Ashton Lattimore’s new historical fiction novel, “All We Were Promised,” challenges the narrative that Philadelphia indeed was the birthplace of American liberty.
This dense but riveting novel delves into the historical suppression of freedom of speech and personhood. It explores the impact of measures like the six-month rule in the Gradual Abolition of Slavery Act and the brutal burning of Pennsylvania Hall in 1838 by anti-abolitionist mobs.
Set in pre-Civil War Philadelphia, Lattimore’s novel takes us to a time when anti-slavery societies and leaders like Robert Purvis were instrumental in using their money and what little influence they had as free Black men at the time to ensure all Black people were free.
Lattimore not only interrogates the laws and social barriers that kept Black people oppressed but also sheds light on the often unacknowledged women’s organizations and Black elites who helped build the foundation for the Underground Railroad. Lattimore spoke with The Emancipator about her new novel, why it’s a good read at this juncture in American history, and posits the true role of movement journalism in an unjust world.
Keishel Williams: Why did you choose the title “All We Were Promised?”
Ashton Lattimore: I think it speaks to that particular moment in time and place. Pennsylvania, at that point, had passed its gradual emancipation acts. Up until 1838, Black men could even vote there. So, it’s a place that holds itself out as offering the promise of freedom to Black people. And I think that’s how Philadelphia is understood historically, as this abolitionist haven, a place where free Black folks can go and thrive and be safe. So there is a strong reason for these three young women [in the novel], in their various situations, to believe that this city is going to be the place where they can build free lives for themselves and live out from under the constraints that have been put on them either by slavery or by their race more broadly. And I think it’s the story of them striving to grab onto all that they’ve been promised and finding that it kind of slips away or gets snatched away fairly easily.
Social media does some work that’s similar to what the abolitionist papers did then… What they were doing was organizing across state lines and organizing across different regions of the United States. In a lot of ways, [it serves] the same function right now that social media does, which is connecting people in very different places who all have the same goals. [It allows] them to have a shared language, a shared space, to be in conversation with each other, and opportunities to develop a shared strategy around the abolitionist cause.
This novel is driven by strong female characters, each a leader and a victim of circumstance in their own way. Did you intentionally write this book as women-centered?
It felt important for me to make this a woman-centered book, partially because I think Black women, in particular, were so much at the center of the abolitionist movement and the center of the push for emancipation — whether personal emancipation or a larger kind of political push for abolition and emancipation. Black women were very much at the center of that work, as we’re often at the center of a lot of political and social movement work. But I think very often, we get pushed to the sidelines of the historical record and the sidelines of historical memory. Apart from Harriet Tubman, if you ask the average person to tell me the name of a Black abolitionist or somebody who is very prominent in the abolitionist movement, they’re not necessarily going to come up with a woman’s name.
Something I [also] found fascinating was many of the White women abolitionists who show up in this story and who are active during this time eventually go on to become leaders of the suffragette movement. And you can kind of see the early seeds of their activism, which we know eventually is going to shut Black women out. So something that I wanted to dig into is what an interracial coalition [such as the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society] of women looked like during this period, and what the seeds were that eventually led to it falling apart.
Hetty Reckless is not a name you often hear about in Black history in America. Tell us about her and why you wanted to include her in this story.
Hetty Reckless is a fascinating figure because she is one of the only women who were a part of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society but who was not part of this Black elite group. The rest of the Black women who were part of the society were from these pretty old Black Philadelphia families — the Fortens, the Purvises, the Douglasses — were the really big names during that period, and Hetty Reckless was very much an outsider. She was someone who was enslaved herself, which was not an experience that the other Black women and certainly not the other White women in the society — had. So she was sort of a lone voice within that group who could bring the lived experience to understand what it was that they were fighting against. And that’s something that they were conscious of at the time. There was this push to bring other types of women, less elite women into the anti-slavery society. But I thought Hetty Reckless was just this fascinating figure. The miles that she traveled socially, in terms of where she began in slavery and where she ended up, and the people that she ended up influencing and rubbing shoulders with and organizing with, I just found fascinating. Her story was emblematic of the way that Black women could become involved during that time period. They had the Men’s Vigilance Committee, which was doing all this work to eventually set up the infrastructure for the Underground Railroad. And she was part of founding the women’s auxiliary to that, the Female Vigilance Committee. And then some of the things that she went on to do in later years were just really cool. She had safe houses; she was just doing the absolute most.
Newspapers and journals seemed to play a major role in that era. As a journalist, what are your thoughts on how those publications helped people of color in America during the 19th century? And are there any forms of media now that you believe are doing similar work?
Yeah. I would actually argue that social media does some work that’s similar to what the abolitionist papers did then. Because what’s notable, at least to me, about the abolitionist papers was that they might be situated in a particular city — you had the Liberator coming out of Boston, you had the Pennsylvania Freeman coming out of Philadelphia — but they had wide circulation and shared stories amongst one another throughout the United States, at least throughout the northern United States. So it was very much this networked group of journalists and networked group of abolitionists who were sharing the same stories. Some of them were contributing to newspapers that were outside of their immediate area, like Sarah Mapps Douglass, I believe, who wrote for the Liberator sometimes. What they were doing was organizing across state lines and organizing across different regions of the United States. In a lot of ways, [it serves] the same function right now that social media does, which is connecting people in very different places who all have the same goals. [It allows] them to have a shared language, a shared space, to be in conversation with each other, and opportunities to develop a shared strategy around the abolitionist cause.
How does your work in journalism help with your fiction writing?
As I was thinking about the role of abolitionist newspapers in particular, they’re sort of a very early form of this notion of movement journalism, which is journalism that’s not pretending to be objective or seeking to be neutral, but journalism that’s very deliberately in the service of liberation.
I was the editor-in-chief of Prism [a nonprofit news outlet] for almost five years, and that’s very much what Prism is and the function that it tries to serve, along with a lot of other movement journalism outlets in the U.S. right now; which is journalism that has a liberatory purpose, and rejects the idea that it’s the role of the news media to simply observe and report and leans into what I see as the transformative power of what you choose to report and how you choose to report it. And I think the abolitionist newspapers understood and grasped power in a way that I wish more news media did in this current moment.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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