boston , Massachusetts