Black Geographies of Liberation: Mapping the Interlocking Movements for Abolition and Black Education in 19th-Century California

The murmurs of Black educational history will forever echo in the halls of American education, yet the name Rev. Jeremiah Burke Sanderson utters few sounds. This paper examines the interstitial space between anti-slavery abolition and Black education as interconnected social movements. Returning to this geography of Black liberation unearths the material and political conditions that structured Black education, social infrastructure, and life outcomes in 19th century California. Mentored by anti-slavery abolitionists Fredrick Douglass and William Llyod Garrison in his hometown of New Bedford, Massachusetts, Rev. Sanderson’s journey as an abolitionist and educational organizer in the recently ratified state of California opens of up vectors of Black placemaking proxy schools, religious institutions, and political organizations. I argue that the geography of Black abolitionist schools produce, and are produced by, a dynamic set of poetics, social relations, and Black materiality that challenge the politics, environment, and racial logics of the antebellum free-state. Thus, this paper takes a transdisciplinary approach that centers Black Studies and draws upon Historical Anthropology and Historical Sociology “to explain, explore, and story the world, because thinking and writing and imagining across a range of texts, disciplines, histories, and genres unsettles suffocating and dismal and insular racial logics” (McKittridge, 2021, p. 4). The primary archival sources are from the New Bedford Historical Society, California Historical Society, and UC Berkeley Bancroft Library; supplementary artifacts consist of administrative documents (e.g., executive meeting notes, board reports, etc.) from the State Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California and newspaper records from Black periodicals—the San Francisco-based Pacific Appeal (1862-1880) and the Elevator (1869 - 1874). Distinctive from Southern and Northeastern Black educational history, this case illuminates the texture of Black knowledge and political production under the unique context of the American West’s racial formations, contested cultural sovereignty, and political economy.