Elusive Utopia: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Oberlin, Ohio (Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World) - Hardcover

Kornblith, Gary; Lasser, Carol

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807169560 ISBN 13: 9780807169568

Publisher: Louisiana State University Press, 2018

Synopsis

Before the Civil War, Oberlin, Ohio, stood in the vanguard of the abolition and black freedom movements. The community, including co-founded Oberlin College, strove to end slavery and establish full equality for all. Yet, in the half-century after the Union victory, Oberlin's resolute stand for racial justice eroded as race-based discrimination pressed down on its African American citizens. In Elusive Utopia, noted historians Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser tell the story of how, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Oberlin residents, black and white, understood and acted upon their changing perceptions of race, ultimately resulting in the imposition of a colour line.

Founded as a utopian experiment in 1833, Oberlin embraced radical racial egalitarianism in its formative years. By the eve of the Civil War, when 20 percent of its local population was black, the community modeled progressive racial relations that, while imperfect, shone as strikingly more advanced than in either the American South or North. Emancipation and the passage of the Civil War amendments seemed to confirm Oberlin's egalitarian values. Yet, contrary to the expectations of its idealistic founders, Oberlin's residents of colour fell increasingly behind their white peers economically in the years after the war. Moreover, leaders of the white-dominated temperance movement conflated class, colour, and respectability, resulting in stigmatization of black residents. Over time, many white Oberlinians came to view black poverty as the result of personal failings, practiced residential segregation, endorsed racially differentiated education in public schools, and excluded people of colour from local government. By 1920, Oberlin's racial utopian vision had dissipated, leaving the community to join the racist mainstream of American society.

Drawing from newspapers, pamphlets, organisational records, memoirs, census materials and tax lists, Elusive Utopia traces the rise and fall of Oberlin's idealistic vision and commitment to racial equality in a pivotal era in American history.

About this title

About the Author

Gary J. Kornblith, emeritus professor of history at Oberlin College, has published Slavery and Sectional Strife in the Early American Republic, 1776-1821 and Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America.

Carol Lasser, emeritus professor of history at Oberlin College, has published Educating Men and Women Together: Coeducation in a Changing World and Antebellum American Women: Private, Public, Partisan.

Edition details

• Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807169560
• ISBN 13: 9780807169568
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 344