The dominant national narrative on race and civic engagement in the U.S. before the modern Civil Rights movement focuses on the exclusion of people of color. Our interdisciplinary roundtable panel will discuss research that goes against the grain of this narrative and reveals histories of Black and Native American political life in the face of these oppressive structures. The story of the Reconstruction-era Black Congressmen is well-known, but there is much less scholarship on pre-1865 civic engagement and state-level activism. Other questions have received little systematic study: did Native Americans vote and hold office before 1924? How did Native Americans determine citizenship within their own nations? What other kinds of political activity did people of color engage in despite the racialized limits on voting? The effort to answer these questions, and to provide a more comprehensive and accurate narrative of Black and Native American political life in America before the modern Civil Rights movement, inspired our three year Mellon-Funded project, “Native Americans and African Americans in and out of the U.S. Body Politic.”

We use storytelling, especially biographies of activists and communities who challenged oppressive systems, to explore civic engagement, citizenship and voting rights. We break ground by asking questions about less-studied geographic spaces, particularly the Midwest (including territorial phases of U.S. administration) and the lower South, and examine why people of color gained or retained political rights in some places and not others. Changing concepts of race and racialization formed a context for our subjects’ actions; treating race, ethnicity, and gender intersectionally and including Native Americans in the story of citizenship and civil rights reveals interrelationships, similarities, and important differences between the Black and American Indian experience. Native Americans interested in protecting sovereignty sometimes detribalized to gain U.S. citizenship—at the cost of but that meant expelling Black community members—and at other times retribalized to and consciously rejected citizenship.

These questions create opportunities for student engagement in community-based research. As Principal Investigators in this project on civic engagement and citizenship, we are combining our own scholarly work with the creation of an undergraduate History Praxis Lab at Ohio State. We hope to include a student researcher on the panel and share results from the lab's first year summer of research.