CLST's Popular Print Culture Working Group is proud to present with its co-sponsors (the Departments of Africana Studies, Communication, and English, and the School of Education), Northwestern University's Angela Ray speaking on: “'Every Black Child Is as Good as Queen Victoria’s Son': Clandestine Learning and the Rhetoric of Radical Reconstruction."  This presentation investigates early Reconstruction in the South by elucidating the rhetorical education of a Radical political leader in Augusta, Georgia. Simeon W. Beaird, an African American educator, minister, and politician, grew up in the proslavery stronghold of Charleston, South Carolina, where he attended one of the free black community’s clandestine schools, operated a school of his own in direct opposition to South Carolina law, and participated for a decade in a young men’s debating and lecture society. Drawing on an unusually rich archive of materials about this society, the presentation reveals an enclaved education that promoted self-assurance, rehearsed moral values, and taught skills in audience assessment, advocacy, and rebuttal. Later, Beaird’s public persuasion in postwar Augusta bore the hallmarks of his antebellum learning. In 1867, for example, he spoke at a political meeting in which Radical Republican supporters, both black and white, debated the South’s political future with former Confederate officers and state officials. Bridging the Civil War and linking covert learning and public advocacy, the presentation discloses often-neglected complexities of rhetorical education and the postwar leadership of southern black men.

Angela Ray is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Northwestern University.  Professor Ray has published The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Michigan State UP 2005), “A Green Oasis in the History of My Life”: Race and the Culture of Debating in Antebellum Charleston, South Carolina (University of Utah, 2014),  “Making History by Analogy: Frederick Douglass Remembers William the Silent,” in Exploring Argumentative Contexts, ed. Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart Garssen (John Benjamins 2012), and “How Cosmopolitan Was the Lyceum, Anyway?” in The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Tom F. Wright (U Massachusetts P 2013).  She is co-editing with Paul Stob, Thinking Together: Lecturing, Learning, and Difference in the Long Nineteenth Century (Penn State UP, forthcoming in May 2018).  Her new book project examines young men’s debating societies in the 1850s.