Charles B. Ray and the Awakening of a Nineteenth-Century Public Man

“A leaf from Freedom’s golden chaplet fair”: Charles B. Ray and the Awakening of a Nineteenth-Century Public Man

Across several junctures of his career, the Falmouth-native Charles B. Ray staged a new standard for an American public man who placed the arts of sympathy in alignment with professionalism and community oversight. This lecture will explore the reach of Ray’s influence—from the pages of his newspaper The Colored American andinto the emerging literary texts and philosophical environments of his era. When Charles B. Ray’s daughter H. Cordelia Ray later memorialized his legacy in an early twentieth-century poetry volume, she placed the sonnet “To My Father” alongside elegies that honored a touted senator, a famed orator, a preeminent newspaperman and decorated soldiers. Yet, Ray remains distinguished by unique intellectual and charitable responses to the social dilemmas arising within a still-young nation and by a profile of action that resisted a break between the individual and his community.

Non-members $20/Museums on the Green Members $10.

Bio:

Sarah Lynn Patterson, assistant professor of English at University of Massachusetts Amherst where she studies nineteenth-century African American literature, women’s literature and reform movements. She is co-editor of The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2021). She will offer a literary and visual history of Ray’s commonly overlooked authorship and the relative rarity of his iteration of publicness.

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