Description
Book SynopsisIn The Emancipation Circuit Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This interdisciplinary history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid. Mapping the emancipation circuits, Davis shows the geography of ideas of freedom---circulating on shipping routes, via army maneuvers, and with itinerant activists---that became the basis for the first mass Black political movement for equal citizenship in the United States. In this work, she reconfigures understandings of the evolution of southern Black political agendas while outlining the origins of the enduring Black freedom struggle from the Jim Crow era to the present.
Trade Review“In this spectacular book Thulani Davis presents a framework for not only rewriting the Civil War and Reconstruction, but for understanding the entire history of the Black freedom movement extending into the twentieth century. As groundbreaking as W. E. B. Du Bois’s
Black Reconstruction,
The Emancipation Circuit is a masterpiece.” -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of * Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression *
"
The Emancipation Circuit offers a powerful reimagining of the networks that helped to secure Black freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction: It is a history about enslaved people’s efforts to free themselves and about their local struggles to give substance to their legal emancipation, as well as a mapping of the geography that enabled their achievements and the circuits that spread their political goals like pollen in the wind. . . .
The Emancipation Circuit reminds today’s activists that any organizing for Black freedom must be multifaceted and must pursue local aims while traveling along preexisting networks to become a broader collective effort." -- Elias Rodriques * The Nation *
"Thulani Davis’s
The Emancipation Circuit is an important contribution to Black social and political thought that helps center Black women and Black resistance of United States history and social movements." -- Krystal Batelaan * Ethnic and Racial Studies *
"
The Emancipation Circuit provides a convincing analysis of the spatial history of emancipation ... a valuable reference for future research." -- Keith D. McCall * Journal of Southern History *
Table of ContentsList of Maps xi
List of Tables xiii
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Black Political Thought as Shaped in the South 1
1. Flight: Movement Matters 19
2. The Emancipation Circuit: A Road Map 44
3. Virginia: Assembly 80
4. North Carolina: Custody 109
5. South Carolina: Majority 133
6. Georgia: Mobilization 165
7. Florida: Faction 196
8. Alabama: Redemption 217
9. Louisiana: Societies 243
10. Mississippi: Bulldoze 269
11. Arkansas: Minority 294
Conclusion: What Lives On Is Black Political Thought 321
Notes 345
Table Source Notes 393
Bibliography 397
Index 427
