Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

The Need to Remember \\ 249
7. Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters (New York, 1974), pp. 76-78, 303-306;
Leon Litwack, North of Slavery (Chicago, 1961), pp. 113—52; and Robert L. McCaul,
The Black Struggle for Public Schooling in Nineteenth-Century Illinois (Carbondale, IL,
1987).
8. Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, pp. 76-78.
9. On Douglass, see Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
(New York, 1973; 1845), pp. 35-41, and William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass
(New York, 1991), pp. 29-32. When Christopher McPherson advertised his school,
he was arrested and shipped to an insane asylum. On Richmond, see Berlin, Slaws
Without Masters, pp. 76-77. Norfolk resident Margaret Douglass created a stir when
she admitted teaching free Black children in the basements of some of the city's lead-
ing white churches. See Tommy Lee Bogger, "The Slave and Free Black Community
In Norfolk, Virginia, 1775-1865," (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1976), pp.
217-221.
10. Litwack, North of Slavery, p. 132.
11. Interestingly, by the 1890s Italians and Jews made up a majority of the stu-
dents at the Institute. Even in Philadelphia five bloody race riots in two decades cur-
tailed the meaning of freedom and opportunity. For a history of education, racial
conflict, and Black aspirations see, Vincent P. Franklin, The Education of Black
Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1979), pp. 3-15; Gary Nash, Forging Freedom (Cambridge,
MA, 1988), pp. 203-10; and Roger Lane, William Dorsey's Philadelphia & Ours (New
York, 1991), especially chapter 5.
12. Douglass began his first autobiography with the indicting words: "My father
was a white man. He was admitted to be such by all I ever heard speak of my parent-
age" (p. 1). Douglass would rewrite his life story on two other occasions, even
distancing himself from this claim, bat the charge forever exposed whites as co-
conspirators in the story of race in America.
13. As a result, in 1870 Detroit, nearly 82 percent of Jews worked as peddlers or
traders. Such businesses favored those with limited capital and reliable networks of
similarly situated workers crisscrossing the nation. In time, many of these peddlers
parlayed savings into the purchase of small businesses—in some cases still larger busi-
nesses. Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson, eAs.,Jews in the South (Baton
Rouge, LA, 1973); Abraham Karp, Haven and Home: A History of Jews in America (New
York, 1985); Shelly Tenebaum, "The Jews," in Mary Kupiec Cayton, Elliott J. Gorn,
and Peter W. Williams, Encyclopedia of American Social History (New York, 1993), pp.
770-75.
14. James William Hagy, This Happy Land: The Jews of Colonial and Antebellum
Charleston (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1993), pp. 1, 12-27, and 91.