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African Americans in the Post-Emancipation South by
Historians and other scholars often use first-hand accounts, including contemporary observations, as sources for study of the past. These types of sources are valuable, especially when used in conjunction with other documents, as they help us to approximate the past. This study uses these types of sources to attain glimpses of African American life in the post-emancipation South. Spanning from the 1860s through the New Deal, this study incorporates a broad cross-section of the views of European travelers and Euro-American visitors from the North, based upon travel books as well as articles and essays from periodicals and scholarly journals. The study synthesizes the outsiders' observations and assesses their summaries' overall validity for increasing our understanding of the lives of blacks in the post-emancipation South. Furthermore, these accounts allow for a reconstruction of African American life and labor in the major aspects of black culture--religion, education, politics, criminal justice, employment and entrepreneurship, social life and status--of the times. The work is constructed in the context of contemporary anthropology, ethnography, psychology, and sociology.
Juneteenth Texas by
Juneteenth Texas reflects the many dimensions of African-American folklore. The personal essays are reminiscences about the past and are written from both black and white perspectives. They are followed by essays which classify and describe different aspects of African-American folk culture in Texas; studies of specific genres of folklore, such as songs and stories; studies of specific performers, such as Lightnin' Hopkins and Manse Lipscomb and of particular folklorists
The Long Emancipation by
In The Long Emancipation Rinaldo Walcott posits that Black people globally live in the time of emancipation and that emancipation is definitely not freedom. Taking examples from across the globe, he argues that wherever Black people have been emancipated from slavery and colonization, a potential freedom has been thwarted. Walcott names this condition the long emancipation--the ongoing interdiction of potential Black freedom and the continuation of the juridical and legislative status of Black nonbeing. Stating that Black people have yet to experience freedom, Walcott shows that being Black in the world is to exist in the time of emancipation in which Black people must constantly fashion alternate conceptions of freedom and reality through expressive culture. Given that Black unfreedom lies at the center of the making of the modern world, the attainment of freedom for Black people, Walcott contends, will transform the human experience worldwide. With The Long Emancipation, Walcott offers a new humanism that begins by acknowledging that present conceptions of what it means to be human do not currently include Black people.
Rethinking American Emancipation by
On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, an event that soon became a bold statement of presidential power, a dramatic shift in the rationale for fighting the Civil War, and a promise of future freedom for four million enslaved Americans. But the document marked only a beginning; freedom's future was anything but certain. Thereafter, the significance of both the Proclamation and of emancipation assumed new and diverse meanings, as African Americans explored freedom and the nation attempted to rebuild itself. Despite the sweeping power of Lincoln's Proclamation, struggle, rather than freedom, defined emancipation's broader legacy. The nine essays in this volume unpack the long history and varied meanings of the emancipation of American slaves. Together, the contributions argue that 1863 did not mark an end point or a mission accomplished in black freedom; rather, it initiated the beginning of an ongoing, contested process.