Watchman, Tell Us: John J. Bird and Black Politics in Post-Civil War Illinois
Autor Wayne T. Pitarden Limba Engleză Paperback – 9 sep 2024
The most influential Black leader in 19th century southern Illinois
This key biography of John J. Bird unveils the forgotten story of a remarkable Black political figure in post-Civil War Illinois. Emerging as a leader in Cairo, the city with Illinois’ second-largest Black community, Bird played a pivotal role in advancing civil rights within the state, also becoming Illinois’ first Black elected judge and first Black trustee of the University of Illinois. Watchman, Tell Us deftly examines Bird’s lifetime of service and advocacy for a vulnerable community and the ways in which he successfully advocated for and protected voting rights, educational opportunity, and public access for the Black residents of southern Illinois.
Bird arrived in Cairo at age twenty during the Civil War to aid the 2,000 Black refugees from the South living there. By 1870, he had established the city’s substantial Black Republican wing, providing the Black community with unprecedented political influence in this hostile, majority white, Democratic town. Under Bird’s leadership, the Black Republicans pressed for policies that improved the well-being of the African American population, including the early establishment of a Black public school, the rise of an integrated judicial system, and the ability to access public and private businesses. Bird became influential across Illinois as a judge and university trustee, a leader in the Black convention movement, and a significant newspaper editor in Cairo and Springfield. When Bird died in 1912, the nation he loved had once again betrayed its Black citizens, and it appeared that most of the achievements he had fought for had collapsed. But the work of Bird and the other civil rights workers of the nineteenth century created the foundation upon which the movements of the twentieth century could stand.
This key biography of John J. Bird unveils the forgotten story of a remarkable Black political figure in post-Civil War Illinois. Emerging as a leader in Cairo, the city with Illinois’ second-largest Black community, Bird played a pivotal role in advancing civil rights within the state, also becoming Illinois’ first Black elected judge and first Black trustee of the University of Illinois. Watchman, Tell Us deftly examines Bird’s lifetime of service and advocacy for a vulnerable community and the ways in which he successfully advocated for and protected voting rights, educational opportunity, and public access for the Black residents of southern Illinois.
Bird arrived in Cairo at age twenty during the Civil War to aid the 2,000 Black refugees from the South living there. By 1870, he had established the city’s substantial Black Republican wing, providing the Black community with unprecedented political influence in this hostile, majority white, Democratic town. Under Bird’s leadership, the Black Republicans pressed for policies that improved the well-being of the African American population, including the early establishment of a Black public school, the rise of an integrated judicial system, and the ability to access public and private businesses. Bird became influential across Illinois as a judge and university trustee, a leader in the Black convention movement, and a significant newspaper editor in Cairo and Springfield. When Bird died in 1912, the nation he loved had once again betrayed its Black citizens, and it appeared that most of the achievements he had fought for had collapsed. But the work of Bird and the other civil rights workers of the nineteenth century created the foundation upon which the movements of the twentieth century could stand.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780809339464
ISBN-10: 0809339463
Pagini: 310
Ilustrații: 23
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 25 mm
Greutate: 0.43 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
ISBN-10: 0809339463
Pagini: 310
Ilustrații: 23
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 25 mm
Greutate: 0.43 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
Notă biografică
Wayne T. Pitard is professor emeritus of the department of religion at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is author of Ancient Damascus: A Historical Study of the Syrian City-State; The Ugaritic Baal Cycle, Volume II: KTU 1.3-1.4: Text, Translation and Commentary; and numerous academic articles.
Extras
INTRODUCTION
On the afternoon of July 1, 1874, John J. Bird stepped to the podium in the main lecture hall of the new Southern Illinois Normal University in Carbondale to address an august assembly of leaders and citizens from across the state gathered for the dedication ceremonies of the first state university founded in southern Illinois. Governor John L. Beveridge had already spoken to the convocation, as had the newly inaugurated president of the university, Dr. Robert Allyn, the presidents of Northwestern University and the Bloomington Normal School (later Illinois State University) and the superintendent of the St. Louis public schools. Bird’s address was the final speech of the day, and as he stood before the assembled body, many in the audience were certainly disturbed by his presence there, and some were likely outraged, for John Bird was African American, and the audience to whom he spoke was almost entirely white.
Bird’s appearance on the stage at this event was unprecedented. Never before had an African American been invited to speak at the inaugural ceremony of a state university in Illinois (or perhaps in any other state in the post-war North). The roster of speakers had certainly been approved by the office of Governor Beveridge; in fact, Bird’s inclusion on it was probably at the specific instruction of the Republican governor, who just one year earlier had created a stir by appointing Bird to the Board of Trustees of the Illinois Industrial University, the state’s land grant institution. That too had been an unprecedented move, making Bird the first African American ever named to the board of an essentially white institution of higher education in Illinois (and probably in the entire North). Just a month after his appointment to IIU, Bird had also become the first elected African American judge in the state (and—again—probably in the entire post-war North), when he won election as police magistrate in the busy town of Cairo, his home at the southern tip of the state. So, when he gave his speech in Carbondale, he was already known to much of his audience and was in fact the most prominent African American in southern Illinois.
Bird’s invitation to the ceremony had offended many people in Democratic Carbondale. Apparently, some of those unhappy people were members of the local organizing committee for the event. In what seems to have been an attempt to insult Bird, the committee failed to make arrangements for his arrival. While they appointed welcoming committees to meet the other speakers at the train station, reserved hotel rooms for them for the night before the ceremony, and had dinners arranged for them, they did none of these things for Bird. He arrived at the station and found no one there to greet him. He walked to the few hotels in town and discovered that none of them would accept an African American guest. He tried to eat at a restaurant and was turned away. Finally, he walked about two miles out of town to stay with an African American friend for the night.
Perhaps the committee hoped that Bird might be sufficiently offended by this treatment that he would leave Carbondale without speaking. But Bird would not forego this chance to address what was essentially a captive audience of white elites who needed to hear what he had to say. And thus on that Wednesday, John Bird arrived at the university’s building in the morning, attended all of the events of the celebration and then stood in the packed lecture hall to deliver his speech.
Bird’s invitation had asked him to speak on “The Education of the African Race,” and he did so in a powerful, comprehensive manner. In the speech, Bird laid out the scale of the educational crisis among African American citizens nationwide, north and south. He argued that education was a right belonging to every citizen, and condemned the fact that three out of four African Americans were still illiterate. He went on to describe the long years of slavery in the United States and the recent transition to freedom, but he pointed out that across the nation, particularly in the southern states, violent opposition to education for African Americans was still prevalent and that people of good will needed to oppose that violence. He concluded with a stirring call for his white audience to support the public education of Black children.
One of the most striking moments of Bird’s speech came in his discussion of slavery and its eventual overthrow. Describing the horror of enslavement, he quoted from a hymn entitled, “Watchman, Tell Us of the Night,” written by the British diplomat John Bowring in 1825. The hymn was very popular in the United States, appearing in the songbooks of almost every Christian denomination, both white and Black. It was written in the form of a dialogue between a traveler in the night and a watchman. The fearful traveler asks the watchman if he can see signs of approaching dawn in the darkness, and the watchman responds with assurance that indeed the morning star is already visible and that the dawn is coming. In white churches, “Watchman” was generally considered to be a Christmas hymn, describing the dawn of Christ’s birth and the promised arrival of his “peace and truth.” But African American Christians saw the meaning of the lyrics quite differently. They interpreted the night during which the song begins as the darkness of slavery and the approaching dawn as the advent of freedom. The hymn had become part of the African American observance of the traditional Watch Night celebration on New Year’s Eve, particularly after the implementation of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, when Watch Night took on a clear connection with freedom at the arrival of the New Year.
In preparing his speech, Bird knew that the lyrics of “Watchman” would be familiar to his white audience, but he also knew that the African American take on the song would not. He first set the stage for his use of the hymn by describing slavery before quoting its opening lines: “Two hundred and forty-two years of our history in this country was as one long night of darkness and despair. We waited, hoped and prayed. Often times in the gloomiest hour of our sorrow, we would cry, ‘Watchman, tell us of the night, what its signs of promise are.’” Bird’s audience knew that the watchman’s response in the next two lines was hopeful and reassuring: “Traveler, o’er yon mountain’s height, See that glory-beaming star!” These lines were what they anticipated hearing next, but Bird subverted their expectations, continuing, “The answer would come back, falling on our ears with redoubled force, ‘Perpetual slavery and ignorance is your doom forever.’” Bird’s maneuver here in providing the watchman with a deeply pessimistic response to the traveler presumably startled his white audience and powerfully evoked for them the despair of the generations of African Americans who suffered in bondage.
Following this gloomy assessment, however, Bird then picked up on the optimistic viewpoint of the hymn, paralleling African Americans’ current situation with the watchman’s heralding of the morning star in the first verse (rather than with the full dawning of the new day in the final verse). “The night of our sorrow has past,” Bird said, “but it has left its traces upon our hearts and memories. The day star of gladness has loomed up in the horizon before us, and we are marching forward with courage bold to realize the inestimable blessings that await us.”
John Bird’s striking use of “Watchman, Tell Us of the Night” in this speech, with its fundamental hopefulness and optimism for the future as personified by the watchman, characterizes in a very vivid way his own lifelong, overarching optimism concerning the struggle for African American rights in post-Civil War America. During his long career, he held to an unshakable faith that eventually African Americans would live beside their white neighbors in a land of equality and justice. Yet also like the watchman in the hymn, he was aware that that day had not yet dawned, and he knew that a great deal of effort, time, persuasion, agitation and persistence would be necessary to reach that future. He would spend his life fighting for that goal, and in his struggles, John Bird was never the uncertain traveler of the song. He was the watchman.
On the afternoon of July 1, 1874, John J. Bird stepped to the podium in the main lecture hall of the new Southern Illinois Normal University in Carbondale to address an august assembly of leaders and citizens from across the state gathered for the dedication ceremonies of the first state university founded in southern Illinois. Governor John L. Beveridge had already spoken to the convocation, as had the newly inaugurated president of the university, Dr. Robert Allyn, the presidents of Northwestern University and the Bloomington Normal School (later Illinois State University) and the superintendent of the St. Louis public schools. Bird’s address was the final speech of the day, and as he stood before the assembled body, many in the audience were certainly disturbed by his presence there, and some were likely outraged, for John Bird was African American, and the audience to whom he spoke was almost entirely white.
Bird’s appearance on the stage at this event was unprecedented. Never before had an African American been invited to speak at the inaugural ceremony of a state university in Illinois (or perhaps in any other state in the post-war North). The roster of speakers had certainly been approved by the office of Governor Beveridge; in fact, Bird’s inclusion on it was probably at the specific instruction of the Republican governor, who just one year earlier had created a stir by appointing Bird to the Board of Trustees of the Illinois Industrial University, the state’s land grant institution. That too had been an unprecedented move, making Bird the first African American ever named to the board of an essentially white institution of higher education in Illinois (and probably in the entire North). Just a month after his appointment to IIU, Bird had also become the first elected African American judge in the state (and—again—probably in the entire post-war North), when he won election as police magistrate in the busy town of Cairo, his home at the southern tip of the state. So, when he gave his speech in Carbondale, he was already known to much of his audience and was in fact the most prominent African American in southern Illinois.
Bird’s invitation to the ceremony had offended many people in Democratic Carbondale. Apparently, some of those unhappy people were members of the local organizing committee for the event. In what seems to have been an attempt to insult Bird, the committee failed to make arrangements for his arrival. While they appointed welcoming committees to meet the other speakers at the train station, reserved hotel rooms for them for the night before the ceremony, and had dinners arranged for them, they did none of these things for Bird. He arrived at the station and found no one there to greet him. He walked to the few hotels in town and discovered that none of them would accept an African American guest. He tried to eat at a restaurant and was turned away. Finally, he walked about two miles out of town to stay with an African American friend for the night.
Perhaps the committee hoped that Bird might be sufficiently offended by this treatment that he would leave Carbondale without speaking. But Bird would not forego this chance to address what was essentially a captive audience of white elites who needed to hear what he had to say. And thus on that Wednesday, John Bird arrived at the university’s building in the morning, attended all of the events of the celebration and then stood in the packed lecture hall to deliver his speech.
Bird’s invitation had asked him to speak on “The Education of the African Race,” and he did so in a powerful, comprehensive manner. In the speech, Bird laid out the scale of the educational crisis among African American citizens nationwide, north and south. He argued that education was a right belonging to every citizen, and condemned the fact that three out of four African Americans were still illiterate. He went on to describe the long years of slavery in the United States and the recent transition to freedom, but he pointed out that across the nation, particularly in the southern states, violent opposition to education for African Americans was still prevalent and that people of good will needed to oppose that violence. He concluded with a stirring call for his white audience to support the public education of Black children.
One of the most striking moments of Bird’s speech came in his discussion of slavery and its eventual overthrow. Describing the horror of enslavement, he quoted from a hymn entitled, “Watchman, Tell Us of the Night,” written by the British diplomat John Bowring in 1825. The hymn was very popular in the United States, appearing in the songbooks of almost every Christian denomination, both white and Black. It was written in the form of a dialogue between a traveler in the night and a watchman. The fearful traveler asks the watchman if he can see signs of approaching dawn in the darkness, and the watchman responds with assurance that indeed the morning star is already visible and that the dawn is coming. In white churches, “Watchman” was generally considered to be a Christmas hymn, describing the dawn of Christ’s birth and the promised arrival of his “peace and truth.” But African American Christians saw the meaning of the lyrics quite differently. They interpreted the night during which the song begins as the darkness of slavery and the approaching dawn as the advent of freedom. The hymn had become part of the African American observance of the traditional Watch Night celebration on New Year’s Eve, particularly after the implementation of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, when Watch Night took on a clear connection with freedom at the arrival of the New Year.
In preparing his speech, Bird knew that the lyrics of “Watchman” would be familiar to his white audience, but he also knew that the African American take on the song would not. He first set the stage for his use of the hymn by describing slavery before quoting its opening lines: “Two hundred and forty-two years of our history in this country was as one long night of darkness and despair. We waited, hoped and prayed. Often times in the gloomiest hour of our sorrow, we would cry, ‘Watchman, tell us of the night, what its signs of promise are.’” Bird’s audience knew that the watchman’s response in the next two lines was hopeful and reassuring: “Traveler, o’er yon mountain’s height, See that glory-beaming star!” These lines were what they anticipated hearing next, but Bird subverted their expectations, continuing, “The answer would come back, falling on our ears with redoubled force, ‘Perpetual slavery and ignorance is your doom forever.’” Bird’s maneuver here in providing the watchman with a deeply pessimistic response to the traveler presumably startled his white audience and powerfully evoked for them the despair of the generations of African Americans who suffered in bondage.
Following this gloomy assessment, however, Bird then picked up on the optimistic viewpoint of the hymn, paralleling African Americans’ current situation with the watchman’s heralding of the morning star in the first verse (rather than with the full dawning of the new day in the final verse). “The night of our sorrow has past,” Bird said, “but it has left its traces upon our hearts and memories. The day star of gladness has loomed up in the horizon before us, and we are marching forward with courage bold to realize the inestimable blessings that await us.”
John Bird’s striking use of “Watchman, Tell Us of the Night” in this speech, with its fundamental hopefulness and optimism for the future as personified by the watchman, characterizes in a very vivid way his own lifelong, overarching optimism concerning the struggle for African American rights in post-Civil War America. During his long career, he held to an unshakable faith that eventually African Americans would live beside their white neighbors in a land of equality and justice. Yet also like the watchman in the hymn, he was aware that that day had not yet dawned, and he knew that a great deal of effort, time, persuasion, agitation and persistence would be necessary to reach that future. He would spend his life fighting for that goal, and in his struggles, John Bird was never the uncertain traveler of the song. He was the watchman.
Cuprins
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
1. Prepared in Cincinnati, O: John J. Bird’s Early Days in Ohio and Canada, 1844-1864
2. A Cairoite to Some Extent: John Bird’s Activities in Cairo, ca. 1864-1869
3. The Colored People Intend to Stay: John J. Bird’s rise in politics, 1870-1872
4. The Morning Seems to Dawn: John J. Bird, Trustee and Judge, 1873-1878
5. Beware of such men: Clash with the Republican Party, 1879-1880
6. One of the most intelligent men in the state: New Directions, 1881-1886
7. More entitled to recognition than any other one of his race: John Bird’s Life in Springfield, 1887-1912
Epilogue: Political Moses
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Endnotes
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
1. Prepared in Cincinnati, O: John J. Bird’s Early Days in Ohio and Canada, 1844-1864
2. A Cairoite to Some Extent: John Bird’s Activities in Cairo, ca. 1864-1869
3. The Colored People Intend to Stay: John J. Bird’s rise in politics, 1870-1872
4. The Morning Seems to Dawn: John J. Bird, Trustee and Judge, 1873-1878
5. Beware of such men: Clash with the Republican Party, 1879-1880
6. One of the most intelligent men in the state: New Directions, 1881-1886
7. More entitled to recognition than any other one of his race: John Bird’s Life in Springfield, 1887-1912
Epilogue: Political Moses
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Endnotes
Recenzii
“Wayne Pitard traces the career of John J. Bird, a long-forgotten civil rights pioneer. In doing so, Pitard not only resurrects Bird’s importance but also brings to light the many challenges faced by all African Americans in post-Civil War Illinois.”—David Joens, author of From Slave to State Legislator: John W. E. Thomas, Illinois’ First African American Lawmaker (SIU Press, 2012)
“Bird’s story—by turns inspiring and tragic—makes it impossible to ignore that Reconstruction was a national, not simply Southern, process, and that its successes and its later overthrow profoundly reverberated throughout the entire nation.”—Chandra Manning, author of Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War
“Bird’s story—by turns inspiring and tragic—makes it impossible to ignore that Reconstruction was a national, not simply Southern, process, and that its successes and its later overthrow profoundly reverberated throughout the entire nation.”—Chandra Manning, author of Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War
Descriere
This first biography of the extraordinary John J. Bird (1844-1912) tells the long-forgotten story of one of the most significant Black politicians in Illinois during the post-Civil War Era.