Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region during the Final Decades of Slavery by dann j. Broyld (review)

Reviewed by: Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region during the Final Decades of Slavery by dann j. Broyld Nina Reid-Maroney (bio) Keywords Rochester, NY, St. Catharines, Ontario, African American history, Niagara Movement, Slavery, Abolition, Resistance Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region during the Final Decades of Slavery. By dann j. Broyld. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. Pp. 296. Cloth, $45.00.) dann j. Broyld's welcome study of the Black communities of Rochester, New York, and St. Catharines, Canada, in the period between 1840 and 1865 includes a striking photograph of the lower entrance to the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge, which opened to pedestrian and carriage traffic in 1848. The central subject of the photo is the long space of the passage, framed at its entrance by wooden beams and stretching into the distance to a vanishing point. As Broyld notes of the Niagara bridge, "for fugitives, this could be a gateway to a new life and greater freedom, and a doorway that swung open in both directions" (86). The vivid image of the bridge evokes Broyld's argument in Borderland Blacks: Rochester and St. Catharines constituted a transnational borderland shaped by the "beliefs, aspirations, and history" of Black lives lived in the crossing, defying, and redefining of boundaries. Broyld situates his book on the shared history of Rochester and St. Catharines within the scholarship of Afua Cooper, Tiya Miles, Nele Sawallisch, H. Amani Whitfield, and others whose work places Black Canadian communities in transnational context. The Niagara region has received less scholarly attention than cross-border communities in the Maritimes or along the Detroit River; Borderland Blacks shifts the geographic focus to address the gap. Emphasizing that the connections between Rochester and St. Catharines were dynamic, multivalent, and [End Page 135] complex, Borderland Blacks joins recent historiography calling for a nuanced and transnational narrative of communities created and transformed by the resistance networks of the Underground Railroad. The book offers meticulously researched portraits of the two communities, sketching the outlines of their distinctive histories while tracing well-traveled connections that were drawn between them. Broyld provides a counterbalance to studies that focus on well-known names associated with Black Rochester, such as Frederick Douglass, or Black St. Catharines, such as Harriet Tubman. Borderland Blacks contextualizes Douglass and Tubman, along with other familiar figures such as Austin Steward, Jermain Loguen, and the white abolitionists John Brown and Hiram Wilson, reminding us of the communities in which they worked and wrote and the contingencies at play as they defined their own political and civic identities. Seeking to convey a sense of ordinary lives in the fabric of community woven from political, religious, and social organizing—a history of activism from below—Broyld turns to a careful analysis of print narratives and newspapers. The result is a richly detailed account of churches, schools, businesses, and political engagement. The source material places the analysis in conversation with recent scholarship on the Black press and its role in constituting and maintaining an activist network across the antislavery culture of the Great Lakes. Ideas and agency of Black residents of the borderlands emerge from the reading of a wide range of print that circulated across borders, demonstrating the significance of mobility as an activist condition, and offering a striking view of the Underground Railroad from the inside out. Noting the limitations of histories that focus on the binary of British colony versus American state, Borderland Blacks makes clear that anti-Black racism lived on both sides of the border, which meant that cultures of resistance shaped the political and social world of both places. The book draws attention to a shared "regional consciousness and social intercourse" that transcended British and American geopolitical boundaries, while pointing to the ways in which options and opportunities and possibilities were weighed and pursued within specific circumstances. In Rochester, Broyld writes, Black residents "looked almost strictly toward challenging all-white institutions and spaces" (142). In St. Catharines, such efforts were less successful, leading to a shift toward practical self-reliance through the creation of separate social and community institutions. Broyld concludes that St. Catharines's Black community created [End Page 136] "Black marron...

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