Black Savannah focuses upon efforts of African Americans, free and slave, who worked together to establish and maintain a variety of religious, social, and cultural institutions, to carve out niches in the larger economy, and to form cohesive black families in a key city of the Old South.

A richly illustrated, accessibly written book with a variety of perspectives on slavery, emancipation, and black life in Savannah from the city's founding to the early twentieth century. Written by leading historians of Savannah, Georgia, and the South, it includes a mix of thematic essays focusing on individual people, events, and places.

A new way of seeing Black history—the sweeping story of how American cities as we know them developed from the vision, aspirations, and actions of the Black poor. Building the Black City shows how African Americans built and rebuilt thriving cities for themselves, even as their unpaid and underpaid labor enriched the nation's economic, political, and cultural elites. Covering an incredible range of cities from the North to the South, the East to the West, Joe William Trotter, Jr., traces the growth of Black cities and political power from the preindustrial era to the present. Trotter defines the Black city as a complicated socioeconomic, spiritual, political, and spatial process, unfolding time and again as Black communities carved out urban space against the violent backdrop of recurring assaults on their civil and human rights—including the right to the city. As we illuminate the destructive depths of racial capitalism and how Black people have shaped American culture, politics, and democracy, Building the Black City reminds us that the case for reparations must also include a profound appreciation for the creativity and productivity of African Americans on their own behalf. Cities covered: Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Richmond, Birmingham, Durham, Atlanta, Houston, Miami, Tulsa, early New York (New Amsterdam), Philadelphia, Boston Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Seattle

With information on over 500 organizations, their founders and membership, this unique encyclopedia is an invaluable resource on the history of African-American activism. Entries on both historical and contemporary organizations include: * African Aid Society * African-Americans forHumanism * Black Academy of Arts and Letters * BlackWomen's Liberation Committee * Minority Women in Science* National Association of Black Geologists andGeophysicists * National Dental Association * NationalMedical Association * Negro Railway Labor ExecutivesCommittee * Pennsylvania Freedmen's Relief Association *Women's Missionary Society, African Methodist EpiscopalChurch * and many more.

The lush landscape and subtropical climate of the Georgia coast only enhance the air of mystery enveloping some of its inhabitants—people who owe, in some ways, as much to Africa as to America. As the ten previously unpublished essays in this volume examine various aspects of Georgia lowcountry life, they often engage a central dilemma: the region's physical and cultural remoteness helps to preserve the venerable ways of its black inhabitants, but it can also marginalize the vital place of lowcountry blacks in the Atlantic World. The essays, which range in coverage from the founding of the Georgia colony in the early 1700s through the present era, explore a range of topics, all within the larger context of the Atlantic world. Included are essays on the double-edged freedom that the American Revolution made possible to black women, the lowcountry as site of the largest gathering of African Muslims in early North America, and the coexisting worlds of Christianity and conjuring in coastal Georgia and the links (with variations) to African practices. A number of fascinating, memorable characters emerge, among them the defiant Mustapha Shaw, who felt entitled to land on Ossabaw Island and resisted its seizure by whites only to become embroiled in struggles with other blacks; Betty, the slave woman who, in the spirit of the American Revolution, presented a “list of grievances” to her master; and S'Quash, the Arabic-speaking Muslim who arrived on one of the last legal transatlantic slavers and became a head man on a North Carolina plantation. Published in association with the Georgia Humanities Council.

This is a 2nd edition of the 1985 anthology that examines the religious history of African Americans.

Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist in History A dramatic work of historical detection illuminating one of the most significant—and long forgotten—Supreme Court cases in American history. In 1820, a suspicious vessel was spotted lingering off the coast of northern Florida, the Spanish slave ship Antelope. Since the United States had outlawed its own participation in the international slave trade more than a decade before, the ship's almost 300 African captives were considered illegal cargo under American laws. But with slavery still a critical part of the American economy, it would eventually fall to the Supreme Court to determine whether or not they were slaves at all, and if so, what should be done with them. Bryant describes the captives' harrowing voyage through waters rife with pirates and governed by an array of international treaties. By the time the Antelope arrived in Savannah, Georgia, the puzzle of how to determine the captives' fates was inextricably knotted. Set against the backdrop of a city in the grip of both the financial panic of 1819 and the lingering effects of an outbreak of yellow fever, Dark Places of the Earth vividly recounts the eight-year legal conflict that followed, during which time the Antelope's human cargo were mercilessly put to work on the plantations of Georgia, even as their freedom remained in limbo. When at long last the Supreme Court heard the case, Francis Scott Key, the legendary Georgetown lawyer and author of "The Star Spangled Banner," represented the Antelope captives in an epic courtroom battle that identified the moral and legal implications of slavery for a generation. Four of the six justices who heard the case, including Chief Justice John Marshall, owned slaves. Despite this, Key insisted that "by the law of nature all men are free," and that the captives should by natural law be given their freedom. This argument was rejected. The court failed Key, the captives, and decades of American history, siding with the rights of property over liberty and setting the course of American jurisprudence on these issues for the next thirty-five years. The institution of slavery was given new legal cover, and another brick was laid on the road to the Civil War. The stakes of the Antelope case hinged on nothing less than the central American conflict of the nineteenth century. Both disquieting and enlightening, Dark Places of the Earth restores the Antelope to its rightful place as one of the most tragic, influential, and unjustly forgotten episodes in American legal history.

A discourse on the historical emergence of African American Churches as dynamic cultural presences which occurred in the aftermath of the Civil War, and specifically in the wake of General Sherman's march from Atlanta to Savannah.

Slavery and Freedom in Savannah is a richly illustrated, accessibly written book modeled on the very successful Slavery in New York, a volume Leslie M. Harris coedited with Ira Berlin. Here Harris and Daina Ramey Berry have collected a variety of perspectives on slavery, emancipation, and black life in Savannah from the city's founding to the early twentieth century. Written by leading historians of Savannah, Georgia, and the South, the volume includes a mix of longer thematic essays and shorter sidebars focusing on individual people, events, and places. The story of slavery in Savannah may seem to be an outlier, given how strongly most people associate slavery with rural plantations. But as Harris, Berry, and the other contributors point out, urban slavery was instrumental to the slave-based economy of North America. Ports like Savannah served as both an entry point for slaves and as a point of departure for goods produced by slave labor in the hinterlands. Moreover, Savannah's connection to slavery was not simply abstract. The system of slavery as experienced by African Americans and enforced by whites influenced the very shape of the city, including the building of its infrastructure, the legal system created to support it, and the economic life of the city and its rural surroundings. Slavery and Freedom in Savannah restores the urban African American population and the urban context of slavery, Civil War, and emancipation to its rightful place, and it deepens our understanding of the economic, social, and political fabric of the U.S. South. This project is made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services. This volume is published in cooperation with Savannah's Telfair Museum and draws upon its expertise and collections, including Telfair's Owens-Thomas House. As part of their ongoing efforts to document the lives and labors of the African Americans--enslaved and free--who built and worked at the house, this volume also explores the Owens, Thomas, and Telfair families and the ways in which their ownership of slaves was foundational to their wealth and worldview.

Contents -- Foreword / James C. Cobb -- Introduction / Randy Finley and Thomas A. DeBlack -- Publications by Willard B. Gatewood Jr. -- In the Shadow of the Revolution: Savannah's First Generation of Free African American Elite in the New Republic, 1790-1830 / Whittington B. Johnson -- "A Model Man of Chicot County": Lycurgus Johnson and Social Change / Thomas A. DeBlack -- "I Go To Set the Captives Free": The Activism of Richard Harvey Cain, Nationalist Churchman and Reconstruction-Era Leader / Bernard E. Powers Jr. -- "This Dreadful Whirlpool" of Civil War: Edward W. Gantt and the Quest for Distinction / Randy Finley -- James Carroll Napier (1845-1940): From Plantation to the City / Bobby L. Lovett -- Robert E. Lee Wilson and the Making of a Post-Civil War Plantation / Jeannie M. Whayne -- Reward for Party Service: Emily Newell Blair and Political Patronage in the New Deal / Virginia Laas -- "A Generous and Exemplary Womanhood": Hattie Rutherford Watson and NYA Camp Bethune in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, 1937 / Fon Gordon -- Tufted Titans: Dalton, Georgia's Carpet Elite / Thomas Deaton -- Sara Alderman Murphy and the Little Rock Panel of American Women: A Prescription to Heal the Wounds of the Little Rock School Crisis / Paula C. Barnes -- Notes -- List of Contributors