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Author: John Baker
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2010-01-05
Total Pages: 432
ISBN-13: 1416567410
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Traces the author's thirty-year research into his slave ancestry, describing the history of the massive tobacco plantation where his ancestors worked and his family's extensive genealogical legacy.
Author: John Baker
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-02-03
Total Pages: 432
ISBN-13: 1416570330
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →When John F. Baker Jr. was in the seventh grade, he saw a photograph of four former slaves in his social studies textbook—two of them were his grandmother's grandparents. He began the lifelong research project that would become The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation, the fruit of more than thirty years of archival and field research and DNA testing spanning 250 years. A descendant of Wessyngton slaves, Baker has written the most accessible and exciting work of African American history since Roots. He has not only written his own family's story but included the history of hundreds of slaves and their descendants now numbering in the thousands throughout the United States. More than one hundred rare photographs and portraits of African Americans who were slaves on the plantation bring this compelling American history to life. Founded in 1796 by Joseph Washington, a distant cousin of America's first president, Wessyngton Plantation covered 15,000 acres and held 274 slaves, whose labor made it the largest tobacco plantation in America. Atypically, the Washingtons sold only two slaves, so the slave families remained intact for generations. Many of their descendants still reside in the area surrounding the plantation. The Washington family owned the plantation until 1983; their family papers, housed at the Tennessee State Library and Archives, include birth registers from 1795 to 1860, letters, diaries, and more. Baker also conducted dozens of interviews—three of his subjects were more than one hundred years old—and discovered caches of historic photographs and paintings. A groundbreaking work of history and a deeply personal journey of discovery, The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation is an uplifting story of survival and family that gives fresh insight into the institution of slavery and its ongoing legacy today.
Author: Elizabeth Jacoway
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Published: 2008-01-01
Total Pages: 502
ISBN-13: 9781557288783
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A historical account of the efforts of nine African-American students to integrate Central High School draws on interviews to offer insight into the behind-the-scenes experiences of the students and members of their community.
Author: John Cimprich
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Published: 2002-10
Total Pages: 203
ISBN-13: 0817311831
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This is the first book-length work on wartime race relations in Tennessee, and it stresses the differences within the slave community as well as Military Governor Andrew Johnson’s role in emancipation. In Tennessee a significant number of slaves took advantage of the disruptions resulting from federal invasion to escape servitude and to seek privileges enjoyed by whites. Some rushed into theses changes, believing God had ordained them; others acted simply from a willingness to seize any opportunity for improving their lot. Both groups felt a sense of dignity that their slaves initiated a change; they lacked the power and resources to secure and expand the gains they made on their own. Because most disloyal slaves supported the Union while most white Tennesseans did not, the federal army eventually decided to encourage and capitalize upon slave discontent. Idealistic Northern reformers simultaneously worked to establish new opportunities for Southern blacks. The reformers’ paternalistic attitudes and the army’s concern with military expediency limited the aid they extended to blacks. Black poverty, white greed, and white racial prejudice severely restricted change, particularly in the former slaves’ economic position. The more significant changes took the form of new social privileges for the freedmen: familial security, educational opportunities, and religious independence. Masters had occasionally granted these benefits to some slaves, but what the disloyal slaves wanted and won was the formalization of these privileges for all blacks in the state.
Author: Jenny Masur
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2015-04-13
Total Pages: 190
ISBN-13: 1439666032
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Many of the unsung heroes of the Underground Railroad lived and worked in Washington, D.C. Men and women, black and white, operatives and freedom seekers - all demonstrated courage, resourcefulness and initiative. Leonard Grimes, a free African American, was arrested for transporting enslaved people to freedom. John Dean, a white lawyer, used the District courts to test the legality of the Fugitive Slave Act. Anna Maria Weems dressed as a boy in order to escape to Canada. Enslaved people engineered escapes, individually and in groups, with and without the assistance of an organized network. Some ended up back in slavery or in jail, but some escaped to freedom. Anthropologist and author Jenny Masur tells their stories.
Author: Ann Nixon Cooper
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2014-04-12
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781476786353
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →On Tuesday November 4, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama reflected on the life of Anne Nixon Cooper: “she’s seen throughout her century in America—the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told we can’t; and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes, we can.”? Empowered and energized by this history-making presidential campaign, Mrs. Cooper will tell her story in her own voice. A Century and Some Change is the portrait of an American who lived a rewarding and culturally rich life despite racial discrimination and economic struggles. Beloved by her extended family and in her community of Atlanta, where she is celebrated by both the famous and the nameless, Mrs. Cooper will share what she has learned throughout her 107 years of life. Along with Mrs. Cooper’s story, A Century and Some Change will include photographs and the perspectives of those who know her. Like President Obama said, Mrs. Cooper’s life story reveals the character of everyday Americans and of society as a whole.
Author: Ben Raines
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2023-01-24
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 1982136154
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The “enlightening” (The Guardian) true story of the last ship to carry enslaved people to America, the remarkable town its survivors’ founded after emancipation, and the complicated legacy their descendants carry with them to this day—by the journalist who discovered the ship’s remains. Fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, the Clotilda became the last ship in history to bring enslaved Africans to the United States. The ship was scuttled and burned on arrival to hide the wealthy perpetrators to escape prosecution. Despite numerous efforts to find the sunken wreck, Clotilda remained hidden for the next 160 years. But in 2019, journalist Ben Raines made international news when he successfully concluded his obsessive quest through the swamps of Alabama to uncover one of our nation’s most important historical artifacts. Traveling from Alabama to the ancient African kingdom of Dahomey in modern-day Benin, Raines recounts the ship’s perilous journey, the story of its rediscovery, and its complex legacy. Against all odds, Africatown, the Alabama community founded by the captives of the Clotilda, prospered in the Jim Crow South. Zora Neale Hurston visited in 1927 to interview Cudjo Lewis, telling the story of his enslavement in the New York Times bestseller Barracoon. And yet the haunting memory of bondage has been passed on through generations. Clotilda is a ghost haunting three communities—the descendants of those transported into slavery, the descendants of their fellow Africans who sold them, and the descendants of their fellow American enslavers. This connection binds these groups together to this day. At the turn of the century, descendants of the captain who financed the Clotilda’s journey lived nearby—where, as significant players in the local real estate market, they disenfranchised and impoverished residents of Africatown. From these parallel stories emerges a profound depiction of America as it struggles to grapple with the traumatic past of slavery and the ways in which racial oppression continues to this day. And yet, at its heart, The Last Slave Ship remains optimistic—an epic tale of one community’s triumphs over great adversity and a celebration of the power of human curiosity to uncover the truth about our past and heal its wounds.
Author: Sylviane A. Diouf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-02-18
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 0199723982
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In the summer of 1860, more than fifty years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves. Timothy Meaher, an established Mobile businessman, sent the slave ship, the Clotilda , to Africa, on a bet that he could "bring a shipful of niggers right into Mobile Bay under the officers' noses." He won the bet. This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women. After emancipation, the group reunited from various plantations, bought land, and founded their own settlement, known as African Town. They ruled it according to customary African laws, spoke their own regional language and, when giving interviews, insisted that writers use their African names so that their families would know that they were still alive. The last survivor of the Clotilda died in 1935, but African Town is still home to a community of Clotilda descendants. The publication of Dreams of Africa in Alabama marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Winner of the Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association (2007)
Author: Louise Pecquet du Bellet
Publisher: Genealogical Publishing Com
Published: 1976
Total Pages: 1756
ISBN-13: 0806307226
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