Overlooked: Thomas Young’s “Afro-American Freeman’s Light”

In 1896, Thomas Young published Afro-American Freeman’s Light: A Book of Original Poems and Songs. It is possibly the only book by an African American author published in the American West (excluding California) before the 20th century. The Huntington’s volume is one of only six copies in library collections and the only copy held west of the Mississippi River. Young’s rare work offers a window into popular religious expression, musical print culture, and African American literary traditions.

Born in 1860 in Batesville, Mississippi, to a formerly enslaved mother of four and a father who would die prematurely, Young received little formal schooling—a single year’s worth, he estimated. But as an adult, after days of hard labor, he diligently taught himself to read and write. He later moved to Memphis, Tennessee, and, in 1892, would cross the Great Plains to Colorado Springs. There, he secured work as a manager in the servants’ hall of the luxurious Antlers Hotel, the largest employer of African Americans in the city. He soon began composing poems and hymns.

“When my work was done,” Young wrote, “I would devote all of my spare time to studying and writing. … I began to feel my talents growing, so I commenced writing poetry.” Over the next four years, Young built up a short book’s worth of work: three poems, 50 original hymns, and an autobiographical essay. His Christian faith and membership in Methodist Episcopal churches guided him. His book includes a prayer that this work might be “a light for the Christians and a way-bill for all who will accept of the teaching of these lines.” He worked with a Denver publisher to produce his singular book, an as-yet-unrecognized contribution to African American and Western American literature.

In 1893, while Young was still composing the works that he would assemble for Afro-American Freeman’s Light, Katharine Lee Bates, an English professor and poet from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, came to Colorado Springs to teach a summer course at Colorado College. During her stay, she roomed at the Antlers Hotel.

One day, she and a group of fellow teachers traveled by a prairie wagon and mules to the top of Pikes Peak, just west of Colorado Springs. From the 14,000-foot summit, Bates beheld amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties. Later that day, when she returned to her hotel room, she penned the initial draft of what would eventually become her signature work, “America the Beautiful.” She first published the poem two years later in The Congregationalist, a weekly newspaper, and in time the poem would become one of the most beloved American patriotic hymns.

Did Bates and Young interact at the Antlers Hotel? Could either of them have known what the other was working on? It seems unlikely because of the lines of race and social class that separated them, and yet verses flowed from the pens of both American poets in the same western hotel. To imagine Young’s poems and hymns in conversation with the well-known work of Bates opens vistas onto a broader American landscape, one filled with hard work, faith, and an ardent desire for recognition. Young wrote in his poem “Poet of Determination”: “From the handle of the plow, from mauling of rails / I am determined that the world should know my name.” A notable hymn in his book, titled “Emancipation,” reflected on the end of slavery as a legal institution when he was a small child and looked forward hopefully to the 20th century: “Now through the land let freedom go.”

Young saw his work as part of a tradition of African American poetry, hearkening back to the work of Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784), the first published African American poet. She wrote while enslaved to the Wheatley family of Boston on the eve of the Revolutionary War. At the end of Afro-American Freeman’s Light, Young wrote the following, linking the two poets.

FOR FUTURE REFERENCE:
Mrs. Phillis Wheetley [sic], an Afro-American, received a copyright in the seventeenth century [sic] for Poet Writing.
…Thomas Young, Author, applied for a copyright for a book of songs, April 8, 1896.

Wheatley’s poetry, like Young’s, was formal, religious, and forward-looking. Both authors managed to publish books that have previously been regarded (or disregarded) as ephemeral or as minor works of literature. In fact, both created verses rich with poetic and historical meaning, against all odds. Scholars have yet to sift through the links between the works of Wheatley and Young or their connections with other writers and traditions.

In June 2024, a group of students and professors from the summer research program of Occidental College’s Humanities for Just Communities initiative visited The Huntington to learn about its collections. James Ford III, the Mary Jane Hewitt Department Chair in Black Studies at Occidental and an expert on Wheatley, is mentoring four of the fellowship students as they research new approaches to Wheatley’s pathbreaking 1773 book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. During the visit, students and faculty looked at The Huntington’s first edition of Wheatley’s book alongside other rare items related to Wheatley, the late 18th century, and the longer arc of African American literature—including the speculative fiction of Octavia E. Butler, whom Ford pointed to as a literary descendant of Wheatley. The program participants also had the opportunity to look at Young’s Afro-American Freeman’s Light, a literary midpoint in time—roughly halfway between Wheatley’s 18th and Butler’s 20th centuries—and geographically originating between Wheatley’s Boston and Butler’s Pasadena. It is one more spine on a shelf of historic African American literature that is still too sparse but growing.

The Huntington acquired its rare copy of Thomas Young’s Afro-American Freeman’s Light earlier this year when members of the Library Collectors’ Council made the purchase possible.

Josh Garrett-Davis is the H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western American History at The Huntington.