Free Blacks In The North

In the 1800s, there was a group of Americans who were prohibited from living in certain states; they were routinely insulted and sometimes physically attacked when they walked on the streets; they were assumed to be inferior to other Americans; and they lived in such poor conditions that many of their babies died in infancy—and yet they were called “free.” They were the free blacks of the slavery era—African Americans who were not enslaved, typically because their masters had freed them, their parents, or their ancestors. However, they were only free in the sense that no one legally owned them.
They lived in both the North and the South, but perhaps surprisingly, they often led harder lives in the North. Despite suffering from oppressive
Because of prejudice, free black men found it especially hard to find employment in skilled trades such as construction. White workers often refused to work alongside blacks. In Cincinnati, a city that is just across the Ohio River from the then-slave state of Kentucky, the president of a union was put on trial by his organization for taking on a black apprentice (Curry 19). In New York City, white dock workers used violence to keep black men from obtaining jobs on the docks. As a result of such attitudes and behavior, 87 percent of the employed African Americans in that city in the 1850s worked in menial occupations (Takaki, Iron Cages 111). In 1830, a writer who called himself “a Colored Philadelphian” said, “If a man of color has children, it is almost impossible for him to get a trade for them, as the journeymen and apprentices generally refuse to work with them” (qtd. in Curry 19). A young free black man of that era wrote, “Shall I be a mechanic? No one will employ me; white boys won’t work with me” (Takaki, A Different Mirror 110). To feed themselves and their families, most free black men in the North took whatever work they could find as servants, day laborers, or sailors. Women often worked as maids, cooks, or laundresses (“African American
In cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, free blacks founded lasting communities in which the people who came after them prospered, created, and overcame. Americans today may wonder how the free blacks of that time were able to endure. One part of the answer may be that the free blacks of the North “shared the nineteenth-century version of the ‘American Dream’” (Curry xix). They knew that slaves could become free, and they foresaw that freedom could expand greatly beyond the half-freedom that they knew. They believed in their own abilities and believed that in spite of everything, America was the place where their efforts could bear fruit. At times they may have despaired. As Curry says, “to most urban free blacks it must surely have seemed that they had been able to grasp but the shadow of the dream.” Nevertheless, Americans today can look back and know that the free blacks succeeded. In the process, they passed down a legacy that benefits the entire nation. Free blacks may have been hindered in their opportunities, but their contributions to the future were