One of Frances Wright’s most famous? notorious? undertakings was founding an intentional community of her own inspired by New Harmony (for more about New Harmony, listen to Episode 3).
Located in what was then the wilds of Western Tennessee, Wright called her community Nashoba and crafted a plan that would use the economic power of cooperation to prove that slavery could be undone step by step. Enslaved people and free (mostly white) people would work side by side. The enslaved would receive skills training and education, while the group effort would lead to decent profits from raising commodity crops like cotton. These earnings would pay off the enslaved person’s purchase price, they would be freed, and then moved to a safer location, such as Haiti.
The plan purposefully didn’t rock slaveholders’ boats hard and purposefully insisted that African Americans should be educated and liberated. It was both a radical action for the time—and deeply embedded in white supremacist, paternalistic beliefs.
This contradiction has made it hard to know what to make of Nashoba. We wanted to paint a broader picture by engaging with African American experiences and perspectives historians and scholars have worked hard to foreground in the past fifty years.
Our expert guests this week are Leslie M. Harris (Northwestern University), Jack Kaufman-McKivigan (IU Indianapolis), and Sean Griffin.
This is a podcast about Frances Wright, reformer, philosopher, writer, activist, abolitionist before it was cool. Feminist long before the word existed.
Want to go deeper? Find shownotes with links to resources and rabbit holes here on our substack site. There’s even more to read on our Bookshop.org lists here!
Frances Wright: America’s Forgotten Radical is a co-production of Newyear Media and Her Reputation for Accomplishment, written and hosted by Eleanor Rust and Tristra Yeager. Made possible by a grant from the Working Men's Institute, New Harmony, Indiana, and by the generosity of the Efroymson Family Fund. Thanks also to the Bloomington Area Arts Council for supporting this podcast.
Frances Wright is voiced by Emily McGee. Music by Eleanor Dubinsky. Editing and audio support by Josh Perez.