In our blog on Reconstruction in Virginia part two, we begin looking at the passage of the 14th amendment in the former Confederate states in”No Easy Walk to Freedom”. The development of social, economic and political community in black Hampton, Virginia is described in “Freedom’s First Generation”. And race as a social construction is explored through a study in interracial marriage in “Tell the Court I Love My Wife.”
A look into the centrality of literacy and education in the African American experience in slavery and freedom begins with “Self-Taught”. “Education of Blacks in the South” expansively chronicles the events and ideas of African Americans from 1860-1935. And “Booker T. Washington” describes the complex conservative life and times of an important African American educational leader.
For book reviews at The Virginia Historian.com in this historical period addressing other topics, see the webpage for Antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction. General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
No Easy Walk to Freedom
James E. Bond wrote No Easy Walk to Freedom: Reconstruction and the Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1997. It is now available on Kindle, Digitally and online used. Bond investigates the two-year ratification process of the 14th Amendment among the eleven former Confederate states. All but Tennessee initially rejected the Amendment in conservative legislatures. Using voices from two hundred newspapers, legislative committees and constitutional conventions, the political, legal and social issues at hand are discussed for each state.
Viewpoints of diehard racists and radical African Americans are heard from. Although Reconstruction majorities in Southern state legislatures subsequently ratified the Amendment in these ex-Confederate states, it was meant to guarantee fundamental rights, that states were the primary guarantors, and latitude was allowed in defining the scope of citizen rights.
Learn more to buy “No Easy Walk” for your bookshelf.
*Joseph B. James wrote The Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1956. It is out of print but may be available at your central library or by interlibrary loan.
*Lynda J. Morgan wrote Emancipation in Virginia’s Tobacco Belt, 1850-1870 in 1992. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Emancipation in Virginia’s Tobacco Belt” for your bookshelf.
*Crandall A. Shifflett wrote Patronage and Poverty in the Tobacco South: Louisa County, 1860-1900 in 1982. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “Patronage and Poverty” here for your bookshelf.
Freedom’s First Generation
Robert Francis Engs wrote Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861-1890 in 1979 and reprinted in 2004. It is now available in paperback. Hampton black accomplishment was achieved despite misunderstanding, indifference and hostility. The presence of Union troops at Fort Monroe throughout the Civil War made Hampton a terminus of the Underground Railroad. But army management of the refugees resembled that of a slave master’s overseer, requiring labor without compensation. Northern missionaries failed to connect the right to be free with the right to be different.
Post war Hampton saw an active Freedman’s Bureau, black home ownership, businesses, schools and churches. In 1868 Hampton Institute was begun, and the community soon boasted teachers, lawyers, ministers, merchants and politicians. Black majorities participated in town and county governance.
Learn more to buy “Freedom’s First Generation” for your bookshelf.
Tell the Court
Peter Wallenstein wrote Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law – An American History in 2002. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. It is a social, political and legal history of race and marriage over three hundred years, focusing on miscegenation regulating interracial marriage. In Virginia for most of its history “black” identity required one-quarter African ancestry, then one-sixteenth in 1910, and finally “one drop” in 1924. The laws in the public sphere governed the private, challenging basic tenants of individual liberty and the sanctity and desirability of marriage.
The intrusion of public regulation into personal lives became nearly universal with more severe punishments, defining “whiteness” as ever more exclusive. By the 1940s miscegenation laws came under increasing attack, finally collapsing with the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case.
Learn more to buy “Tell the Court” for your bookshelf.
*Diane Swann-Wright wrote A Way out of No Way: Claiming Family and Freedom in the New South in 2002. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “A Way out” here for your bookshelf.
Self-Taught
Heather Andrea Williams wrote Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom in 2005. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. It emphasizes black agency across the transition from bondage to emancipation. African Americans had a self-determination to learn sometimes in spite of initial slave holder instruction, northern benevolent groups and the Freedman’s Bureau.
Black men and women sought to expand their educational horizons, the drive for teaching former slaves originated with the freedpeople themselves. They built their own schools, including while serving as Union soldiers, taught in those schools and strove to attend and learn there.
Learn more to buy “Self-Taught” for your bookshelf.
Education of Blacks
James D. Anderson wrote The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 in 1988. It is now available on Kindle and in paperback. It addresses important events and ideas that contributed to the black educational experience in the South over the seventy-five years following the Civil War. Critical in the period 1860-1880 was the impulse of the freedmen generation to secure public education to perpetuate their emancipation in a free society. From 1880-1900 the industrial school model of Hampton Institute emphasized economic security. After 1900 there was an emphasis on expanding literacy by investing in normal schools for teachers and a struggle to establish black public high schools.
Blacks and several denominational societies sought to maintain liberal educational institutions. Northern philanthropists sought industrial and agricultural education. Many white southerners feared that any education at all would make black laborers more intractable and so undermine the racial caste system.
Learn more to buy “Education of Blacks” for your bookshelf.
Booker T. Washington
Louis R. Harlan wrote Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901 in 1972. It is now available in paperback. This first volume of the life and times of Booker T. Washington explores a restless, complex man. He acted as a conservative who was not a total accommodator to white supremacy, but one who sought advantage from a paternal upper class against the more militantly racist lower white class. He advanced a constructive, moderate and cooperative program of industrial and agricultural education.
B.T. Washington was an enigma, a race leader not so much for black activists who would be drawn to the NAACP, but certainly a focus for white philanthropists and paternally sympathetic southerners who acknowledge the need for artisan training in the cities and subsistence agriculture in the rural south. Despite his secret efforts at racial advancement, his stratagems also represented a setback to black liberal education.
Learn more to buy “Booker T. Washington” for your bookshelf.