James Monroe Whitfield was a remarkable figure in a remarkable time: a free Black man who owned his own home and his own business in pre-Civil War America; a renowned Romantic poet; and a leading voice in the abolitionist movement.
Quite a set of accomplishments for a barber—for that was Whitfield’s business. He owned and operated a barbershop at 30 E. Seneca Street, and it was there that he sold his poems, and earned respect and renown. Whitfield “balanced his poetic ambitions and his activist commitments with his work as a barber,” wrote the scholar Matthew Sandler in The Black "Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery." "From those inauspicious circumstances, he produced the most psychologically rich Black verse of the nineteenth century."
Born in Exeter, New Hampshire, to parents who escaped slavery in Virginia, Whitfield spent his early childhood in the comfortable family cottage and attended local schools. But by the time he was 9, both his parents had died, and he and his two siblings subsequently relocated to Buffalo. There, at 16, he published his first pamphlets in support of abolitionism and was among the signers of “An Appeal to the Citizens of Buffalo” (a petition in which the city’s Black community demanded more equitable treatment from Buffalo’s whites). At 17, he already owned and worked at the barbershop on East Seneca; he was also listed as the head of a household of six. Not long after, he bought a residence on S. Division Street.
Whitfield worked his day job for the next 20 years, even as he gained prominence as a writer. His breakthrough came roughly halfway through that period, when his poems were published in William Lloyd Garrison’s Boston-based abolitionist weekly, The Liberator, and in Frederick Douglass’s Rochester-based weekly, The North Star. All the while, he was an active member of Buffalo’s small but influential Black community, participating in demonstrations, reading societies and church groups, and writing prose and poetry. He also got married and helped raise three sons.
In 1850, Douglass visited Whitfield in Buffalo and came away deeply impressed, later writing that Whitfield was nothing less than a “sable son of genius”. But, he added, “That talents so commanding, gifts so rare, poetic powers so distinguished, should be tied to the handle of a razor and buried in the precincts of a barber's shop . . . is painfully disheartening.” Douglass wasn’t the only one who looked down on Whitfield’s job. The Black nationalist Martin Delany, Douglass’s colleague (and Whitfield’s close friend), praised him with these faint damns:
James M. Whitfield, of Buffalo, New York, though in an humble position, (for which we think he is somewhat reprehensible), is one of the purest poets in America. He has written much for different newspapers; and, by industry and application—being already a good English scholar—did he but place himself in a favorable situation in life, would not be second to John Greenleaf Whittier, nor the late Edgar A. Poe.
But if anything, Whitfield’s barbershop gave him a unique window into the concerns of the era in Buffalo, particularly the turmoil over slavery that was tearing the country apart. In 1843, the city played host to the National Convention of Colored Citizens, which Whitfield attended; the convention was itself rent by controversy over a delegate’s speech exhorting the enslaved to rise up and free themselves by force. In 1848, Whitfield was at the anti-slavery Free Soil Party’s first national convention, also held in Buffalo.
“As a young man, then, Whitfield by 1850 had become a prominent African American leader and poet,” wrote the scholar Robert S. Levene. “At antislavery meetings, he would generally give a speech, read a poem, or serve on a committee. In October 1850 he attended an anti–Fugitive Slave Law protest meeting, served on the business committee, and continued to publish his poems.”
Amid such ferment, Whitfield’s abolitionist essays and poems—his “song of fiercest passion”—gained traction. He also became a firm advocate of the Colonization Movement, which pushed for Black Americans to emigrate to West Africa or Central America to establish their own republic, helping to organize a convention to that end in Cleveland in 1854.
A year earlier, Whitfield published his masterwork, America and Other Poems, with its bitter denunciation of the oppression and hypocrisy of American slavery.
Thou boasted land of liberty,—
It is to thee I raise my song,
Thou land of blood, and crime, and wrong.
Whitfield and his family moved to New Haven in 1860, and the next year his apocalyptic vision of what slavery would do to America finally came to pass with the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1862 they moved to California, where, he believed, questions of race had not poisoned life to the extent it had in the rest of the United States. In San Francisco, where he was enthusiastically received as a great poet, he opened another barbershop and continued to write, until his death of a heart attack at 49, in 1871.
He left behind a legacy that is largely forgotten today, but not entirely so. Thanks in part to scholars like Sandler, James Monroe Whitfield’s verse lives on, the words of “a free Black man yearning for his people’s freedom.”
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Cast (in order of appearance):
James Monroe Whitfield: Donald Capers
Narrator: Susan Banks
Sound recording: Brendan Nightingale
Sound editing: Micheal Peters
Piano theme: Excerpt from “Buffalo City Guards Parade March,” by Francis Johnson (1839)
Performed by Aaron Dai
Produced by the Niagara Frontier Heritage Project
Written by Jeff Z. Klein
Associate producer: Karl-Eric Reif
Special thanks to:
Kathryn Larsen, vice president, content distribution, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
S.J. Velasquez, director of audio strategy, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
Jerry Urban, senior radio broadcast engineer, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
Council Member Mitchell P. Nowakowski and the City of Buffalo for their generous support.
Written by Jeff Z. Klein (Niagara Frontier Heritage Project)