This study is a thoughtful and important addition to an
understanding of rural Texas and the nature of black settlements.
-- Journal of Southern History "Thad Sitton and James H. Conrad
have made an important contribution to African American and
southern history with their study of communities fashioned by
freedmen in the years after emancipation." -- Journal of American
History "This book is the first of its kind....Blacks emerge as
thinkers and actors on the stage; that is, they were not merely
passive victims; rather, they made their own history by building
their own communities and by becoming free farmers." -- James
Smallwood, Professor Emeritus of History, Oklahoma State University
In the decades following the Civil War, nearly a quarter of
African Americans achieved a remarkable victory-- they got their
own land. While other ex-slaves and many poor whites became trapped
in the exploitative sharecropping system, these
independence-seeking individuals settled on pockets of unclaimed
land that had been deemed too poor for farming and turned them into
successful family farms. In these self-sufficient rural
communities, often known as "freedom colonies," African Americans
created a refuge from the discrimination and violence that
routinely limited the opportunities of blacks in the Jim Crow
South.
Freedom Colonies is the first book to tell the story of these
independent African American settlements. Thad Sitton and James
Conrad focus on communities in Texas, where blacks achieved a
higher percentage of land ownership than in any other state of the
Deep South. The authors draw on a vast reservoir of ex-slave
narratives, oral histories, written memoirs, and publicrecords to
describe how the freedom colonies formed and to recreate the
lifeways of African Americans who made their living by farming or
in skilled trades such as milling and blacksmithing. They also
uncover the forces that led to the decline of the communities from
the 1930s onward, including economic hard times and the greed of
whites who found legal and illegal means of taking black-owned
land. And they visit some of the remaining communities to discover
how their independent way of life endures into the twenty-first
century.
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