African American suffrage advocate and abolitionist minister’s scrapbook in free online talk

“Strengthen and invigorate our souls!”

On Oct. 12, Yale’s Beineke library offers a webinar with Charles Warner, Jr. presenting

Rev. Amos Beman

the scrapbooks that Rev. Amos Gerry Beman, an African American pastor and social activist in Connecticut, made between 1830 and 1858, now fully digitized. 

Amos Berman followed the decades-long struggle for African American voting rights. I have only begun to dip into this trove, and have already seen one item where African Americans wrote passionately about the need for the right to vote. Although slavery had ended in New York in 1827, Black men, but not whites, were required to own $250 in property to vote. African Americans organized and demanded referenda on the issue. Black men got full voting rights only when the 15^th amendment, which banned racial discrimination in access to voting, ended New York State’s discriminatory laws.

Amos Beman clipped articles about African Americans who organized against voting restrictions. One eloquent piece in the weekly Colored American pressed for continued agitation, and called for a meeting in August 1841. Signed by Henry Highland Garnet and others, it roused readers to keep up the struggle in the face of the NY state legislature’s failure to act in the previous session:

Brethren, be not discouraged; such disappointments should only act as a stimulus, to strengthen and invigorate our souls, and rouse us to a determination of persevering in the struggle by stronger and still more unanimous efforts, and by the talismanic influence of Agitation!

It was not just in the South that African Americans had to fight to vote. But Black people recognized the importance of having and using the vote. Scrapbooks like Rev. Amos Beman’s show us what a long and multifaceted battle it was.

One of the four volumes concerns Rev. Beman’s work with the Colored Men’s Convention, part of the decades-long Colored Conventions movement that a network of scholars, led by P. Gabrielle Foreman, have brought to light.  The scrapbooks themselves are fully digitized.

Sign up for the webinar here.

Speaking at Yale, Friday Jan. 30

Looking forward to joining Laura Wexler and the members of the Yale Photographic Memory Workshop and History of Science people at the Gilder Lehrman Centre’s Seminar room from 4:30-6:30. Open to the public — do come. I leave or Paris the next day, so this is your last chance for 5 months. (I don’t think the Photographic Memory Workshop means they study people with photographic memory, but rather the kind of work Laura has done on photography and memory, and most recently the extraordinary Photogrammar project, for searching and doing much more with FSA photos from the Depression.