African-American Manhood

Black Manhood under Slavery

Manhood under slavery was highly problematic, for enslavement denied African-American men a range of experiences that they and white Americans associated with manhood, including earning a living, providing for a family, enjoying personal independence, and defending one's freedom. It also impaired their ability to protect their wives and daughters from sexually aggressive masters and denied them the right to resist slavery and its brutality, for acts of rebellion and carrying weapons were punishable by death. At the same time, however, many slave owners promoted family life as a counter to rebellion and desertion, and male slaves were therefore able to develop masculine identities around marriage and fatherhood.

White defenders of slavery, associating manhood with freedom and independence, defined black men as feminine and lacking the qualities of true masculinity. Black men, they said, were naturally dependent and needed to be subservient to paternalistic white masters because they were incapable of taking care of themselves. Nineteenth-century proslavery advocate George Fitzhugh explicitly feminized male slaves when he compared the relation between master and slave to that between husband and wife. Even white abolitionists associated black men with femininity. The abolitionist Theodore Tilton, for instance, called blacks a “feminine people” possessing a “strange moral, instinctive insight that bellows more to women than to men” (Tilton, 11–12).

Black abolitionists, on the other hand, asserted black manhood, linking its fulfillment to liberation from slavery and protection of family. Advocating armed insurrection, if necessary, Frederick Douglass and David Walker believed that acceptance of servitude signified weakness and femininity, while redemptive violence, grounded in courage, intelligence, and self-reliance, demonstrated an authentic black masculinity. Henry Highland Garnett complained in his 1843 Address to Slaves that male slaves “tamely submit, while your lords tear your wives from your embraces,” and he asked “are you men?”

Emancipation and African-American Manhood

While African-American men associated masculinity with freedom, it became clear to them after emancipation that black manhood also required what many white Americans, influenced by agrarianism and republicanism, considered fundamental to manliness: land ownership, labor contracts, and the vote (guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment but often denied in practice by property requirements, poll taxes, literacy tests, among other restrictions). But continuing racism and discrimination limited their ability to fulfill these roles and responsibilities and achieve the status they associated with manhood. In the North, 80 percent of jobs available to blacks were in menial and unskilled labor (generally defined by whites as unmanly), and 75 percent of blacks in the South were sharecroppers. White middle-class society associated manliness with status as a land owner or sole family breadwinner, but black men were unlikely to secure work that allowed them this status. Their desire to acquire the economic, legal, social, and political underpinnings of American manhood shaped much of African-American activism for civil rights and racial justice during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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