A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration - Softcover

Hahn, Steven

Softcover

ISBN 10: 067401765X ISBN 13: 9780674017658

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2005

Synopsis

This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people--an embryonic black nation. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice. Emphasizing the importance of kinship, labor, and networks of communication, A Nation under Our Feet explores the political relations and sensibilities that developed under slavery and shows how they set the stage for grassroots mobilization. Hahn introduces us to local leaders, and shows how political communities were built, defended, and rebuilt. He also identifies the quest for self-governance as an essential goal of black politics across the rural South, from contests for local power during Reconstruction, to emigrationism, biracial electoral alliances, social separatism, and, eventually, migration. Hahn suggests that Garveyism and other popular forms of black nationalism absorbed and elaborated these earlier struggles, thus linking the first generation of migrants to the urban North with those who remained in the South. He offers a new framework--looking out from slavery--to understand twentieth-century forms of black political consciousness as well as emerging battles for civil rights. It is a powerful story, told here for the first time, and one that presents both an inspiring and a troubling perspective on American democracy.

About this title

Product Description:

A Nation Under Our Feet This Pulitzer Prize-winning book is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people - an embryonic black nation. Full description

Review:

The broad scope of this study and Hahn's ability to articulate the complex characteristics of African American political origins and growth supersedes Eric Foner's seminal work or any other more specialized study on the era.--B. A. Wineman"Choice" (04/01/2004)

Imagine a world in which slaves were thoughtful, purposeful political beings before the Northern "liberators" showed up at the gates of Southern plantations. Steven Hahn identifies the constituent elements of slave politics and uncloaks the relationship between public acts of politics and the less visible world of African-American institutions, practices, obligations, communities, and understandings that enabled them. This is a wonderful book which dramatically revises our assumptions about the formidable role of rural working-class people in remaking the nation after slavery.--Tera Hunter, author of To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War

In this sweeping account of black political culture in the rural south, Steven Hahn reveals a century of black community mobilization from slave resistance before the Civil War to the rise of Garveyism in the Deep South of the 1920s. Hahn's breathtaking research and his focus on public activism return to the subject of black rural life a political currency that can only grow in interest.--Evelyn Higginbotham, Editor-in-Chief, The Harvard Guide to African-American History

An original book about what it means to be political in America. With stunning research and sparkling narrative, Steven Hahn has written a moving story about political behavior among the slavery and freedom generations of rural, southern blacks. He demonstrates how a people with roots in slavery converted freedom into integrationist and separatist ends all at once. Blacks practiced the craft of bending wills as they bent their backs in labor. This book will take its place among a handful of classics on southern black life and politics.--David W. Blight, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

A Nation Under Our Feet is the best study of working class politics published in a generation. By unraveling the riddle of black politics in slavery and tracing the growth of black political activism through Reconstruction into the twentieth century, Hahn forces us to think differently about the American polity and what he calls "the inspiring and dispiriting history of American democracy." An extraordinary achievement.--Ira Berlin, author of Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves

In Steven Hahn's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Nation Under Our Feet, the aims and organization of black political agency from the final years of slavery into the early twentieth century receive a sweeping reassessment...The Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to towns and then to the North had its roots in the 1890s and progressed sharply during World War One...Both those who moved to other regions and those who remained in the South maintained a collective identity, but they also held on to the promise that American democracy was meant to cross racial boundaries. With a wealth of evidentiary detail and lucid prose, Hahn confronts the challenges made to that promise in an engaging and cohesive work.--Scott Taylor Morris "Southern Historian "

Original and deeply informed, the book does an excellent job of rendering those devoted 'to the making of a new political nation while they made themselves into a new people.'--Publishers Weekly (09/22/2003)

Hahn examines how disenfranchised African Americans in the rural South exercised grassroots strategies to gain political power--albeit limited--after emancipation until the migration to the North. Hahn asserts that southern rural blacks were much more active and assertive in gaining political rights than is typically portrayed and explores the connection between labor and political rights....Readers interested in the history of the struggle for racial justice will appreciate this new perspective on the period that preceded the modern civil rights movement.-- (10/15/2003)

Steven Hahn's A Nation Under Our Feet is the most comprehensive account yet of black politics in the rural South before, during and after the Civil War. Whereas most previous work has focused either on the slave experience or on post-Emancipation struggles, Hahn's book encompasses both and shows the continuities between how blacks fought for self-determination in the two periods...Based on prodigious research in primary sources, A Nation Under Our Feet is one of the most important works in American social history to appear in recent years...This book [is] a major achievement and a landmark in African-American history.-- (12/29/2003)

Hahn argues, in this ambitious and fascinating book, that associations of slaves--centered on kinship, work, and religion--were far more intricate, enduring, and politicized than has been realized...One of the most striking theses here is that black rural laborers, rather than urban, educated freeborn leaders, radicalized Reconstruction.-- (02/02/2004)

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 067401765X
• ISBN 13: 9780674017658
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 624