Marking Black History Month October 2008
‘After Slavery: Race, Labour and Politics in the Post Emancipation Carolinas’ is an AHRC-funded collaborative research project which brings together historians from the UK and the USA. The project is led by Dr Brian Kelly from Queen’s University Belfast.
Africans and their descendants harvested staple crops in the American South for nearly two and a half centuries before a crisis over slavery convulsed the United States, precipitating a bloody civil war and ending with the emancipation of four million slaves. The decades that followed brought dramatic changes in freedpeople’s lives: a hopeful period of expanding freedom gave way to paramilitary collisions and eventually, the long nightmare of ‘Jim Crow.’ The period of Reconstruction, in the aftermath of the war, has been the subject of extensive historical examination and debate.
Dr Kelly explains, “Many of the early interpretations were written by scholars who embraced the same racial assumptions white conservatives had used to rationalise their actions. They conferred respe
ctability on a version of the past rooted in the belief that former slaves were intrinsically unfit for democratic participation. Reconstruction was doomed from the outset, they argued, by blacks’ innate racial inferiority. Fortunately, over the past generation this body of work has been thoroughly discredited; a remarkable outpouring of post-civil rights era scholarship has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of this crucial period.”
‘After Slavery: Race, Labour and Politics in Post Emancipation Carolinas’ is aimed at pushing this new historiography a step further, through a focus on labour and race relations in the diverse setting of North and South Carolina. Dr Kelly says, “We chose the Carolinas because together these two states reflect the economic, demographic and geographic diversity of the region as a whole. They include coastal lowcountry with dense concentrations of former slaves and mountain regions where whites predominated; the largest staple-producing plantations in the region but also important industrial settings; in South Carolina you had a very bitter, quasi-military confrontation that brought down Reconstruction, but to its north political cooperation between blacks and whites continued until the end of the century. This diversity highlights the variation in experience across the South—one of the key insights in recent work.”
Through their focus on labour in the postbellum South, project partners, Bruce E. Baker (University of London-Royal Holloway) and Susan E. O’Donovan (Harvard University) hope to push beyond some of the generalizations about race that linger even in some of the best recent work. “It is no longer possible to talk about a monolithic black South or a unified white South during the period we’re examining,” Baker suggests,” but scholars have only begun to attend to some of the region’s complexities.” After Slavery is addressing some of these problems, paying close attention to what one scholar has called “the complicated interpenetration between race and class” in the South.
With funding from the AHRC the Project has acquired an impressive collection of source materials, and now has access to what is probably the largest collection of relevant records held anywhere in Europe. In addition to vital records from the Freedmen’s Bureau and Justice Department of the time, the research team has a large array of census materials and labour and African-American newspapers.
After Slavery has placed a strong emphasis on public engagement, including a new website, www.afterslavery.com, which is being developed as a learning tool for educators and secondary and university-level students. Over the coming year its interactive Online Classroom will showcase study units built around documents, maps and images from the Carolinas and beyond. The Project hosted the recent Wiles Colloquium at Queen’s, which brought together many of the world’s leading experts on emancipation, including Professors Eric Foner (Columbia University) and Thomas C. Holt (University of Chicago), and an edited collection based on the proceedings is due out from University Press of Florida in 2010.
A public exhibit linked to the Colloquium drew together extracts from archival sources and artefacts from the period, including photographs and engravings to illustrate the story of Reconstruction. The panels are scheduled to tour museums, galleries and universities across Ireland, north and south, and mainland UK later this year, taking the research to a wide and varied audience.
“At some level,” Kelly concludes “Black History Month came out of an acknowledgement that the history curriculum that prevailed through the mid-1970s in Britain and the United States had left out or misrepresented an essential element of what is our common history as citizens of the Atlantic world. Part of what we are attempting to do with After Slavery is to demonstrate that all of American society—and not just black life—was profoundly shaped by having been compelled to grapple with the ‘problem’ of slavery. In many ways, it’s a legacy that is with us still.”
Picture Credit: Seasonal laborers on a South Carolina rice plantation, c.1895. Courtesy South Carolina Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, U.S.A.