Masculinity and Migration: The Black Atlantic Lives of Henry Highland Garnet and Peter Thomas Stanford

Rev. Henry Highland Garnet (1815-82) and Rev. Peter Thomas Stanford (c. 1860-1909) were nineteenth-century African American ministers whose dramatic lives intersected. Both descended from enslaved black southerners; both emerged as charismatic preachers in Brooklyn, New York’s radical antislavery community; and, predating the innovative work of W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), both became passionate advocates for providing access for talented African American youth to a classical and liberal arts educations beyond the grammar school level. Garnet was one of Stanford’s spiritual and political mentors, and helped place him in summer jobs to finance his college education. For this meeting of the International Auto/Biography Association, I will focus on how Garnet and Stanford constructed notions of gender and race as part of a collective project of shaping a political and economic agenda for African Americans in the decades after the Civil War. They are no longer household names among Anglophone readers, yet each of their stories marked milestone moments in early African American print culture. The Sketch of the Life and Labors of Rev. Henry Highland Garnet (1865), as told by the abolitionist James McCune Smith, was in fact commissioned for printing in Washington, DC, by the US Congress after Garnet became the first black man invited to speak there. Nearly one-half century later, Stanford’s firsthand memoir From Bondage to Liberty (1889) highlighted his historic appointment as the first black minister of a church in the working class city of Birmingham, England. These texts, I argue, subvert conventional discussions of black masculinity and citizenship in order to facilitate post-Emancipation goals of educational opportunities, political suffrage, and transnational antiracist collaborations. Similarly, the hybrid forms of their stories, which challenge the aesthetics of ex-slaves’ narratives, reflect a new post-Emancipation agenda for African Americans.