Greetings from Jim Crow, New Jersey: Contesting the Meaning and Abandonment of Reconstruction in the Public and Commercial Spaces of Asbury Park, 1880-1890*
On the night of June 28, 1889, William Nelson, a black employee of an ice cream parlor, stood watching a carousel ride inside the Palace, an indoor amusement arcade located on the boardwalk of Asbury Park, New Jersey. When a white security guard attempted to remove him from the facility, Nelson fought back, prompting a physical altercation with the officer, John A. Krause, outside of the Palace premises. After both men were arrested and fined for the incident, Palace owner Ernie Schnitzler responded by restricting entrance into the pavilion to season ticket holders only, which, according to an account published in the town’s Shore Press, were sold and distributed only to the Palace’s white patrons. However, after immediate public protests from the town’s African American community, Schnitzler reversed his decision and allowed the town’s black citizens back into the Palace on a restricted and limited basis. Concluding its coverage of the altercation a few days later, the Shore Press predicted that “it is probable that no future trouble will result.” For the summer residents of Asbury Park, the Palace served as the focal point of a shore community centered around leisure attractions. However, for Nelson—a black man in a resort town that increasingly sought to curb the public presence of African Americans—the Palace became one of many new public and commercial spaces that highlighted the emerging Jim Crow character of the Jersey shore after Reconstruction. In the Palace, as well as on the beaches, pavilions, promenades, boardwalks, bathing houses, skating parlors, and amusement arcades of Asbury Park, white and black residents waged both vocal and physical contests over the undefined and unreconstructed social landscape. Using both the Press and active participation to assert their ideas about public and private segregation, citizens’ written accounts of social relations from both communities helped to highlight the undefined and unfixed public and commercial boundaries that existed during the period between the end of Reconstruction and the legal institutionalization of Jim Crow. Over the past few decades, literature on the subject of Republican-led Reconstruction has successfully contributed to a more complete record of the tensions between contested notions of political, social, and economic equality within southern
"Overrun with Free Negroes": Emancipation and Wartime Migration in the Upper Midwest
In March 1863 a Union officer wrote to his hometown newspaper inquiring, “Are there any contrabands wanted in Iowa City, or its vicinity for help this spring? If so, please let me hear from you. I could send a large number to Iowa, if they were wanted, as there are many brought up the river at this time. …” Writing from St. Louis, he noted that many of the former slaves gathered there “prefer going to Iowa [more] than any other place.” But back in Iowa, some of his neighbors had organized a public meeting to oppose “all schemes … to fill our schools and domestic circle with the African race” because of their belief that recently emancipated African Americans, “unaccustomed to our climate, unskilled in our mode of agriculture, undisciplined in habits, and unfit for society,” would “destroy the dignity of white labor” in Johnson County. That Iowans were not all of one mind about the arrival of emancipated slaves was further evidenced in the tone of newspaper coverage when former slaves were brought to a nearby Mississippi River town. As sarcastically noted in the local paper, potential employers were not difficult to find: “When the negroes arrived, there was a great fluttering… for the best ‘take.’ Philanthropy ran very high indeed—provided the services of a good stout negro could be obtained for his victuals and clothes. Visions of retired gentlemen and gentlewomen, with black servants to attend their every want and wish, overcame some … [who] felt as though ‘it were the happiest day of their lives.’”1
They chose Minnesota : a survey of the state's ethnic groups
Why did emigrants leave their homelands and move to Minnesota? Where in the state did they settle? What did they do, and how did they organise? How did they maintain their ethnicity? Based on ground-breaking research, each chapter describes the unique concerns of individual groups and delves into personal stories. Farmers and factory workers, men, women and children, families and single people, idealists and pragmatists, people who were devout or irreligious or enthusiastic or fearful, those who cut their ties with the homeland or intended to return -- all form part of Minnesota's ethnic saga.