Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Driven toward Madness
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1972
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
Now at Howard Univ, formerly at Texas Southern Univ * https://newsroom.howard.edu/newsroom/article/7001/howard-university-names-nikki-m-taylor-chairperson-department-history * http://www.ohioswallow.com/author/Nikki+M+Taylor
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2001086280
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2001086280
HEADING: Taylor, Nikki Marie, 1972-
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100 1_ |a Taylor, Nikki Marie, |d 1972-
373 __ |a University of Cincinnati
375 __ |a female
670 __ |a “Frontiers of freedom”, 2001: |b t.p. (Nikki Marie Taylor) leaf 329 (b. 1972)
670 __ |a America’s first black socialist, 2013: |b ECIP t.p. (Nikki M. Taylor) dataview (born Feb. 16, 1972; Nikki M. Taylor, associate professor of History at the University of Cincinnati, is author of Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802-1868, and coauthor of A History of African Americans. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio)
953 __ |b rf04
PERSONAL
Born February 16, 1972.
EDUCATION:University of Pennsylvania, B.A. (with honors); Duke University, M.A., Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Howard University, Washington, DC, professor of history and chair of history department, 2017—. Previously taught at Texas Southern University, University of Cincinnati, University of Toledo, University of Michigan, and Vassar College.
AWARDS:Fulbright Scholarship, Social Science Research Council Fellowship, and Woodrow Wilson Fellowship.
WRITINGS
Coauthor of A History of African Americans.
SIDELIGHTS
Nikki M. Taylor, who has taught at several universities, is a specialist in nineteenth-century African-American history. As an undergraduate, she initially had ambitions to be a lawyer, but she decided to become a historian because “I knew that I didn’t have a passion for law; I was really only interested in civil rights,” she told Jayna Barker in an interview for the News Record, the University of Cincinnati’s student newspaper. Her teaching and writing reflect this interest and her desire to improve race relations and the situation of African-Americans. “Long after I’m gone, my books remain,” she told Barker. “This is my impact on the world.”
America's First Black Socialist
Taylor tells the story of a once-prominent African-American activist in America’s First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark. Clark was born into a free family in Cincinnati in 1829. His father was a barber, a common occupation among free black men at the time, and the family was fairly prosperous. Peter Clark inherited the barber shop from his father, but he soon quit the business, partly because a white customer had asked him to arrange sexual liaisons with black women. Also, his true passion was politics. He became interested in the abolitionist movement at a young age, and he worked for Frederick Douglass’s newspaper; Taylor finds evidence that he was involved with the Underground Railroad as well. He later became interested in black nationalism and the possibility of establishing a new country in Africa. After the Civil War, he joined socialist political parties, then worked for the Republican Party and later the Democrats. His efforts for the Democratic Party hurt his standing among African-Americans, as the party had supported slavery before the war, and many of its members opposed equal rights for blacks afterward. Clark’s tendency to shift his party loyalties also made his contemporaries wonder if they could trust him. Still, an 1890 poll by the Indianapolis Freeman, a newspaper with a primarily African-American readership, rated him one of the most admired black men in history. Despite his political activism, he never gained any of the patronage positions he sought, nor did he ever hold elected office. He did have a long career as a teacher and administrator in schools for African-Americans. He died in 1925 and soon was largely forgotten. Taylor’s book makes an argument for his historical importance and draws on family documents, newspaper accounts, and a variety of other sources to chronicle his life.
Several critics found America’s First Black Socialist interesting and enlightening.”Taylor excellently traces the various ideological threads that influenced and were influenced by Peter H. Clark throughout his long life, thus showing why he matters in our conception of nineteenth-century black political and intellectual history,” remarked Historian contributor David Brodnax, Sr. Spencer Crew, writing in Ohio History, called the book “a fascinating character study of the rise and fall of an important but forgotten historical figure.” Taylor offers “a carefully balanced assessment of Clark,” Crew noted, and “reminds us that even admirable, charismatic individuals can make poor decisions that can cause all their previous accomplishments to be overlooked and forgotten.” On H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, Elizabeth Jozwiak concluded: “While Clark remains somewhat elusive, Taylor has gone a long way toward enhancing our understanding of him. This work adds a valuable insight into Ohio political history as well as African American history and is worth reading, particularly by students of those fields.”
Driven toward Madness
In Driven toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio, Taylor chronicles the real-life story of the woman who inspired Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved—a woman who killed her young daughter rather than let the child grow up a slave. In 1856, Garner, her husband, and their four children were attempting to escape enslavement, and they crossed the Ohio River from the slave state of Kentucky into Ohio, a free state. Their owner found them in Cincinnati, though, and Garner, apparently in panic, killed her two-year-old daughter by slitting her throat, and attempted to kill her other daughter and two sons. Taylor focuses much of the book on Garner’s trial, which treated her as a fugitive slave, and on the psychological, physical, and sexual abuse she and other enslaved women endured. She notes that some abolitionists defended Garner, but much of the general population saw her as a monster. Garner had support, however, from African-American women, many of whom demonstrated outside the courthouse—one of the first times black women made their voices heard in public. Garner was eventually returned to slavery, along with her family, and she died of typhoid fever in 1858, still in bondage.
Garner’s voice was important to Taylor, the author told Megan Constable, who interviewed her for Ohio’s Dayton City Paper. “I wanted to reclaim her and I wanted to rescue her voice,” Taylor said. “It had been effectively erased by the archive—her voice had been muted. In order to amplify that, I had to use the theories of black feminists, which means, first of all, you put a black woman at the center of your interrogation—their perspective, their lives, their histories, what mattered to them, how they viewed the world. Two is actively understanding there’s an intersection of race, gender, and class.” She continued: “I wanted to make sure people didn’t think she was simply a crazy woman who did something horrific. It’s easy for us to sweep it away if we think of her simply as that.”
Some reviewers thought Taylor had accomplished that goal. Driven toward Madness “is a narrative with the distinction that finally removes Margaret Garner, in part, from the pantheons of superheros and monsters and tries (largely successfully) to restore and celebrate Garner for simply being a human being who, in Garner’s own words, simply did the best she could,” related a Daily Kos blogger. The book, noted a Publishers Weekly contributor, “illuminates the gendered experience of enslavement and the dialectic by which the victims of violence may in turn become its perpetrators.” In Library Journal, Amy Lewontin recommended it to anyone “seeking to understand the depth of pain and depravity faced by women living under the tyranny of American slavery.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Black Issues Book Review, January-February, 2005, Andria Y. Carter, review of Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802-1868, p. 25.
Dayton City Paper, May 23, 2017, Megan Constable, “‘Driven toward Madness’: Historian Nikki M. Taylor Reveals Stories of Margaret Garner, Cincinnati Racism.”
Historian, spring, 2016, David Brodnax, Sr., review of America’s First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark, pp. 116–117.
Library Journal, December 1, 2016, Amy Lewontin, review of Driven toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio, p. 106.
News Record, February 23, 2010, Jayna Barker, “Nikki Taylor: Leaving a Legacy.”
Ohio History, 2015, Spencer Clark, review of America’s First Black Socialist, pp. 93-94.
Publishers Weekly, October 31, 2016, review of Driven toward Madness, p. 66.
ONLINE
Daily Kos, https://www.dailykos.com/ (April 18, 2017), “She Did the Best She Could.”
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, https://networks.h-net.org (August 21, 2017),Elizabeth Jozwiak, review of America’s First Black Socialist.
Howard University College of Arts and Sciences Website, http://coas.howard.edu/ (July 30, 2017), brief biography.
Howard University Newsroom, https://newsroom.howard.edu/ (February 14, 2017), Shamilla Amulega, “Howard University Names Nikki M. Taylor Chairperson of Department of History.”
Ohio University Press Website, http://www.ohioswallow.com/ (July 30, 2017), brief biography.
University of Cincinnati McMicken College of Arts and Sciences Web site, http://www.artsci.uc.edu/ (July 30, 2017), brief biography.*
Nikki M. Taylor is a professor of African American history at Howard University. Her other books include Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802–1868 and America’s First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark.
Listed in: History · Ohio and Regional · African American Studies · Slavery and Slave Trade · American History · Law · American Civil War · Women’s Studies · Legal History
HOWARD UNIVERSITY NAMES NIKKI M. TAYLOR CHAIRPERSON OF DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
February 14, 2017 | Written by Shamilla Amulega Share:
MEDIA CONTACTS
Shamilla Amulega, Communications Marketing Specialist
shamilla.amulega@Howard.edu, (202) 238-2509
History Dept ChairHoward University College of Arts and Sciences announced the appointment of Nikki M. Taylor, Ph.D., on Jan. 2 as chairperson of its department of history. She comes to Howard from Texas Southern University, where she most recently served as interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Behavioral Sciences.
Taylor, who is from Ohio, graduated with honors from the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a history degree and was a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship that allowed her to study African history in Ghana. She attended Duke University where she earned a M.A. and Ph.D., in U.S. and African American History. Taylor also has authored three books, the most recent being “Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio,” which was published in December 2016. That book is about the real woman who inspired Toni Morrison’s book, “Beloved.”
“Any historian of African-American history knows how significant Howard’s department of history is,” Taylor said. “Some of the greatest scholars of African-American history have either been trained at or worked here. A painting of one of them, Charles H. Wesley, hangs above me in my office. I work in a building named after Frederick Douglass. Our department hallway is lined with historians such as Rayford Logan and Carter G. Woodson. Hence, I am reminded every day of the legacy here, and there is power in that legacy. I am deeply humbled by and a little nervous about the significance of the job that lies before me—and especially in the school’s 150th year. I am inspired and invigorated by what I see and know of my colleagues at Howard within and outside of the Department of History and would hope that I can be at least half as good as they are.”
The department of history’s mission aligns with Howard’s character as a historically Black university, derived from the determination of people of African descent to advance and affirm human freedom, equality and dignity. Intrinsic to this mission is a perspective on the world that conveys full respect for the integrity and dignity of all people, particularly emphasizing the history and culture of peoples of African origin. It is within this historical-cultural context that the community of scholars in the department of history is committed to seeking truth, increasing knowledge, producing excellent scholarship and approaching the education of students holistically.
“The college is very excited that Taylor has joined our ranks,” said Bernard A. Mair, Ph.D., dean of Howard’s College of Arts and Sciences. “She is an accomplished researcher, scholar, teacher, administrator and brings innovative ideas for expanding the history program, increasing productivity, and increasing the visibility of the department. By placing her affiliation with Howard University on the publisher’s webpage of her latest book, she has already increased Howard University’s international visibility.”
Faculty
Nikki Taylor
Nikki M. Taylor, Professor of History and Chair of the Department, specializes in 19th century African American History. Her sub-specialties are in Urban, African American Women, and Intellectual History. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania (B.A.) and Duke University (M.A., PhD, Certificate in Women's Studies), Dr. Taylor has won several fellowships including Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, and Woodrow Wilson.
Dr. Nikki Taylor has written three monographs. Her first book, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community 1802-68 (2005) uses the backdrop of one of the nineteenth-century's most racist American cities to chart the emergence of a very conscientious black community--a community of people who employed various tactics such as black nationalism, emigration, legislative agitation, political alliances, self-education, and even armed self-defense to carve out a space for themselves as free people living in the shadow of slavery.
Professor Taylor’s second book, America's First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark (2013), is a political and intellectual biography of one of the foremost African American activists, intellectuals, orators, and politicians in the nineteenth-century century, whose name once was spoken in the same breath as Frederick Douglass, Dr. McCune Smith, and John Mercer Langston. This book charts Clark’s journey from recommending that slaveholders be sent to "hospitable graves," to advocating for a separate black nation, to forging alliances with German socialists and labor radicals, to adopting the conservative mantle of the Democratic Party.
Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio (2016) is Dr. Taylor's third monograph. This book is a biography of Margaret Garner, an enslaved wife and mother who, along with her entire family, escaped from slavery in northern Kentucky in 1856. When their owners caught up with the Garner family, Margaret tried to kill all four of her children--and succeeded in killing one--rather than see them return to slavery. Using black feminist and interdisciplinary methodologies, Driven Toward Madness examines why this fated act was the last best option for her as an enslaved mother. Dr. Taylor's current research project is on women who participated in armed slave revolts.
Dr. Taylor joined the department in 2017.
Nikki Taylor
Professor of History and Department Chair
Ph.D., Duke University
Telephone: 202-806-9326
Fax: 202-806-4471
Email: nikki.taylor@howard.edu
Nikki M. Taylor
Title: Associate Professor
Office: 3614 French Hall
Tel: 513-556-2561
Dr. Taylor received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her MA and PhD(2001) degrees from Duke University, where she also received a certificate in Women’s Studies. She has held several fellowships including Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, and Social Science Research Fellowships. Dr. Taylor joined the Department of History in 2005. Her current research projects include a biography of Peter H. Clark who was a 19th century activist and educator, and a history of the Jezebel stereotype as it has been applied to African American women. In her free time, Professor Taylor volunteers as a Court Appointed Special Advocate for kids in the foster care system in Hamilton County.
Presentations & Lectures
Lectures
(04-2008). African Americans, Reconstruction, and the Struggle for Citizenship in Ohio in the Late 19th Century. Invited Lecturer for Teaching American History.
(03-2008). Detangling the Myths of the Underground Railroad: Southern Ohio, A Case Study. Ohio History Works II .
(03-2007). The Strange Career of Jezebel: African American Women and Representation, A Historical Analysis. Engaged History Lecture Series, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH.
(02-2007). Culture, Class, Respectability: The Development of Class Consciousness in Cincinnati’s African American Community. Seminar in the City Lecture Series at the Cincinnati Museum Center.
(02-2007). The Emergence of Political Self Respect in 19th Century Black Cincinnati. the Public Library of Cincinnati’s Black History Month Lecture Series.
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Experience & Service
Courses Taught
African American History
African American Urban History
African Americans and the State (Honors)
African American Women’s History
American History
Nikki Taylor: Leaving a legacy
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Nikki Taylor: Leaving a legacy
Posted: Tuesday, February 23, 2010 12:00 am
Jayna Barker | The News Record
Nikki Taylor's passion began long before she came to Cincinnati. The dedicated professor and Toledo native didn't receive an in-depth education about African-American history during high school, but it became her passion, which drove her to pursue a career that is now the most important aspect of her life.
Upon enrolling at the University of Pennsylvania, Taylor's interest in
African-American history quickly peaked, and she became involved with a program geared toward minority students — the Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship Program.
""I first intended to go to law school, but I loved history and I was doing well,"" Taylor said. ""I knew that I didn't have a passion for law; I was really only interested in civil rights.""
Shortly after she received her undergraduate degree, Taylor received several fellowships including the Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson and Social Science Research.
The Fulbright fellowship led her to Gahanna, where she then began to consider a career in education. Taylor was young and on the stage in her life where anything was a possibility.
She was paired with mentors in the field who taught her what exactly professors do in their occupation, other than teach, and the path she would have to take to get there.
Taylor matriculated into Duke University graduate school soon after, where she turned her focus to African-American history.
""It was a little daunting to know that I had seven-to-10-more years left of school,"" Taylor said. ""But I learned that as long as you have a passion for something, it would push you forward.""
After receiving her master's and doctorate degree, Taylor went on to teach at the University of Toledo, University of Michigan and Vassar College in New York before joining the University of Cincinnati's history department in 2005.
In addition to teaching, Taylor is also a published author. She has written and published one book, ""Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati's Black Community,"" as well as many articles and book reviews.
""Frontiers of Freedom"" is about the rich history of the African-American community in Cincinnati, paying close attention to the city's transition from a ""population of former slaves into a self-conscious black community.""
Lately, Taylor has been doing research and is currently finishing up another project, a biography about Peter H. Clark, a 19th-century activist and educator as well as one of Ohio's most effective black abolitionist writers and speakers.
She is also planning on publishing a textbook and possibly thinking about writing a more popular book about African-American children in public schools.
Taylor is not only focused on education, but she is also committed to the future of society and the following generations.
""Long after I'm gone, my books remain,"" Taylor said. ""This is my impact on the world.""
Most, if not all, of Taylor's passion is executed in the classroom. She drives a lot of focus and concentration on racism and race relations during her lectures.
The importance of Black History Month is always a topic of discussion even after the month has passed.
""I don't have these conversations outside of the classroom,"" Taylor said. ""Interracial uninhibited dialogue about race tears down walls of racism. It is a rare opportunity for
everyone involved.""
Taylor sees these discussions as a vehicle or venue to impact as many students as possible and hopefully more each year. She opens up the floor for discussion to the diverse groups of students in her classes, creating powerful conversations regarding race.
""This is my opportunity to imprint on the next generation,"" Taylor said. ""Students who leave my classroom leave [as] better people, more conscious and more conscientious.""
The discussions shed light on the difficult and painful past of American history while creating an honest and safe place for dialogue where different voices and perspectives can be heard.
Taylor is not only a passionate and dedicated professor and author, but she also spends time in the community. She involves herself in hosting public lectures and sermons in churches throughout Ohio, mostly in Cincinnati.
""It defines me and sets me apart,"" Taylor said. ""I do a lot in the community.""
Taylor has been involved with an NAACP youth group in Cincinnati as well as volunteering in the past as a court-appointed special advocate for children in the foster care system in
Hamilton County.
Taylor is also on the Ohio Historical Records Advisory Board and was appointed by Ohio Governor Ted Strickland. She is resigning and waiting on a replacement to fill her position.
""It's hard to envision doing what I'm doing if I was still in New York,"" Taylor said. ""I can have a bigger impact in Cincinnati, in and out of the classroom and in the community.""
Taylor has also been involved with the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. She hosted a presentation on lynching before the exhibit opened in August 2004.
In the past, Taylor lectured on diversity training for the Cincinnati Police Department — she instructed new recruits on diversity and race relations in Cincinnati.
""If you can't make an impact at home, you can't make an impact, period,"" Taylor said. ""I spent many years elsewhere, but Ohio is home.""
All of Taylor's hard work doesn't allow for much free time. From juggling a career inside and outside of the classroom to balancing spending time with her teenage daughter, Taylor's time spent alone is very limited.
""So much of my work overlaps into my free time and personal life,"" Taylor said. ""I have no other passions than history, so my free time is spent preparing for lectures, writing books and reading other people's work.""
Although Taylor is very busy, she does enjoy her schedule, especially the interaction with her students. She is inspired by her students and her relationships with them outside of the classroom, which she says is the most rewarding part of her job.
Taylor ensures her students, supporters and colleagues understand her passion.
""Black History Month isn't just about a month; it's how I live my life,"" Taylor said. ""It's who I am. It is the center of my identity and my passion.""
Taylor's loyalty to her passion, her students, her career and the community is impeccable. She will continue to devote her time to modeling the clay that is our generation.
""The biggest legacy I want to leave is the potential impact on racial relations,"" Taylor said. ""I think and hope that it can change. The day I stop hoping that is the day I will leave the profession.""
‘Driven toward madness’
Historian Nikki M. Taylor reveals stories of Margaret Garner, Cincinnati racism
May 23, 2017
Photo: Historian and Ohioan Nikki M. Taylor’s 3rd book, ‘Driven Toward Madness’
By Megan Constable
Margaret Garner’s story has been told in poems, paintings, literature (Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”), and even an opera, but few know who she was and the tragedy that befell her family.
Author Nikki M. Taylor, Ph.D., reveals Garner’s tragic story in her book, “Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio.”
Taylor, originally from Toledo, Ohio, trained as a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and received her doctorate from Duke University. She has taught at the University of Cincinnati for nearly a decade. Currently, Taylor works as the chair of and a professor in the Department of History at Howard University. She has written three books focused on race in Cincinnati.
Taylor worked on “Driven Toward Madness” for three years, a considerably shorter amount of time compared to the average seven years it took for her other two books.
“I knew the area’s history so much better than I did when I first started my career,” Taylor says. “I also knew how to interpret things, I knew where to go for stuff, I already built relationships with the archivists, and so it was a lot easier.”
The book explores the story of Margaret Garner, who was a slave in the 19th century. She ran away from her enslavement in Kentucky with her husband, his parents, her two sons, and two daughters. They made it, crossing the frozen Ohio River into Cincinnati, where Garner’s cousin lived. While waiting for her cousin to find them a ride farther north, her owner found her and brought the law with him. In a panic, Garner slit the throat of her 2-year-old daughter, attempted to slit the throats of her sons, and hit her infant daughter in the head with a shovel. The 2-year-old did not survive the attack. With this in mind, Taylor examines how slavery affected women, from a black feminist perspective.
“I wanted to reclaim her and I wanted to rescue her voice,” Taylor says. “It had been effectively erased by the archive—her voice had been muted. In order to amplify that, I had to use the theories of black feminists, which means, first of all, you put a black woman at the center of your interrogation—their perspective, their lives, their histories, what mattered to them, how they viewed the world. Two is actively understanding there’s an intersection of race, gender, and class.”
An example Taylor uses is how, in the 19th century, Kentucky did not have a law protecting black women from rape. Sometimes slavery required nonstop work from a woman, whom slave owners expected to work outside and inside, including taking care of her own and even their own children. These examples look at the roles of gender, race, and class to understand Garner’s experience as a slave in the 19th century.
The book also examines the law differences between Kentucky, a slave state, and Ohio, a free state. If an owner willingly brought a slave across the Ohio border, the law considered that slave free. However, once the slave went back to Kentucky, they lost that freedom. In Garner’s case, her lawyer attempted to have her tried for murder in Ohio, instead of as a runaway slave in Kentucky.
“Cincinnati was, hands down, the most racist city in 19th century America,” Taylor says. “That troubled me as an Ohioan, and I wanted to know why, and I wanted to know to what extent that racism presented itself and what allowed for that.”
According to Taylor, Cincinnati had the most mob attacks on African-Americans, as well as a large anti-abolitionist community. Cincinnati also did not allow African-Americans to receive education, unlike other northern cities. One issue was Cincinnati’s close proximity to Kentucky.
Taylor briefly wrote about Garner in her first book, but she was conflicted by her story.
“I didn’t talk about her much because her story was so troubling on so many different levels for me as a black female historian, as a historian of black women’s history, and as a mother,” Taylor says. “I wasn’t prepared to really build into the story.”
Whenever a mother takes the life of her child, people usually turn to mental disorders. However, Taylor does not think this is the case with Garner.
“I wanted to make sure people didn’t think she was simply a crazy woman who did something horrific,” Taylor says. “It’s easy for us to sweep it away if we think of her simply as that.”
Today, this story can shed some light on the current mistreatment of African-Americans by the law. Taylor says many black women cannot speak up because the law is not on their side, much as it was not on Garner’s side when it sent her back to Kentucky.
“One of the main things activists talk about is valuing black bodies and black voices and black perspectives, and so, this is a part of the narrative,” Taylor says.
During Garner’s trial, black women gathered and protested outside of the courthouse, which was one of the first times in American history where black women were protesting to help another black woman. Taylor relates this to a division of Black Lives Matter called Say Her Name, which gives a name to murdered black women.
“Saying her name is part of our effort to reclaim the voices, the identities, the real personhood for people who have been killed, executed, abused, oppressed, violated by the state or other forces,” Taylor says, just as she did with Garner’s.
‘Driven Toward Madness’ is available on Amazon. For more of Nikki M. Taylor’s work, please visit Ohio University Press at OhioSwallow.com.
Taylor, Nikki M.: Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive
Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio
Amy Lewontin
Library Journal.
141.20 (Dec. 1, 2016): p106.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Taylor, Nikki M. Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio. Ohio Univ. Dec. 2016. 152p. illus.
notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9780821421604. pap. $22.95. HIST
The events delicately detailed in Taylor's (African American history, Texas Southern Univ.; Frontiers of Freedom) work may be familiar to some
as the subject of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize--winning novel Beloved. Taylor presents here a well-written and thoroughly researched account of
Margaret Garner, an African American slave who attempted to escape from Kentucky to the free state of Ohio with her family in 1856. The story
of Gamer, who killed one of her children to prevent them from a life of slavery after being captured in Ohio by their owners, is quickly related by
Taylor. Much of the book is a reexamination of Garner's trial and an examination of the conditions of her traumatic bondage. The author's
background as a historian of the period brings a fresh look at this unfortunate event. VERDICT Taylor crafts a book that should be read by all
who have an interest in understanding the roots of slavery and oppression of women during the pre--Civil War era. It should also be read by those
seeking to understand the depth of pain and depravity faced by women living under the tyranny of American slavery.--Amy Lewontin,
Northeastern Univ. Lib., Boston
Lewontin, Amy
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Lewontin, Amy. "Taylor, Nikki M.: Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio." Library Journal, 1
Dec. 2016, p. 106. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
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Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret
Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio
Publishers Weekly.
263.44 (Oct. 31, 2016): p66.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio
Nikki M. Taylor. Univ. of Ohio, $22.95 (152p) ISBN 978-0-8214-2160-4
Taylor (America's First Black Socialist), professor of African-American history at Texas Southern University, rehabilitates the image of Margaret
Garner, who escaped slavery and, in 1856, murdered her infant daughter rather than see her taken back into bondage. A number of abolitionists
saw Garner's actions as heroic, but popular opinion excoriated her as an unnatural woman and a monstrous mother--a "Modern Medea." Garner's
story largely disappeared from the public eye until resuscitated through Toni Morrison's celebrated 1987 novel Beloved. Taylor focuses on the
psychological damage that Garner and other enslaved people suffered, and on the extent to which her actions resulted from this unending bodily
and spiritual abuse. Deploying perspectives from feminist analysis and trauma theory, Taylor vividly portrays the sufferings Garner and her
family endured under slavery and in their attempt to escape from it, placing their experiences in the wider context of the antebellum Midwest. For
those familiar with the experiences of enslaved women in relation to sexuality, motherhood, and violence, little here will come as a surprise, but
readers of Morrison's novel will likely appreciate the ways that Taylor illuminates the gendered experience of enslavement and the dialectic by
which the victims of violence may in turn become its perpetrators. Illus. (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio." Publishers Weekly, 31 Oct. 2016, p. 66. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470462561&it=r&asid=28d24da612968cd9034169ee8cbc76cb. Accessed 9 July
2017.
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Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati's Black Community, 1802-
1868
Andria Y. Carter
Black Issues Book Review.
7.1 (January-February 2005): p25.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Cox, Matthews & Associates
Full Text:
Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati's Black Community, 1802-1868 by Nikki M. Taylor Ohio University Press, February 2005 $55, ISBN 0-821-
41579-4
Frontiers of Freedom is not just a story about the founding of Cincinnati's African American community, but a story of the attitudes, the culture,
and the laws that took hold to shape this strategically placed river town and its black and white citizens for generations.
Taylor has captured the essence of Cincinnati's African American community, which has inherited the strength of character from former slaves
who chose to stay, and withstood what the racially oppressive city gave and never gave up believing that things would get better.
As a native Cincinnatian, I always understood that Cincinnati had a hard time finding its identity, its Founding Fathers believing in freedom, but
for whites only, not for those of a different hue. The historian Henry Louis Taylor Jr. contends that 19th-century Cincinnati had a "dual
personality, a schizophrenic northern and southern personality occupying the same urban body."
Cincinnati's schizophrenic personality is understandable because its economy was dependent upon the slave trade. The city's business community
was dependent upon the goods produced by Kentucky's plantations. Even when the federal government outlawed states doing business with slave
states, Cincinnati continued to do business with Kentucky by going underground. Additionally, the city was known for allowing slave trackers to
come into town looking for runaway slaves, allowing the slaves to be dragged back to their master or snatching someone off the street to replace
those slaves that couldn't be found.
By 1850, Cincinnati had the largest African American population (3,237) in the entire Old Northwest. Between 1802 and 1868, African
Americans fled to Cincinnati because the river town offered them greater economic opportunities than did other Ohio cities. Cincinnati was full of
promise, but many hopes were dashed as many soon learned jobs were scarce. Those to be had were mainly on the steamboats, where African
American men endured long separations from their families. Many chose to remain single because of the difficulties. Those who stayed on land
had to fight with the Irish immigrants to find jobs.
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Nikki M. Taylor's thirst for history and understanding comes out in the book, though at times she struggles to tell the story of a community that
endured strife, riots, Ohio's Black Laws aim a lack of recognition as citizens. Taylor does communicate how the black community continued to
redefine its vision of freedom, despite the attempts to stifle it.
Carter, Andria Y.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Carter, Andria Y. "Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati's Black Community, 1802-1868." Black Issues Book Review, Jan.-Feb. 2005, p. 25. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA126755007&it=r&asid=50ed5e908dcb04837db7b88d5f643bed. Accessed 9 July
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A126755007
Jozwiak on Taylor, 'America's First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark'
Author:
Nikki Marie Taylor
Reviewer:
Elizabeth Jozwiak
Nikki Marie Taylor. America's First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, March 12, 2013. 308 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8131-4077-3.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Jozwiak (University of Wisconsin)
Published on H-USA (December, 2014)
Commissioned by Donna Sinclair
Ambition First
In this biography Nikki M. Taylor takes on the challenging task of trying to explain nineteenth-century African American activist Peter H. Clark. Taylor’s task is made more difficult by the lack of extant papers of Clark himself. Nonetheless, the author valiantly, if not entirely successfully, attempts to trace and explain Clark’s thought processes over the course of his life using newspapers, convention proceedings, and other sources, and argues that he is a figure who should not languish in obscurity. Readers familiar with the excellent short treatment by David Gerber (“Peter Humphries Clark: The Dialogue of Hope and Despair” in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century [1988]) will find more detail here. But this book does not change the impression of a man who, although he may have had ideals, more often than not put personal ambition first.
From his father, a barber who served both black and white customers in the mid-1800s, Clark learned to challenge the status quo. Unsatisfied with the traditional career options available to African Americans at the time, Clark quit the barber business soon after he inherited it from his father. During the 1850s Clark became enamored by black nationalism and even emigration--distinguished from colonization because it would be run by African Americans on their own terms. He bailed out of the movement before any expedition was undertaken, however.
This book adds to the literature on the abolitionist movement, showing Clark to have been a significant abolitionist figure in Ohio. He spent some time in the Radical Abolitionist Party, and based on his friendship with Levi Coffin, Taylor’s conclusion that he had at least some connection with the Underground Railroad is a good one. In this period he was also close to Frederick Douglass (although they did not always agree) and worked for him on Frederick Douglass’ Paper.
This background made it all the more astonishing when Clark joined the Democratic Party. Taylor argues that as someone who had never been a slave, he had less attachment to the Republican Party than other African Americans. His attitude seemed to be, “What have you done for me lately?” He believed Republicans should be pressed to action and if they were not delivering he was willing to shift to the Democratic Party. That may be all well and good, but it seems the motivation for Clark’s shift was also disappointment that the Republicans did not reward him with a job.
Ever ambitious, Clark also sought patronage positions and when one party disappointed him in that area, he was willing to try the next. Many African Americans, not surprisingly, saw him as a traitor for joining the party of states’ rights and slavery in order to get ahead.
He was a nonconformist in religion as well, attracted to Unitarianism for its focus on reason and human agency rather than to more predestinarian traditions. As a young teacher he also lectured on the humanist ideas of Thomas Paine. The mainline Protestant community was appalled by what they saw as Clark’s promotion of the Paine’s “atheist” ideas, and although other teachers came to his defense, his position was not renewed.
In perhaps the strongest section of the book, Taylor showcases the struggles over the integration of Ohio schools in the 1880s. Clark courted controversy by opposing it and lost much support in the African American community when the integration bill failed. What Taylor shows is that Clark and other black educators defended the segregated system in large part over the years because they foresaw that integration would lead to the dismissal of black teachers and administrators. But Clark also recognized that not only was teaching a respected occupation, but black teachers helped guide the next generation toward middle-class opportunities.
Clark worked hard in the 1880s to be a player in the Democratic Party, angling for a patronage plum. He was not above engaging in character assassination to prevent his rival from getting the post he wanted as minister to Haiti. Perhaps in an effort to be a good member of the machine, he even became involved in a bribery scandal attempting to protect a Democrat involved in black voter intimidation. He lost credibility with the African American community and despite his maneuverings, Clark never won the patronage posts he coveted nor held political office.
While Taylor highlights the varied political lives of Clark, she is not entirely successful in arguing that Clark was a socialist. His family members’ brief experience with Fourierism and his early interest in German Turnvereine notwithstanding, it’s hard to see evidence of continued socialist philosophy during his career. Clark appears to have spent a total of three years in socialist parties in the 1870s (the Workingmen’s Party and then the Socialist Labor Party), quitting after losing badly as a congressional candidate. True to form, Clark resisted the push to orthodoxy within socialism, as he did with African American Republicans. As any student of American socialism knows, however, socialists tended to gloss over racial issues in favor of economic arguments and one wonders if that was part of why Clark left. There is little evidence that he continued to speak and write from a socialist perspective as he jumped quickly to first to the Republican and then the Democratic Party. Thus the book’s title is somewhat misleading and disappointing to those expecting a discussion of African American socialism.
Clark spent at least as much time being denounced as admired, so it is somewhat surprising that, as the author notes, in an 1890s Indianapolis Freeman poll he was considered one of the greatest African Americans in history. Perhaps “most controversial” would have been a better designation.
While Clark remains somewhat elusive, Taylor has gone a long way toward enhancing our understanding of him. This work adds a valuable insight into Ohio political history as well as African American history and is worth reading, particularly by students of those fields.
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=42474
Citation: Elizabeth Jozwiak. Review of Taylor, Nikki Marie, America's First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark. H-USA, H-Net Reviews. December, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=42474
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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From: Ohio History
Volume 122, 2015
pp. 93-94 | 10.1353/ohh.2015.0016
Unless you lived in the city of Cincinnati or the state of Ohio, you probably would not know the name Peter H. Clark. Despite his significance in the nineteenth century, he is little remembered by current historians or politicians. This is a key reason why Nikki Taylor set out to write his biography. As Taylor has noted, in the years prior to and following the Civil War, Clark was among the best-known and well-respected public figures in the Ohio African American community. But by the last two decades of that century, he had become a peripheral and, in some quarters, despised individual. The story of his rise and fall is the central theme of this book.
Clark did not leave an abundance of papers and records with which to reconstruct his life. Other than documents retained by Clark’s family and his writings or speeches published in newspapers, there is but scant additional information upon which to draw. This is probably another reason why Clark’s life history has not been previously explored in depth. Despite these challenges, Taylor does an excellent job of reconstructing and analyzing Clark’s life.
Clark’s story parallels that of a tragic Greek hero. He first comes to prominence as a consequence of his involvement in the black convention movement in Ohio. His participation in that movement, Taylor suggests, marks his initial embrace of radical black nationalism. Clark is also a stalwart supporter of black education and political rights. In many ways Clark’s intellectual flexibility was both his strength and his Achilles’ heel. As long as his words and actions reflected the hopes and values of the African American community, he remained an influential figure in Ohio politics. But his switch from the Republican Party to the [End Page 93] Democratic Party in the 1880s eroded this base of support and his influence. Why he decided to do this is open to debate, but undoubtedly it led to his going from being a revered figure among African Americans to a reviled one in most quarters. It also marks his steady decline into oblivion as he was relieved of his position in the Cincinnati school system and forced to scramble for his livelihood.
Taylor’s intent is to put Clark’s thought process into perspective. He is a complicated personality who is willing to embrace different ideas if he believes they might help him achieve his goals. As Taylor points out, Clark was one of the first black socialists as well as a black nationalist. She believes that despite his decisions later in life, “he is one of the foremost public intellectuals in nineteenth-century African American history” (2). It is not an easy case to make, but Taylor does it successfully. She accomplishes this through a thorough examination of his writings and what has been written about him by his contemporaries and others. What results is a carefully balanced assessment of Clark. While Taylor thinks highly of Clark, she also recognizes that personal ambition and conceit served him poorly later in life and in many ways undermined what was a brilliant career for many years.
America’s First Black Socialist is a fascinating character study of the rise and fall of an important but forgotten historical figure. There is much to be learned from the choices Clark made, as well as the issues that African Americans in positions of leadership faced. Taylor reminds us that even admirable, charismatic individuals can make poor decisions that can cause all their previous accomplishments to be overlooked and forgotten.
Spencer Crew
George Mason University
Copyright © 2015 The Kent State University Press
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America's First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark. By Nikki M. Taylor. (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. Pp. 320. $40.00.)
Authors
David Brodnax Sr.
First published: 8 March 2016Full publication history
DOI: 10.1111/hisn.12106 View/save citation
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Long before Barack Obama and Martin Luther King Jr. were accused of being secret socialists, Peter H. Clark became the first African American involved in the socialist movement. Nikki M. Taylor's new biography follows the life of this educator and activist from his earliest years in antebellum Cincinnati to his death after World War I. Although he has been largely forgotten by the general public and most historians have focused on his socialist activity, Taylor shows how Clark's involvement in many different political movements, even in ways that seemed, and still seem, contradictory, was central in “African American political strivings and intellectual life in the nineteenth century” (12).
Clark lived a life of ideas, activism, and politics, and so Taylor appropriately studies that life within the broader context of nineteenth-century intellectual, political, and social history. Although he was born into a free and prominent family, he found his upward mobility constantly challenged by racism; for instance, he ended a brief barbering career when a white customer asked for his help in gaining sexual access to black women. He was also exposed to a wide range of ideas such as black nationalism, German American labor activism, and Unitarianism. His support for black institutions, education, and equal rights resulted in a half-century of service as a teacher and principal in black schools. Clark was also active in the antislavery struggle, and after the Civil War he became the first African American active in socialist politics. In later years, though, his political influence among black voters, and thus his usefulness to white politicians, faded as he seemed increasingly willing to support whatever political party would offer him a patronage position, even defending Democratic officials who had arrested black men to keep them from voting. He spent the last few decades of his life in the obscurity that has lasted to the present day.
In America's First Black Socialist, Taylor excellently traces the various ideological threads that influenced and were influenced by Peter H. Clark throughout his long life, thus showing why he matters in our conception of nineteenth-century black political and intellectual history. She also enhances our understanding of the importance of pre-Great Migration black Midwestern history, which has often been overshadowed by later events and by Southern history during the same time. The book also strongly reflects Taylor's own views about Clark's actions and ideas. Her analysis may be overly defensive of his early years and overly critical of his later years: phrases like “loss of conscience and commitment toward his people” are typical (157). This may raise broader questions about whether biographers should defend their subject, criticize their subject, or explore and contextualize their subject, leaving explicit defense and criticism to the reader. Otherwise, though, this is a fine study of an inappropriately forgotten black leader, useful to any reader who wants to better understand nineteenth-century black Midwestern history; black intellectual, educational, and political history; and the connections between African Americans and radical white thinkers.
She Did the Best She Could
Review by Chitown Kev
Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio
by Nikki M. Taylor
Ohio University Press, 152 pp., $22.95 (paperback)
Quoted in Sidelights: it is a narrative with the distinction that finally removes Margaret Garner, in part, from the pantheons of superheros and monsters and tries (largely successfully) to restore and celebrate Garner for simply being a human being who, in Garner’s own words, simply did the best she could.
In 1974, Middleton A. Harris, a collector of African American memorabilia, worked in tandem with a team of collectors, editors, and designers (including Random House book editor Toni Morrison) to publish The Black Book, a “large scrapbook” of "photographs, newspaper clippings, illustrations, and various other African American memorabilia." Even a cursory glance at the portions of The Black Book available online shows The Black Book (or at least the 35th anniversary edition) to be a handsomely curated print documentary of African American life that remains more than worthy of study and meditation whether by scholars or even, say, over an afternoon tea where one might see The Black Book sitting on a coffee table.
Nowadays, The Black Book is best known for its entry on page 10; a February 22, 1856 newspaper headline in The American Baptist titled “A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child.” It tells the story of the prison visit of a Reverend P.S. Bassett, a Baptist minister, to a fugitive slave named Margaret Garner, who was imprisoned for killing her daughter, Mary. That “scrapbook” entry, of course, was the primary source and inspiration for Toni Morrison’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved. Since the publication of Ms. Morrison’s novel, Garner’s story has inspired a film (an adaptation of Beloved starring Oprah Winfrey), a 2005 opera called Margaret Garner that played to packed houses in Cincinnati, Detroit, and Philadelphia, and a historical account of the Garner case written by Steven Weisenberg.
While there are certainly a number of aspects of the Margaret Garner case appealing to artist-types, Dr. Nikki M. Taylor, newly appointed chair of The History Department at Howard University and the author of Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio, posits that even in Mrs. Garner’s lifetime, the case was so chockful of “things deemed unspeakable, dishonorable, and ugly” that a central element of the Garner story remains underappreciated: the trauma or what Dr. Taylor (following historian Nell Irwin Painter) labels the “soul murder” that Margaret Garner (and most enslaved black women) must have suffered; a trauma that, in Margaret Garner’s case, manifested itself in the near-decapitation of her two year old daughter, Mary, by her own hands mere hours after the Garner family escaped from enslavement in Boone County, Kentucky across a frozen Ohio River to freedom in Cincinnati, Ohio.
9780821421598-cover.jpg
The first three chapters of Driven Toward Madness consists largely of the narrative of Margaret Garner, the background of the Garner family and the backgrounds of the slaveholders, Archibald K. Gaines and James Marshall (the owner of Margaret’s husband, Simon Jr. as well as Simon Jr.’s parents). A number of specific and peculiar aspects of slavery in Boone County, Kentucky immediately catch one’s eye. For example, the Garners were enslaved on small farms as opposed to huge slave plantations, therefore the popularly known binary of “house slave” and “field slave” is probably not applicable for such cases as small farms frequently “could not afford to have separate structures for their enslaved workers” therefore, enslaved families on small farms often lived in “the main family structure” with their owners and would be “quickly missed” in the event of an escape. Another curious aspect of slavery as experienced by the Garners is the apparent mobility of enslaved people even on the “free soil” of Cincinnati, Ohio; Simon Jr.’s mother, Mary, for instance, occasionally attended the AME church in Cincinnati and Simon Jr., himself, frequently accompanied Thomas Marshall, the nineteen-year old son of his owner James Marshall, to Cincinnati and it was on one of these trips, in December 1855, that Simon Jr. was able to visit his wife’s relatives; a visit that proved to be critical in the Garner family’s eventual escape.
Dr. Taylor’s highly readable prose, largely unencumbered by much of the academic “jargon” that usually accompanies a book that crosses disciplinary boundaries, serves Driven Toward Madness especially well as she depicts Garner’s killing of her daughter, Mary:
“Grabbing a butcher knife from the counter, she rushed toward her children, grabbing two-year old Mary and declaring, Before my children are taken back to Kentucky I will kill every one of them!” While the men were trying to keep the posse from gaining entrance, Margaret snatched up two-year old Mary and quickly cut her throat, right to left. She practically decapitated her daughter with a cut that was estimated to be four or five inches long and three inches deep...” (p.20)
Dr. Taylor’s flat, naturalistic, relentlessness description of Margaret Garner killing her daughter (and attempting to kill her other children) simply sticks with you. That description also gives the later, more speculative chapters of Driven Toward Madness, rooted in disciplines like “black feminist theory, trauma studies, pain studies, genetics, history of emotions, and literary criticism,” more credence and results in the inevitable conclusion that Margaret Garner’s murder of her two-year old daughter is actually...quite logical.
While interdisciplinary in nature, one central unknown and unknowable question permeates the later chapters of Driven Toward Madness: the paternity of Garner’s children. The testimonies of noted abolitionist and suffragist Lucy Stone during and after the Garner trial (testimonies that Dr. Taylor feels somewhat “diminished the women’s movement” and, in a way, “turned Garner into a caricature”) laid before an open court and abolitionist and suffrage meetings what everyone knew and no one could acknowledge; the physical and sexual abuse of enslaved black women. The evidence that such abuse had probably occurred laid on Margaret Garner’s own scarred face and in the “faded faces” of three of Garner’s children (including Mary, the child she killed), who were described in various news reports of that time as “mulatto” (as was Margaret Garner, herself). To Dr. Taylor’s credit, she presents the available evidence within the appropriate historical and legal contexts while stipulating that neither Margaret Garner nor those that talked to Garner while she was imprisoned said anything definitive about the paternity of her children one way or another.
Driven Toward Madness is even more unsettling than my multiple readings of Morrison’s Beloved. The boundaries between slavery and freedom, sanity and madness, were then (and are now) every bit as thin as a sheet of ice on the Ohio River on a freezing February night. Furthermore, the awareness of those boundaries can and do get lost over time, lending stories like Margaret Garner’s to becoming a broad range of narratives from tall tales to novels to dramas. To be sure, Dr. Taylor’s Driven Toward Madness is, in a sense, yet another narrative, but it is a narrative with the distinction that finally removes Margaret Garner, in part, from the pantheons of superheros and monsters and tries (largely successfully) to restore and celebrate Garner for simply being a human being who, in Garner’s own words, simply did the best she could.
Not really a review, but for background on Margaret Garner and Peter Clark
Guide to African American Resources
at the Cincinnati History Library and Archives
Introduction
Subject Categories
Index
Cincinnati History
Library and Archives
Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal
Margaret Garner
1834-1858
Margaret Garner was born on the plantation of John Pollard Gaines in Boone County, Kentucky to a slave named Priscilla. She married another slave from a nearby plantation, Robert Garner. In 1849 John P. Gaines sold his plantation, including the slaves, to his brother Archibald Gaines.
In January of 1856, Margaret and her husband decided to flee along with their four children, his parents and a number of other slaves. Their path was to Covington, across the Ohio River to Cincinnati, and then on to Canada. At Cincinnati, the fugitive slaves split up for fear of being captured. Some of the party did make it to Canada. The Garners, however, did not.
At Cincinnati, they went to the home of relatives of Margaret’s for assistance in getting further north. Margaret’s relatives had earlier obtained their release from slavery from their masters. While at the home, Archibald Gaines and U.S. Marshalls surrounded the cabin to capture the fugitive slaves. While Robert was trying to defend them with a pistol, Margaret not wanting to return to slavery, slit the throat of her two-year old daughter, Mary, then stabbed her other children and herself. While her daughter died immediately, Margaret and her other children were only wounded. The entire family were taken into custody and imprisoned.
Cincinnati Gazette article
Article from the Cincinnati Gazette, January 29, 1856
Cincinnati History Library and Archives, Cincinnati Museum Center
A long trial ensued, in fact it has been called “longest” fugitive slave case. Because of the sensationalism of the case it was followed almost daily in the newspapers. Margaret hoped to be tried on charges of murder in a free state. That way she would be treated as a free person and her children would be considered free as well. The decision after two weeks was that this was not a murder case but a fugitive slave case. She and her family were viewed as “property.” The family was returned to slavery.
They departed on the steamboat Henry Lewis for a Gaines plantation in New Orleans. Following a collision with another steamboat, Margaret and her infant daughter Cilla were thrown overboard. Margaret was saved but the child drowned. While it has been said that following her rescue Margaret expressed joy that her daughter drowned rather than be returned to slavery and there were those who even speculated she assisted in the drowning of her infant daughter, her husband in a interview after her death said she never tried again to harm her children, but that she had often express that it would be “better for them to be put out of the world than live in slavery.” Margaret herself died in slavery in Mississippi in 1858 of typhoid fever.
Her story is the basis for the 1987 novel, Beloved, by Toni Morrison and the subsequent opera Margaret Garner based on that novel. The City of Covington has sponsored an historical marker at Sixth and Main Streets noting this is where she began her journey across the frozen Ohio River.
To learn more about Margaret Garner, consult the following resources:
The Fugitive Slave Law, and Its Victims
by Samuel May
Pamphlets 326 M467
View catalog record Request slip
Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South
By Steven Weisenburger
General 325 W427
View catalog record Request slip
Cincinnati Enquirer
See the Trial of Margaret Garner on Jan. 29-Feb 29, 1856.
Microfilm
Cincinnati Gazette
See Jan. 29-Mar. 19, 1856
General 071.771 fC5g
Request slip
2005 Summer Festival
By Cincinnati Opera
Pamphlets f782.1073 C574
View catalog record Request slip
African American National Biography
General q920.0092 A258
See Vol. 3, page 452.
View catalog record Request slip
Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, the Reputed President of the Underground Railroad
By Levi Coffin
General B C675
View catalog record Request slip
Interview of Robert Garner
in the Cincinnati Daily Chronicle, March 11, 1870
General 071.771 fC574chd
Request slip
"George S. Bennett United States Marshall . . ." Broadside
Broadsides Cincinnati Slavery folio
While this broadside does not mention Margaret Garner by name, she is the woman alluded to, in the final sentences of the broadside. Produced by a Cincinnatian using the pseudonym Justice, it describes the barring of the African American population in Cincinnati from the courtroom proceedings of the Margaret Garner case. The Cincinnati Gazette of January 31, 1856 confirms “No Colored persons were admitted within the courtroom” and notes that there was a commotion outside the courthouse resulting in the arrest of several African Americans.
Text of broadside: "George S. Bennett United States Marshall. Let the public mark this man…..the ruffian crowd who have deserted their proper duty as city policemen, to aid him in his degrading work of slave catching, stand ready to insult and maltreat native taxpayers, who desire to enter the court room, as is their right. …We hope you will not fill the measure of your shame by permitting a woman to be dragged to that slavery she dreads worse than death….Justice, Cincinnati, O. February 1st, 1856." View catalog record Request slip
Sources Used for Biographical Sketch:
Weisenburger, Steven. Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-murder from the Old South, General 326 W427, Cincinnati History Library and Archives, Cincinnati Museum Center.
Cincinnati Enquirer, March 11, 1856, Cincinnati History Library and Archives, Cincinnati Museum Center.
Cincinnati Daily Chronicle, March 11, 1870, General 071.771 fC574chd, Cincinnati History Library and Archives, Cincinnati Museum Center.
Tim Talbott, “Slave Escape,” ExploreKYHistory, accessed September 26, 2014, http://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/items/show/179
Find a Grave, Memorial to MArgaret Garner (Memorial# 42533100) http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=42533100
Margaret Garner: A New American Opera, http://www.margaretgarner.org/
Peter H. Clark
1829-1925
Peter Humphries Clark was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1829. His mother died when he was three. His father, Michael, was a barber whose occupation gave them financial stability. Peter was educated in private schools established for the African American population by white philanthropists.
Not wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps to become a barber, he decided to learn the trade of printing. He obtained an apprenticeship under Thomas Varney, a white abolitionist. Although the apprenticeship was short-lived when the Varneys left Cincinnati for California, they had influenced his life. When new owner of the printing business refused to train African Americans, Clark planned to emigrate to Liberia but changed his mind when he arrived in New Orleans.
Peter H. Clark
Peter H. Clark
from Cincinnati’s Colored Citizens
by Wendell P. Dabney, 1926
Cincinnati History Library and Archive.
Cincinnati Museum Center
Shortly after his return to Cincinnati, his father Michael passed away. He did take over his father’s business for awhile but it was short-lived. While his father had served only white clientele, Peter opened his barbershop to the African American community as well. When the white clientele objected, he left the profession. He then went to work for his uncle, John Isom Gaines, who had a grocery. His uncle not only became his employer but also served as a mentor.
Gaines was active in the state black convention movement, having attended the convention in 1849 in Columbus which called for the right for the African American population to establish their own separate school system. The state legislature did pass the legislation to do so that same year. Gaines served on the school board and was the chief administrator of the schools from 1849 until his death in 1859 with the exception of the years 1854-56 when the state legislature repealed the right to have the schools run by African Americans. Clark became a teacher in this segregated school system in 1852. In 1854 he married Frances Williams and had 3 children by her. He became a principal of a segregated elementary school in 1857.
While Clark did not serve in the Civil War, when a group of African Americans in Cincinnati went into service to defend the city, he wrote their story, The Black Brigade of Cincinnati. It is the only book he authored.
In 1866 he became principal of the segregated high school, Gaines High School, named after his uncle. This is when he had his greatest impact on the city for he not only served as principal but also trained numerous African Americans to become teachers. While Clark was for desegregation in many instances, he supported the segregated schools because he felt the teachers he trained would not be hired in an integrated school where they would be teaching white children as well.
Clark was not only interested in education but also politics. He first became a member of the Republican Party, then a member of the Liberal Republican Party and then in 1876 joined the Workingmen’s Party, a socialist organization. Clark became their candidate for state school commissioner in 1877 and in 1878 as representative of the first congressional district. Though defeated for both positions, he gained the attention of the Republican Party who ran the school board. They insisted he resign from the party or cease serving as principal. The African American population which was predominantly Republican came to his defense and in appreciation he left the socialist party for the Republican Party in 1879. This was short-lived when he became a member of the Democratic Party in 1882.
In 1885, as a member of this party, he became embroiled in a political scandal involving bribery. Though escaping indictment, his political career was over and soon after his career in education, as well. In 1886 control of the school board went from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. The new school board forced him to resign as principal. This time the African American population did not come to his rescue. As a supporter of segregated schools at a time when most of the population was for desegregation, he was out-of step with his own race.
In 1887, when William Hooper Councill was forced to resign as principal of the Alabama Colored Normal School in Huntsville, Alabama because of his civil rights activities, Clark replaced him. His time there was short-lived as Councill maneuvered successfully to get his position back. In 1888 Clark moved to St. Louis, Missouri where he taught in segregated school until his retirement in 1908. He died in St. Louis in June 1925.
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