While anti-abolitionists maintained hold of formal political power in antebellum Newport, a movement for abolition and for black civil rights was simultaneously building. Th… See more

The Postal Campaign was the nascent American Anti-Slavery Society’s first large-scale, collective effort, and it led directly to Rhode Island’s first significant nineteenth-century bat… See more

By the late 1830s, the excitement and violence around the postal campaign had waned. Entrenched interests were now less spectacularly but more profoundly working to silence a… See more

The next crisis, and consequential uptick in abolition and anti-abolition activity in Rhode Island, was the Dorr Rebellion of 1841-1843, a struggle to expand suffrage in the state by eli… See more

By 1843, Newport and the broader Rhode Island black community had succeeded in maintaining decades-long institutions, and had won several key victories — all this despite the … See more