Improvising Communities: African American Ethics of Care in the 19th Century

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, homes for elderly African Americans proliferated in the United States. Notably, the Harriet Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Negroes opened in Auburn, New York, on Tubman’s property, a home where she took her last breath. Simultaneously, the former slave Callie House led a movement of a different sort, a petition drive that pressed the federal government for pensions for elderly former slaves. These black movements arose out of a broader culture of multigenerational obligation and care that developed during the antebellum period and continued through the Civil War and beyond. My presentation examines how black individuals, grassroots activists and leaders shifted forms of multigenerational care from improvised and kinship modes to institutional forms in the nineteenth century United States.

The paper contextualizes this process by sketching out how economic forces scattered slaves and free blacks, men and women, and young and old across space in North America. It then reflects on how such experiences of diaspora fragmented African American relationships among kin, between genders, and across generations. Upon these unstable grounds, African Americans improvised forms of care that spanned generations. This paper looks not only at prominent African American autobiographers like Frederick Douglas and Harriet Jacobs; it also highlights narratives in archival records. For example, there was the elderly slave Toney, whose sons “tended” to him; the former black preacher Jarena Lee who relied on the “contributions of others” in her old age. Building on such evidence, this paper shows how African Americans changed their approaches to and ethics of care during the century, all the while trying to stitch together families and communities across multiple generations.