African American Studies

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  Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier

  The story of Free Frank is not only a testament to human courage and resourcefulness but affords new insight into the American frontier. Born a slave in the South Carolina piedmont in 1777, Frank died a free man in 1854 in a town he had founded in western Illinois. His accomplishments, creditable for any frontiersman, were for a black man extraordinary.

  We first learn details of Frank’s life when in 1795 his owner moved to Pulaski County, Kentucky. We know that he married Lucy, a slave on a neighboring farm, in 1799. Later he was allowed to hire out his ...Read More

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  Black American Literature and Humanism

  For Black writers, what is tradition? What does it mean to them that Western humanism has excluded Black culture? Seven noted Black writers and critics take up these and other questions in this collection of original essays, attempting to redefine humanism from a Black perspective, to free it from ethnocentrism, and to enlarge its cultural base.

  Contributors: Richard K. Barksdale, Alice Childress, Chester J. Fontenot, Michael S. Harper, Trudier Harris, George E. Kent, R. Baxter Miller

  R. Baxter Miller is associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee.

  "A milestone in the scholarship on Afro-American letters."—South Atlantic Review

  "An ...Read More

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  Slave And Freeman: The Autobiography of George L. Knox

  Born in Tennessee in 1841, George L. Knox survived slavery and service with both Confederate and Union armies during the Civil War and afterward made his way north to find a chilly reception in Indiana. His autobiography covers the first 44 years of his life and tells how he persevered against threats, harassment, and physical intimidation to become a leading citizen of Indianapolis and an important figure of the Republican Party.

  Willard B. Gatewood Jr. is Alumni Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas.

  "A significant contribution to a missing chapter in our American heritage."—Ohio History

  "A valuable ...Read More

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  The Wheel of Servitude: Black Forced Labor after Slavery

  Emancipation brought an end to many of the evils of slavery, but it did not do away with involuntary servitude in the South. Even during Reconstruction, state legislatures passed laws that bound laborers to the landowner with a nearly unbreakable tie—which still chains many a rural black to what a 1914 Supreme Court ruling called an “ever-turning wheel of servitude.”

  Daniel Novak shows how federal, state, and local regulations combined in an undisguised effort to keep southern agriculture supplied with black labor. A freedman who did not immediately enter into a labor contract was subject to arrest as a vagrant. ...Read More

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  Schools for All: The Blacks and Public Education in the South, 1865–1877

  Schools for All provides the first in-depth study of black education in Southern public schools and universities during the twelve-year Reconstruction period which followed the Civil War. In the antebellum South, the teaching of African Americans was sporadic and usually in contravention to state laws. During the war, Northern religious and philanthropic organizations initiated efforts to educate slaves. The army, and later the Freedmen’s Bureau, became actively involved in freed-men’s education. By 1870, however, a shortage of funds for the work forced the bureau to cease its work, at which time the states took over control of the African American ...Read More

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  The Negro's Image in the South: The Anatomy of White Supremacy

  Symbolic of the historic conflict between North and South has been the South’s attitude toward African Americans. This historical study presents a thorough analysis—derived from books, periodicals, speeches, sermons, lectures, and other documents—of the doctrine of white supremacy.

  Claude Nolen was professor of history at St. Edward’s University, Austin, Texas.