Freedom's first generation : Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861-1890
In this age of affirmative action, reverse discrimination, and increasing complexity in black-white relations, this pioneering study of Hampton, Virginia, tells the story of what race relations in postbellum America might have been. Here alone the promises of Emancipation and Reconstruction were fulfilled. A tradition of black success in business, education, politics, and social solidarity was established; blacks acquired property and political power and held on long after blacks in other communities lost them. Why was the American Dream realized by blacks in Hampton and not elsewhere? Before the Civil War, Hampton contained an above-average number of black fishermen, artisans, and tradesmen--both slave and free--and an unusual amount of black pride. It was within this community that the war was first defined as a war for emancipation when its slaves escaped and sought freedom at the Union-held Fortress Monroe. Throughout Reconstruction and the latter half of the nineteenth century, Hampton Institute trained the most articulate spokesmen for the black race, including Booker T. Washington. This study offers a unique opportunity to follow a group of freedmen from their exuberance at winning freedom to their devastation by the resurgence of racism at the close of the century
Print Book, English, 1979
University of Pennsylvania Press, [Philadelphia], 1979