The "Great Temperance Times" in Nineteenth-Century Black Connecticut
Lunch and Learn Lecture Series
Connecticut Museum of Culture and History
Hartford
Oct. 7, 2025
What do pound cake and temperance – the 19th century movement for the abstinence of alcohol – have to do with one another?
By the former, I'm referring to an infamous speech known as the “Pound cake Speech” given by Bill Cosby back in 2004, at an NAACP awards ceremony in Washington, DC. In that speech, Cosby attacked the African American family as the source of all the ills in our community, blaming our culture and norms for our degraded position in society.
Cosby was engaged in the ancient tradition of “respectability politics”– the pernicious idea in marginalized communities that if we simply “acted right,” we’d earn the respect and praise of the dominant white mainstream, and be able to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.
As for temperance, I attended a fascinating virtual lecture hosted by the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History’s Lunch and Learn series about the rise of African American temperance movements in Connecticut – and the belief that abstaining from alcohol would correlate with freedom. The lecture was given by Mackenzie Tor, a PhD candidate in history at the University of Missouri. What brought Tor virtually to Hartford is the fact that Connecticut was an early leader in the temperance movement.
One of the most famous temperance lectures of all time, the Six Sermons on Temperance, was delivered by Lyman Beecher, the father of none other than Connecticut’s own Harriet Beecher Stowe, in 1824. Those sermons propelled the temperance movement forward nationally, but as with all things in that era, segregation separated even a movement allegedly seeking to bring people closer to God through abstinence from alcohol.
African Americans who promoted temperance were led by men like William Lanson, who was born into slavery but acquired his freedom. According to Tor, Lanson became an engineer and a real estate mogul in New Haven, helping to extend the city’s Long Wharf deeper into the harbor and developing an area of the city known as New Guinea (present day Wooster Square) for African American workers and local businesses.
Lanson was also a strong proponent of temperance, supporting the movement despite the fact that he ran taverns that served alcohol. It was ironic, then, that when powerful whites in New Haven coveted the land he’d developed, part of the smear campaign used against him was that he encouraged drunkenness among the African American population in the city. Lanson’s reputation went from being well-regarded ...
... to his name being tarnished in his obituary by the time of his death.
The treatment of William Lanson illustrates a critical lesson about race that remains true to this day: There is never enough “respectability” in a racist society that will shield an African American from the wrath of whites. Race is a social construct to justify the mistreatment of other people. None of Lanson’s behavior was immoral, but he was an African American man who had something white people wanted. The very delineation between races marked Lanson as “immoral” and “other” at birth, and white people embraced that justification to cast Lanson aside as soon as it was convenient.
Still, that reality did not stop African American moral crusaders from linking a drive towards temperance with achieving freedom and dignity from white Americans. James W. C. Pennington, a formerly enslaved man who became a minister at Talcott Street Congregational Church in 1840, now known as the Faith Congregational Church, said that both alcoholism and slavery were a form of bondage, where one was physical and the other spiritual. He said that drunkenness diminished African Americans' chance for freedom, even while acknowledging that African Americans were no more given to drunkenness than any other group of people:
Maria W. Stewart, who was born in Hartford and moved to Boston, was even more pointed in her correlation of temperance and freedom. Stewart was excluded from many African American temperance organizations because she was a woman, which highlights the often rank hypocrisy of public moralizers (staring SQUARELY at Cosby). She stated that temperance was necessary for liberation, literally using the word “respectability” in her exhortations:
Compare what Stewart said 192 years ago to what Bill Cosby said during his Pound Cake speech. The quote is admittedly long, but humor me:
“Ladies and gentlemen, listen to these people. They are showing you what’s wrong. People putting their clothes on backwards. Isn’t that a sign of something going on wrong? Are you not paying attention? People with their hat on backwards, pants down around the crack. Isn’t that a sign of something or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up? Isn’t it a sign of something when she’s got her dress all the way up to the crack — and got all kinds of needles and things going through her body. What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don’t know a damned thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap and all of them are in jail.”
I understand that when facing a system as monstrous and ingrained as enslavement in the early United States, any and all tools aimed at its destruction are fair game. Respectability politics are personally distasteful to me, yet at the time, African Americans were fighting for something far more basic than even freedom: personal autonomy, the right to their own families, their own existence. They threw everything they could at the problem.
But I want to be clear: respectability and temperance did not end slavery. Relentless agitation from abolitionists and allies, resistance of enslaved people, and yes, a civil war ended slavery. Respectability won’t change the segregation and discrimination that African Americans face today. Temperance, or more accurately, drinking responsibly, as well as strong families are both good things in and of themselves for the people practicing them. Not as signifiers for respect and decent treatment from white people.
NEXT
Jamil goes to a new exhibit opening in Hartford.
