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 professor and chair of the history department. [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]
The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early to mid-19th century. It was used by enslaved African Americans primarily to escape into free states and from there to Canada. The network, primarily the work of free African Americans, was assisted by abolitionists and others sympathetic to the cause of the escapees. The slaves who risked capture and those who aided them are also collectively referred to as the passengers and conductors of the "Underground Railroad". Various other routes led to Mexico, where slavery had been abolished, and to islands in the Caribbean that were not part of the slave trade. An earlier escape route running south toward Florida, then a Spanish possession, existed from the late 17th century until approximately 1790. However, the network now generally known as the Underground Railroad began in the late 18th century. It ran north and grew steadily until the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by President Abraham Lincoln. One estimate suggests that, by 1850, approximately 100,000 slaves had escaped to freedom via the network.
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.
Beloved is a 1987 novel by American novelist Toni Morrison. Set in the period after the American Civil War, the novel tells the story of a dysfunctional family of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. The narrative of Beloved derives from the life of Margaret Garner, an enslaved person in the slave state of Kentucky who escaped and fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856.
Margaret Garner, called "Peggy", was an enslaved African-American woman in pre-Civil War America who killed her own daughter rather than allow the child to be returned to 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).
The fugitive slave laws were laws passed by the United States Congress in 1793 and 1850 to provide for the return of enslaved people who escaped from one state into another state or territory. The idea of the fugitive slave law was derived from the Fugitive Slave Clause which is in the United States Constitution. It was thought that forcing states to deliver fugitive slaves back to enslavement violated states' rights due to state sovereignty and was believed that seizing state property should not be left up to the states. The Fugitive Slave Clause states that fugitive slaves "shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due", which abridged state rights because forcing people back into slavery was a form of retrieving private property. The Compromise of 1850 entailed a series of laws that allowed slavery in the new territories and forced officials in free states to give a hearing to slave-owners without a jury.
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 personal 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.
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, United States 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.
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.
Henrietta Wood was an American enslaved woman who won the largest verdict ever awarded for slavery reparations in the United States. Born as a slave in Kentucky, but freed as an adult, Wood was later kidnapped and sold back into slavery. After the American Civil War, Wood successfully sued her kidnapper and won financial damages.
Peter Fossett was an enslaved laborer at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's plantation, who after he attained his freedom in the mid-1800s, 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.
The history of slavery in Colorado began centuries before Colorado achieved statehood when Spanish colonists of Santa Fe de Nuevo México (1598–1848) enslaved Native Americans, called Genízaros. Southern Colorado was part of the Spanish territory until 1848. Comanche and Utes raided villages of other indigenous people and enslaved them.
Consuelo Clark-Stewart was an American physician and the first African American woman to practice medicine in Ohio.
Mary Bateman Clark (1795–1840) was an American woman, born into slavery, who was taken to Indiana Territory. She was forced to become an indentured servant, even though the Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery. She was sold in 1816, the same year that the Constitution of Indiana prohibited slavery and indentured servitude. In 1821, attorney Amory Kinney represented her as she fought for her freedom in the courts. After losing the case in the Circuit Court, she appealed to the Indiana Supreme Court in the case of Mary Clark v. G.W. Johnston. She won her freedom with the precedent-setting decision against indentured servitude in Indiana. The documentary, Mary Bateman Clark: A Woman of Colour and Courage, tells the story of her life and fight for freedom.
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