Columbus Statue Removed From Seaside Park

Let’s not forget that PT Barnum was a slave owner. As for the Barnum Festival Committee, over all the years that they have selected a new ringmaster every year, there has only been one black ringmaster, Peter Hurst.

The Lost Museum Archive
Race and Race Relations in P.T. Barnum’s New York City
by James W. Cook

This 800 word essay provides historical context for the social, political, and economic circumstances of African Americans in New York City in the decades preceding the Civil War. Links to primary documents and images relating to the same topic appear at the end of the essay. The essay also describes Barnum’s own history of presenting non-white “human curiosities” at the American Museum and elsewhere.

Three major developments structured the racial landscape in which P.T. Barnum took charge of the American Museum. First and most fundamental was the process of gradual emancipation that took place in New York between 1799 and 1827, slowly transforming the City into a nominally free social space. By 1810, a majority of black New Yorkers were no longer the property of whites. But this new freedom came without basic civil rights such as universal suffrage or trial by jury for fugitive slaves. The second major development was the emergence of post-emancipatory forms of bigotry and segregation, a process that coincided with the arrival of large numbers of poor white immigrants (primarily from Ireland and Germany) during the 1830s and 40s. The labor markets and living conditions experienced by immigrants and former slaves were similar: both groups found themselves relegated to the bottom rungs of the burgeoning capitalist economy and forced into urban neighborhoods deemed undesirable by the middle and upper classes. In some cases, this socio-economic proximity produced a common working-class culture of shared saloons, dance halls, street life, and even interracial marriages. But it also led to new forms of segregation in many professions and public institutions (e.g. on New York’s omnibuses, which served as the primary cross-town transportation system), as well as mob attacks on black bodies and homes.

This rising tide of bigotry added new urgency to the third major development in the period’s race relations: the emergence of independent black churches, benevolent societies, newspapers, schools, and vigilance committees. Less structured by white condescension and control, these institutions nurtured the city’s first African-American elite, a small but influential class of merchants, editors, clergymen, writers, actors, and activists. They also provided crucial social networks with which to support and solidify the black population as a whole. Although born out of racial exclusion, New York City’s earliest free institutions quickly produced a rich and diverse black culture, ranging from debating societies and restaurants to literary periodicals and Masonic lodges.

Against this backdrop, Barnum both absorbed and helped to articulate many of the dominant racial attitudes of his era. As a young showman touring the South during the late 1830s, he had briefly owned slaves-a sin for which he later publicly apologized. More typically, he catered to the conventional prejudices and fascinations of his Northern audiences, producing a wide variety of “living curiosity” exhibitions that accentuated all varieties of difference between viewer and performer. These exhibitions did not focus exclusively on any one race, ethnicity, nationality, or physical attribute. Rather, the guiding principle was to create a spectrum of freakishness outside the boundaries of white middle-class normalcy through characters such as the “Aztec Children,” whom Barnum claimed to have discovered at an ancient Mexican temple; or Chang and Eng, the famous “Siamese Twins.” Ironically, it was only as performers that many of these people had access to the American Museum. While Barnum sought out consumers of all classes, religions, regions, and political affiliations, his Museum was (like most antebellum American cultural institutions) generally off limits to non-whites.

Yet the segregation rules in New York popular culture were neither entirely fixed nor consistently enforced, and in Barnum’s case, they changed over time. During Barnum’s tenure at the American Museum, the racial boundaries of admission seem to have been understood but not explicitly stated: non-whites, that is, were generally admitted only in special cases, and even then they were usually forced to attend at special times or sit in special sections set aside for “colored persons.” In fact, the only reason we know this is because Barnum began to advertise an explicitly new policy in 1849: “Notice to Persons of Color-In order to afford respectable colored persons an opportunity to witness the extraordinary attractions at present exhibited at the Museum, the Manager has determined to admit this class of people on Thursday morning next, March 1, from 8 A.M. till 1 P.M.”

It’s unclear whether this was a one-time event or part of a major shift in Barnum’s approach to racial distinction. While his subsequent newspaper ads made no mention of racial rules, visitors to the Museum during the 1860s noted seeing African-American patrons among the crowds. More certain is the fact that Barnum embodied many of the racial paradoxes at the heart of 19th-century America. Although he became increasingly committed to anti-slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War-and even proposed a universal manhood suffrage amendment to the Connecticut Constitution in 1865-these new political commitments did not lead him to embrace full racial equality, or even to question the racial stereotypes regularly produced as part of his own entertainment empire. At the time of Barnum’s death in 1891, his circuses still presented people of color almost exclusively as “living curiosities.”

Also see these primary documents:

On the Conditions of the Free People of Color in the United States, Anti-Slavery Examiner 13 New York, 1839

Free Blacks in the North and South, The Liberator, January 22, 1831

Kidnapping in the City of New York, The Liberator, August 6, 1836

Waiters Protective Union Meeting, New York Herald, April 16, 1853

Colonization Editorial, New York Herald, April 12, 1853

A Black Joke, Yankee Notions, 1854 (Image)

The Irrepressible Conflict, Vanity Fair, 1862 (Image)

An Unpleasant Incident, 1852-53

The Five Points in 1859 (Image)

You said that the Ringmaster’s main job is to raise funds, funds for what, they are not providing scholarship for black or disable students? The Barnum Festival Committee is just an elite organization that doesn’t represent or relates to the different ethnic communities of Bridgeport. I’ve attended three Ringmaster Balls, I was guest of someone and their corporation bought tickets for one table, the tickets were $175 each and the place was sold out.

Common Good, I don’t reply to people who hide from using their god given name but you bring up some points that need to be address. Yale University is being challenge to change its name because of the person the school was named after, Elihu Yale. Professional football and baseball teams are changing their teams name because of the “derogatory slang” of names of those teams, now those teams didn’t own slaves but times have changed and “derogatory slang” of names are out. The Barnum Festival, the Barnum Museum and the City of Bridgeport all have their heads buried in sand, since the police killing of George Floyd by a white police officer protesters have been out in the streets protesting for change lead by Black Lives Matter demanding change, mayor corporations have change the name of their products and acknowledging their wrong but that’s something that’s not being done with anything to do with PT Barnum.

“Confederate Statues Were Never Really About Preserving History”
By Ryan Best

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/confederate-statues/

In recent weeks President Trump has railed against tearing down statues across the country — and has been particularly dogged in his defense of Confederate monuments. But his argument that they are benign symbols of America’s past is misleading. An overwhelming majority of Confederate memorials weren’t erected in the years directly following the Civil War. Instead, most were put up decades later. Nor were they built just to commemorate fallen generals and soldiers; they were installed as symbols of white supremacy during periods of U.S. history when Black Americans’ civil rights were aggressively under attack. In total, at least 830 such monuments were constructed across the U.S, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which maintains a comprehensive database of Confederate monuments and symbols.

The biggest spike in Confederate memorials came during the early 1900s, soon after Southern states enacted a number of sweeping laws to disenfranchise Black Americans and segregate society. During this period, more than 400 monuments were built as part of an organized strategy to reshape Civil War history. And this effort was largely spearheaded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who sponsored hundreds of statues, predominantly in the South in the early 20th century — and as recently as 2011.

“The UDC was very focused on the future,” said Karen Cox, a historian, University of North Carolina at Charlotte professor and author of numerous articles and books on Southern history and culture, including “Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture.” “Their goal, in all the work that they did, was to prepare future generations of white Southerners to respect and defend the principles of the Confederacy.” It wasn’t just Confederate monuments, either. They also rejected any school textbook that said slavery was the central cause of the Civil War; they praised the Ku Klux Klan and gave speeches that distorted the cruelty of American slavery and defended slave owners.

From around 1920 to the early 1940s, there was a second wave of statue building. Jane Dailey, professor of American history at the University of Chicago, said this period of construction coincided with more Black Americans’ fighting for civil rights and pushing back against widespread lynchings in the South. “You have Black soldiers who have just fought for their country [in World War I] and fought to make the world safe for democracy, coming back to an America that’s determined to lynch them,” said Dailey. “[T]hose were very clearly white supremacist monuments and are designed to intimidate, not just memorialize.”

And a significant portion of those monuments were erected on courthouse grounds. According to Lecia Brooks of the Southern Poverty Law Center, placing these memorials on courthouse property, especially in the 1950s and ’60s, was meant to remind Black Americans of the struggle and subjugation they would face in their fight for civil rights and equal protection under the law.

The Barnum Museum, the Barnum Festival committee, the Park Commission, Mayor Ganim, and the City Council need to seriously look at and study the entire history and life of PT Barnum because it is totally incomplete, there are some good things about Barnum but this is 2020 and times are changing and PT Barnum must be apart of that change. The only the public knows he was probably the world great showman who own slaves. Move the statue of PT Barnum to the Barnum Museum and have the whole story of Barnum made public for everyone to see. A descendant of President Thomas Jefferson, Shannon Lanier, gives Bridgeport the direction to go in. Or does the Barnum Museum, the Barnum Festival committee, the Park Commission, Mayor Ganim, and the City Council want to continue with the lie about Barnum’s life.

OPINION
I’m a Descendant of President Jefferson. Take His Public Statues Down | Opinion
SHANNON LANIER
ON 6/18/20 AT 7:55 AM EDT

I AM THE SIXTH GREAT-GRANDSON OF PRESIDENT THOMAS JEFFERSON, WHO WAS A SLAVE OWNER. I AM A DESCENDANT THROUGH HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS SLAVE, SALLY HEMINGS. DESPITE MY CONNECTION TO JEFFERSON, HE FALLS UNDER THE ABOVE DESCRIPTION. THERE ARE MANY STATUES OF HIM THAT SHOULD COME DOWN. HE WAS, AFTER ALL, A PARTICIPANT IN THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY—PERHAPS THE MOST NOTORIOUS ONE AMONG THE FOUNDING FATHERS, NOT LEAST BECAUSE OF THE JARRING CONTRAST BETWEEN WHAT HE PRACTICED AND WHAT HE PREACHED.

A statue alone only provides content, but a museum setting would allow it to have context. It is imperative that we remember our history, that we don’t erase our complicated past, but preserve and learn from it while understanding where those figures fit into the fabric of our country. In the sentiment of Thomas Jefferson, we have to grow and change with our times.

Now I know many people, even some of my family members, will say Jefferson was not as bad as a leader of the Confederate Army. After all, he wrote the Declaration of Independence, created the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, made the Louisiana Purchase and participated in the founding of the Library of Congress and the University of Virginia. I respect him for those things… but on the other hand, ask yourself if you can look past the fact that he owned more than 600 people against their will, knew it was wrong, but never let them go.

Can you look past that and praise him as an idol on a pedestal just because he wrote a document that he thought did not apply to you or your family in the first place? He has a place in our history, to be sure; but this place needs to be occupied by the real Thomas Jefferson, not the character he projected through his more inspirational writings.