Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom

After emancipation, African American men, women and children, as part of black communities throughout the South struggled to define on their own terms the meaning of freedom and in the process to construct communities of struggle. Much of the literature on Reconstruction portrays freed African Americans as rapidly and readily adopting a gendered private-public dichotomy .2 Much of the literature on the nineteenth-century public sphere constructs a masculine liberal bourgeois public with a female co~nterpublic.~ This essay, focusing on the civic geography of post-Civil War black Richmond suggests the problematic of applying such generalizations to African American life in the late-nineteenth century South. In the immediate post-emancipation era black Richmonders enacted their understandings of democratic political discourse through mass meetings attended and participated in (including voting) by men, women and children and through mass participation in Republican Party conventions. They carried these notions of political participation into the state Capitol engaging from the gallery in the debates on the constitutional convention floor.