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Source Description
Title from accompanying material.
Scholar Source Context
Document identity
localId
7653h083x
label
Black Jacks- African American seamen in the age of sail
core
obj
dtoType
object
pageCount
1
Source metadata
id
7653h083x
contentType
object
stage
normalized
title
Black Jacks- African American seamen in the age of sail
description
Title from accompanying material.
date
["1997"]
year
1997
rights
The Lewis H. Latimer Society, Inc. owns outright all of the materials in these collections.
rightsUri
This work is in the public domain under a Creative Commons No Rights Reserved License (CC0).
reuseAllowed
no restrictions
language
English
identifierLocal
5_4_31
institution
Lewis H. Latimer Society & Museum
collections
Lewis H. Latimer Society Chelsea
subjects
Sailors
genreBasic
Objects
genreSpecific
Book covers
typeOfResource
Artifact
Text
thumbnailUrl
largeImageUrl
pageCount
1
source
import
Source extras
institutionArkId
0p09g962w
collectionArkId
k356k7952
extent
1 item
notes
Title from accompanying material.
Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. / W. Jeffrey Bolster. / Chapter 8. / Toward Jim Crow at Sea. / By the middle of the nineteenth century, changes in the maritime industries worked against African Americans' best interests. Although the shifting of blacks' roles in maritime trend was neither uniform nor entirely negative, the general trend was unmistakable. Black men were finding fewer opportunities at sea. / Maritime culture, however, increasingly displayed the legacy of African Americans in the age of sail, notably in the shanteys with which sailors paced their work and expressed their sardonic worldview. Black sailors had remade Atlantic maritime culture, and in the process formed their identities through it. They had contributed substantially to the formation of black America by earning a living at sea and by spreading news to black communities. But after the general emancipation of 1863, the sailor's role as newsmonger became less significant, and seafaring became less meaningful to black America as a whole. Freedom opened black society considerably to outside influences and cross-cultural perspectives, making sailors' vantage point less distinctive. The constriction of blacks' employment during Reconstruction, however, had serious repercussions for a community always struggling to make ends meet. It foreshadowed blacks' segregation by late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century maritime unions, which allowed men of color to sail only as cooks and stewards or as seamen in marginal trades. Jim Crow was going to sea.
hasTranscription
no
dcId
7653h083x
type
object
Single page context
seq
1
pageIndex
0
type
photo
mediaId
b9ac8046cc23ddd2