James Monroe Whitfield Biography

James Monroe Whitfield was born in New Hampshire and probably attended school there. However at some stage before 1840 he moved to Buffalo and began work as a barber. He probably stayed as a barber for the rest of his life to fund his writing as there were few other oppurtunities for black men in that period. Frederick Douglass encouraged Whitfield to give up this menial job but this evidentally had no effect. In the 1840's and 1850's The Liberator, The North Star and Frederick Douglass' Paper all included some of Whitfields poems and his America and Other Poems was published in 1853 by the James S.Leavitt Company. This volume was dedicated to the black Nationalist Martin Delany, a friend of Whitfield's who had a large influence on Whitfield's ideas concerning the status of African Americans within the United States. In the 1850's Whitfield worked with Delany to push forward to cause of black emigration and it is possible that Whitfield traveled to central America to look for a possible place for a black colony. However during the civil war he abandoned the black emigration concept and considered the war as a war against slavery. His letters concerning his hopes for black emancipation and citizenship appeared in San Francisco newspapers and he joined the Prince Hall Masons. By 1864 he was named a Grand Master of the California order. His last poem, which appeated in 1870 in the San Francisco Elevator was untitled but praised America as the “One favored land”. Whitfield died, aged 49, in San Francisco in 1871.