Sitting just south of the nation's capital, Alexandria has a long and storied history." "Still, little is known of Alexandria's twentieth-century African American community. Experience the harrowing narratives of trials and triumph as Alexandria's African Americans helped to shape not only their hometown but also the world around them. Rutherford Adkins became one of the first black fighter pilots as a Tuskegee Airman. Samuel Tucker, a twenty-six-year-old lawyer, organized and fought for Alexandria to share its wealth of knowledge with the African American community by opening its libraries to all colors and creeds. Discover a vibrant past that, through this record, will be remembered forever as Alexandria's beacon of hope and light.

Footprints of African Americans in Alexandria is a thoughtful and focused book that is based on the premise of sharing knowledge, history, and inspiration regarding the African American experience, building on the knowledge with biographies of over two hundred individuals who have made or are making progress and positive changes possible.

"The following publication consists of abstracts of entries in the registers for free blacks for Alexandria County (now Arlington County) Virginia for the period 1797 to 1861. ...These records were created and maintained by the county or circuit court and were usually signed by the clerk of the court." -- Introd.

An award-winning historian reveals the harrowing forgotten story of America's internal slave trade—and its role in the making of America. Slave traders are peripheral figures in most histories of American slavery. But these men—who trafficked and sold over half a million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South—were essential to slavery's expansion and fueled the growth and prosperity of the United States. In The Ledger and the Chain, acclaimed historian Joshua D. Rothman recounts the shocking story of the domestic slave trade by tracing the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who built the largest and most powerful slave-trading operation in American history. Far from social outcasts, they were rich and widely respected businessmen, and their company sat at the center of capital flows connecting southern fields to northeastern banks. Bringing together entrepreneurial ambition and remorseless violence toward enslaved people, domestic slave traders produced an atrocity that forever transformed the nation.

Tracing the erosion of white elite paternalism in Jim Crow Virginia, Douglas Smith reveals a surprising fluidity in southern racial politics in the decades between World War I and the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Smith draws on official records, private correspondence, and letters to newspapers from otherwise anonymous Virginians to capture a wide and varied range of black and white voices. African Americans emerge as central characters in the narrative, as Smith chronicles their efforts to obtain access to public schools and libraries, protection under the law, and the equitable distribution of municipal resources. This acceleration of black resistance to white supremacy in the years before World War II precipitated a crisis of confidence among white Virginians, who, despite their overwhelming electoral dominance, felt increasingly insecure about their ability to manage the color line on their own terms. Exploring the everyday power struggles that accompanied the erosion of white authority in the political, economic, and educational arenas, Smith uncovers the seeds of white Virginians' resistance to civil rights activism in the second half of the twentieth century.

Understanding the history of Alexandria, Virginia is key to the early history of the United States. This throrough overview examines its long and storied history, from former colonial tobacco port to vibrant modern community. Alexandria has a long and storied past. Founded as a colonial tobacco port by English and Scottish merchants in 1749, the city prospered. It became the social and economic center of Northern Virginia and the upper Potomac region. When the nation's capital was established in 1791, Alexandria became a part of the District of Columbia. In 1833, a canal intended to increase tradeand revenue nearly bankrupted the city. By the time Alexandria retroceded to Virginia in 1847, it had lost its standing among maritime cities on the Eastern Seaboard. Notable residents have included politicians and military heroes, such as George Washington, Robert E. Lee, and Gerald R. Ford, as well as cultural icons Willard Scott and Jim Morrison. Today's Alexandria includes descendants of free and enslaved African Americans and the progeny of 18th- and 19th-century European immigrants who have joined with "new" Americans to create vibrant 21st-century communities.

For decades, smiling images of "Aunt Jemima" and other historical and fictional black cooks could be found on various food products and in advertising. Although these images were sanitized and romanticized in American popular culture, they represented the untold stories of enslaved men and women who had a significant impact on the nation's culinary and hospitality traditions, even as they were forced to prepare food for their oppressors. Kelley Fanto Deetz draws upon archaeological evidence, cookbooks, plantation records, and folklore to present a nuanced study of the lives of enslaved plantation cooks from colonial times through emancipation and beyond. She reveals how these men and women were literally "bound to the fire" as they lived and worked in the sweltering and often fetid conditions of plantation house kitchens. These highly skilled cooks drew upon knowledge and ingredients brought with them from their African homelands to create complex, labor-intensive dishes. However, their white owners overwhelmingly received the credit for their creations. Deetz restores these forgotten figures to their rightful place in American and Southern history by uncovering their rich and intricate stories and celebrating their living legacy with the recipes that they created and passed down to future generations.

In 1619, a group of thirty-two African men, women and children arrived on the shores of Virginia. They had been kidnapped in the royal city of Kabasa, Angola, and forced aboard the Spanish slave ship San Juan Bautista. The ship was attacked by privateers, and the captives were taken by the English to their New World colony. This group has been shrouded in controversy ever since. Historian Ric Murphy documents a fascinating story of colonialism, treason, piracy, kidnapping, enslavement and British law.

Freedom Libraries: The Untold Story of Libraries for African-Americans in the South. As the Civil Rights Movement exploded across the United States, the media of the time was able to show the rest of the world images of horrific racial violence. And while some of the bravest people of the 20th century risked their lives for the right to simply order a cheeseburger, ride a bus, or use a clean water fountain, there was another virtually unheard of struggle—this one for the right to read. Although illegal, racial segregation was strictly enforced in a number of American states, and public libraries were not immune. Numerous libraries were desegregated on paper only: there would be no cards given to African-Americans, no books for them read, and no furniture for them to use. It was these exact conditions that helped create Freedom Libraries. Over eighty of these parallel libraries appeared in the Deep South, staffed by civil rights voter registration workers. While the grassroots nature of the libraries meant they varied in size and quality, all of them created the first encounter many African-Americans had with a library. Terror, bombings, and eventually murder would be visited on the Freedom Libraries—with people giving up their lives so others could read a library book. This book delves into how these libraries were the heart of the Civil Rights Movement, and the remarkable courage of the people who used them. They would forever change libraries and librarianship, even as they helped the greater movement change the society these libraries belonged to. Photographs of the libraries bring this little-known part of American history to life.

Slavery and the University is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post-Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery's influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.