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B |
y the early 1830s, the United States had reached
a dead-end on slavery. Colonization had
failed. Each year, the slave population grew by roughly 50,000, but in 1830,
the American Colonization Society convinced just 259 free blacks to migrate to
Africa.
Racial prejudice was intensifying. At the same
time that many state legislatures adopted white manhood suffrage, they
restricted voting by blacks. In 1829, white mobs forced over a thousand free
blacks in Cincinnati to emigrate to Canada. After white abolitionists proposed
to build a manual labor college for African Americans in New Haven, Conn.,
white mobs terrorized the town's black ghetto.
Meanwhile, the threat of violence loomed. In
1822, a slave insurrection, led by Denmark Vesey, was uncovered in Charleston,
S.C. In 1829, David Walker, a second-hand clothing dealer in Boston, issued a
militant Appeal, threatening insurrection and violence if calls for the
abolition of slavery and improved conditions for free blacks were not realized.
African Americans took the lead in staging
protests against slavery. As discrimination and white racial violence
intensified, blacks strengthened community ties by establishing separate
churches, schools, fraternal orders, voluntary associations, and the first
African American newspapers. They also staged parades to commemorate the
Haitian Revolution and the adoption of abolition laws in the North. In 1830,
forty black delegates from eight states held the first of a series of annual
conventions that denounced slavery and called for an end to discriminatory laws
in the northern states.