The Politics of Black Citizenship

In The Politics of Black Citizenship Andrew K. Diemer argues persuasively that the Baltimore-Philadelphia corridor was contested terrain for its free black residents as they grappled to secure the fundamental rights of citizenship. But what were those rights? Diemer highlights a phrase black Philadelphians used in opposing restrictive legislation considered by the Pennsylvania legislature in the early 1830s. Although treading warily on the matter of the franchise, they insisted that they were “citizens for protection” (p. 71). That could mean many things. When it came to the most basic right of having one's liberty recognized, many white Pennsylvanians, Diemer shows, were loath to countenance kidnapping under the guise of the lawful recapturing of runaway slaves from Maryland, and even in the tumultuous 1850s, white Baltimoreans balked at reenslaving free people. They recognized the legitimacy of slavery even while they conceded that some black people were “citizens for protection.” The Baltimore-Philadelphia community—as Diemer observes, the largest concentration of free African Americans in the nation—constituted a “borderland” (and he deftly and effectively employs the growing body of scholarship on borderlands). Slavery was legal on one side of the state line and illegal on the other, and there was much movement back and forth, as fugitives fled north, recaptured slaves and kidnapping victims moved south, and free people of color on both sides of the line struggled to remain free and assert their rights

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