Early Black Atlantic Modernity

Black writer's early modernity was transnational, historically grounded, and progressive. Departing from Phillis Wheatley’s ideals, it also became decidedly masculine. What scholars of the North Atlantic often miss comes to light clearer under a transnational angle. In 1797, the Massachusetts Masonic leader, Prince Hall, was the first in the U.S. to extent Black brotherhood to San Dominguans. With a characteristically Wheatleyan hope, Hall pressed for the need for refinement, in order to enter the angelic train of racial uplift. Hall differed from White secular enlightenment and religious revivalism by arguing for weakening racial and national divides.

Another Mason, Jean Pierre Boyer, who in 1800 had arrived as an aberrant war-prisoner to Connecticut, fit in this Black transnational community— he would become the longest living Haitian president. He shared the broad community vision, but would differ in regards to the role of religion, racial inclusion, and nation-building. His letters, pronouncements, and policies speak of a radically secular modernity that, differently from Hall's, saw Africa as backward and the Americas, with Haiti at its center, as the modern future. The nation for was indispensable for modernity. Prince Saunders, also a Mason, found a niche at the crossroads of this early militant Black modernity. He traveled across the ocean, convinced that a well-educated Black anywhere leads the way to modernity. Frustrated like Hall with the US racial stonewalling, Saunders believed like Boyer that a prosperous Haiti would gain the Whites' admiration and spark an avalanche of Black progress.

Early Black Atlantic modernity ran a wide gamut of philosophical and political positions: from cold atheism to, what today would be considered, Black Liberation Theology; from proposing a race-less society to admitting differences in social rank, often marked by hue. These gradations can be seen only when breaking from traditional approaches to historical research.