Colored Convention Movement 347and discussed aft er one woman fought for the right to
equally participate. She made a motion that the organi-
zation give women rights as voting members, which was
seconded by Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass. Th e
convention determined that the word “persons” did include
women, and that opened the door for the more active in-
volvement of women. Yet, the role of women at these con-
ventions would be plagued with ambiguity until the Civil
War, and there was great inconsistency in the adherence to
this new resolution from state to state, as women met with
varying degrees of acceptance or hostility.
Black women faced powerful opposition as they pro-
jected themselves into the male sphere of public life. Yet
they also ignored the barriers to the public sphere not only
by attending the male-dominated antislavery meetings and
conventions but also by organizing other public forums
and literary societies in which male and female speakers
participated. For example, Maria W. Stewart was the fi rst
American woman to speak in public to a mixed audience in
1832, an event she helped organize. And Mary Ann Shadd
Cary insisted on being seated at the National Colored Con-
vention in Philadelphia in 1855, forcing them to vote on
whether she could address them, and by 15 votes cast in her
favor, she was allowed to do so.
Th e end of the 1848 convention marked the beginning
of a new decade, with members sanctioning the use of vio-
lence to free the slaves. By 1849, even Douglass, Garnet’s
foremost adversary in the fi ght to galvanize revolutionary
action, admitted that the long-suff ering slaves would be
justifi ed if they should murder their masters. Th e 1850s
bred a growing militancy that expressed strong animosity
against the U.S. government. Whereas some members en-
dorsed violent confrontation to resolve the problems fac-
ing the slaves and the Northern black community, in part
to taunt those in power with the potential of a cataclysmic
slave insurrection, a small contingency of black convention
members began to look once again beyond the borders of
America.
In the 1830s, black convention leaders believed that
blacks needed to remain in the United States to fi ght on be-
half of the enslaved. Over time, assertions of the necessity
of emigration for the positive good of the black community
emerged. Th ese ideas increasingly became popular as the
conditions of American life deteriorated in the 1850s. Th e
1847 National Convention was the fi rst to seriously place
emigration back on the agenda, and economic opportunitiesAt the 1847 National Convention, the prospect of de-
veloping a national press resurfaced, an idea that was origi-
nally proposed in 1843. Freedom’s Journal and the Rights of
All had attempted to develop a national readership at the
end of the 1820s. Th e Liberator became a national vehicle
for the concerns of the African American community in the
beginning of the 1830s. Over time, as African Americans
sought to gain control of their own political agenda, they
discussed developing another newspaper that would rep-
resent their interests and activism. Philip A. Bell began the
Struggler, and then in 1837, the Weekly Advocate emerged
and later became the Colored American, and this paper for
several years was the national voice for African Ameri-
cans. Th e 1843 National Convention members, because of
the fi nancial diffi culties that all of these papers faced, re-
solved to either establish a newspaper that would have na-
tional readership or support an already existing one. Not
all convention members supported the idea of a national
press, however. Douglass, who was just about to put out his
paper the North Star, and Th omas Van Rensselaer, editor of
the Ram’s Horn, both rejected the idea of a national press.
Douglass feared that a national press would come to be in-
fl uenced by a few men rather than the concerns of the black
population at large. At the National Convention in Cleve-
land in 1848, the issue of a national press was resolved by
the decision to name Douglass’s paper, the North Star, the
representative organ for the offi cial black press, and for the
next decade Douglass’s paper was recognized as the voice of
the African American people. It was not until the reemer-
gence of emigration as a solution to the problem of racism
and inequality that other papers were developed to chal-
lenge Douglass’s advocacy that African Americans should
remain in America.
Black convention members expressed a continued in-
terest in developing cooperative agricultural communities
in 1843. Farming on the frontier, they believed, would solve
the problems of the black community by providing eco-
nomic independence and prosperity. Four years later, at the
1847 convention, Gerrit Smith off ered 140,000 acres of land
in New York to some 3,000 blacks, making them eligible for
the franchise. Th is project never took hold, however, be-
cause most blacks lacked the necessary capital to relocate
and develop their land.
By 1848, African Americans had held conventions for
19 years. At the 1848 convention, the rights of women to
fully participate in the colored conventions were debated