Black Pioneers Helped Settle the Northwest Territory Long Before Civil War

Long before the Civil War and the Underground Railroad, “free people of color” were instrumental in settling the Northwest Territory as Americans pushed West after the Revolutionary War.

Dr. Anna-Lisa Cox, an award-winning historian on the history of racism and race relations in 19th Century America, has discovered hundreds of Black families who came West, owned land, and were instrumental in taming the frontier.

“When Detroit was still a Fort, African American pioneers were succeeding and rising on the nation’s earliest frontier,” says Cox. “Their story is one buried by violence and denial but a story of success on a level never thought possible.”

Their story, unfortunately, is one of backlash by many white settlers who, for example, taxed Black property owners for schools that African Americans were prohibited from attending among other discriminatory and prejudicial acts.

Cox tells the story of these black pioneers in her book, “The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality.”

Cox is a non-resident Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Recently, she also was a Research Associate at the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Most recently she was one of the keynote speakers at the Settling Ohio: First Nations and Beyond Conference at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.