Nikki M. Taylor is an American historian. She is professor of history at Howard University and author of four books on nineteenth-century African-American history.
Nikki M. Taylor is an American historian. She is professor of history at Howard University and author of four books on nineteenth-century African-American history.
Nikki Marie Taylor was born in Toledo, Ohio. [1] As an undergraduate, Taylor studied United States history at the University of Pennsylvania and was a participant in the Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship Program. [1] She had expected to go to law school but the study of history drew her in; [1] she graduated in 1994, submitting an honors thesis supervised by Drew Gilpin Faust. [2] She next went to study history in Ghana on a Fulbright Fellowship. [3] Returning to the US, she enrolled at Duke University, where she earned an MA (1996) and PhD (2001) in US history, as well as a certificate in women's studies. [4] Her dissertation, '"Frontiers of Freedom:' The African-American Experience in Cincinnati, 1802-1862", was supervised by Sydney Nathans, Peter Wood, Raymond Gavins, John Thompson, and Robert Korstad. [2]
From 2001 to 2005, Taylor taught at Vassar College as an assistant professor of American history, then joined the University of Cincinnati where she taught until 2013, first as assistant then associate professor of American history. [2] In 2014 she joined Texas Southern University as professor and chair of the department of history and geography. [2] In 2017, she moved to Howard University. [2] At Howard she is a Professor in the Department of History, and was chair of the department from 2018 to 2023. [4]
Taylor's research focuses on African-American history in the nineteenth century, particularly in Ohio and Kentucky. Her first book, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati's Black Community 1802-68, based on her dissertation, looks at how an African-American community developed in geographic proximity to the threat of slavery. [5] [6] Her next book was an intellectual biography of a central figure from this area: America's First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark traces the development of Clark's evolving viewpoint, from radical abolitionist to socialist to conservative Democrat. [7] [8] [9] Her third book is also a biography, describing Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman in Kentucky who briefly escaped and when recaptured, attempted to kill her four children (and followed through with killing one) rather than have them subjected to slavery. (Garner's case inspired Toni Morrison's novel Beloved.) Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio. Examining Garner's case through a black feminist lens, Taylor argues her act of violent desperation was the last best choice available to her as an enslaved mother. [10] [11] Following on her work on Garner's case, Taylor is working on a fourth book on enslaved women's uses of violent struggle to resist slavery; the project is called 'Brooding Over Bloody Revenge:' Enslaved Women, 'Wild Justice' and Lethal Resistance to Slavery. [4]
Taylor has won Social Science Research Council and Woodrow Wilson fellowships to support this research. She is also the principal investigator of two institutional grants at Howard: the 2017 Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program Grant ($480,000) and the 2021 Mellon Just Futures grant ($5 million). [4]
William Holmes McGuffey was an American college professor and president who is best known for writing the McGuffey Readers, the first widely used series of elementary school-level textbooks. More than 120 million copies of McGuffey Readers were sold between 1836 and 1960, placing its sales in a category with the Bible and Webster's Dictionary.
In the United States, fugitive slaves or runaway slaves were terms used in the 18th and 19th centuries to describe people who fled slavery. The term also refers to the federal Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850. Such people are also called freedom seekers to avoid implying that the enslaved person had committed a crime and that the slaveholder was the injured party.
Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, dubbed "The Black Swan", was an American singer considered the best-known Black concert artist of her time. She was lauded by James M. Trotter for her "remarkably sweet tones and wide vocal compass". Trotter described her as the first African American concert singer, which has been repeated through many biographies.
Margaret Garner, called "Peggy", was an enslaved African American woman who killed her own daughter and intended to kill her other three children and herself rather than be forced back into slavery. Garner and her family had escaped enslavement in January 1856 by traveling across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati, but they were apprehended by U.S. Marshals acting under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Garner's defense attorney, John Jolliffe, moved to have her tried for murder in Ohio, to be able to get a trial in a free state and to challenge the Fugitive Slave Law. Garner's story was the inspiration for the novel Beloved (1987) by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and its subsequent adaptation into a film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey (1998).
Ellen Craft (1826–1891) and William Craft were American abolitionists who were born into slavery in Macon, Georgia. They escaped to the Northern United States in December 1848 by traveling by train and steamboat, arriving in Philadelphia on Christmas Day. Ellen crossed the boundaries of race, class, and gender by passing as a white planter with William posing as her servant. Their escape was widely publicized, making them among the most famous fugitive slaves in the United States. Abolitionists featured them in public lectures to gain support in the struggle to end the institution.
John Pollard Gaines was a U.S. military and political figure. He was a Whig member of the United States House of Representatives, representing Kentucky from 1847 to 1849, and he served as Governor of the Oregon Territory from 1850 to 1853, stepping down after a turbulent term in office. He was the owner of Margaret Garner, whose enslavement and sexual assault is the basis for Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved.
The Black Brigade of Cincinnati was a military unit of African-American soldiers, that was organized in 1862 during the American Civil War, when the city of Cincinnati, Ohio, was in danger of being attacked, by the Confederate Army. The members of the Cincinnati "Black Brigade" were among the first African Americans to be employed in the military defense of the Union. The fortifications—including forts, miles of military roads, miles of rifle pits, magazines, and hundreds of acres of cleared forests—at the border of Northern Kentucky thwarted the major threat to Cincinnati during the Civil War.
Peter Humphries Clark was an American abolitionist and speaker. One of Ohio's most effective black abolitionist writers and speakers, he became the first teacher engaged by the Cincinnati black public schools in 1849, and the founder and principal of Ohio's first public high school for black students in 1866. Because of these accomplishments, he was named the nation's primary black public school educator. Clark is also remembered as the first African-American socialist in the United States, running for Congress in 1878 under the banner of the Socialist Labor Party of America.
Henry Walton Bibb, was an American author and abolitionist who was born into slavery. Bibb told his life story in his Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, which included many failed escape attempts followed finally by success when he escaped to Detroit. After leaving Detroit to move to Canada with his family, due to issues with the legality of his assistance in the Underground Railroad, he founded the abolitionist newspaper, Voice of the Fugitive. He lived in Canada until his death.
The history of slavery in Kentucky dates from the earliest permanent European settlements in the state, until the end of the Civil War. In 1830, enslaved African Americans represented 24 percent of Kentucky's population, a share that had declined to 19.5 percent by 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. Most enslaved people were concentrated in the cities of Louisville and Lexington and in the hemp- and tobacco-producing Bluegrass Region and Jackson Purchase. Other enslaved people lived in the Ohio River counties, where they were most often used in skilled trades or as house servants. Relatively few people were held in slavery in the mountainous regions of eastern and southeastern Kentucky; they served primarily as artisans and service workers in towns.
The Union Baptist Church is Cincinnati's oldest black church. The church was founded on July 14, 1831. They had their first meeting in a building on Third Street, between Elm and Plum Streets, downtown. The members built a church on Central Avenue and called Rev. David Leroy Nickens of Chillicothe, Ohio as its first pastor. By the end of its first decade, the church had grown sufficiently to require a new building and by 1839, moved to a new location on Baker Street, where they remained for twenty-five years. Nickens was succeeded by Rev. Charles Satchell in 1838, who in turn was succeeded by William P. Newman in 1848. When Newman fled to Canada because of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, he was succeeded by Rev. Henry Adams, who served until 1855; Rev. H. L. Simpson, who served until 1858; and Rev. H. H. White who served three years. William Newman returned in 1864, serving until his death in the 1866 cholera epidemic. Simpson returned to fill the vacancy, serving until 1869, when he was succeeded by Rev. James H. Magee.
The Cincinnati race riots of 1829 were triggered by competition for jobs between Irish immigrants and native blacks and former slaves, in Cincinnati, Ohio but also were related to white fears given the rapid increases of free and fugitive blacks in the city during this decade, particularly in the preceding three years. Merchants complained about the poor neighborhoods along the river as having ill effects on their waterfront shops and trade with southern planters. Artisans excluded blacks from apprenticeships and jobs in the skilled trades. In June 1829 overseers of the poor announced that blacks would be required to post surety bonds of $500 within 30 days or face expulsion from the city and state. This was in accord with a 1807 Black Law passed by the Ohio legislature intended to discourage black settlement in the state.
The Cincinnati riots of 1841 occurred after a long drought had created widespread unemployment in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. Over a period of several days in September 1841, unemployed whites attacked black residents who defended themselves. Many blacks were rounded up and held behind a cordon and then moved to the jail. According to the authorities, this was for their own protection.
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery, except as punishment for a crime, through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Lucy Stanton Day Sessions was an American abolitionist and feminist figure, notable for being the first African-American woman to complete a four-year course of a study at a college or university. She completed a Ladies Literary Course from Oberlin College in 1850.
African-American socialism is a political current that emerged in the nineteenth century, specifically referring to the origins and proliferation of Marxist ideologies among African-Americans for whom socialism represents a potential for equal class status, humane treatment as laborers, and a means of dismantling American capitalism. Black liberation is in line with Marxist theory, which asserts that the working class, regardless of race, has a common interest against the bourgeoisie.
Enslaved women were expected to maintain the enslaved populations, which led women to rebel against this expectation via contraception and abortions. Infanticide was also committed as a means to protect children from either becoming enslaved or from returning to enslavement.
Peter Farley Fossett was an enslaved laborer at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's plantation, who after he attained his freedom in the mid-19th century, settled in Cincinnati where he established himself as a minister and caterer. He was a captain in the Black Brigade of Cincinnati during the Civil War. Fossett was an activist for education and prison reform. He was a conductor on the Underground Railroad. His remembrances, Once the slave of Thomas Jefferson, were published in 1898.
Gilmore High School, also called Cincinnati High School, was established by Rev. Hiram S. Gilmore in 1844 to provide secondary education for African-American students. Students at the school in Cincinnati, Ohio, came from across the country, including the children of white Southern planters and the African Americans they enslaved.
Consuelo Clark-Stewart was an American physician and the first African American woman to practice medicine in Ohio.
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