Download A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration AudioBook Free
This is the epic report of how African-Americans, in the six generations following slavery, altered themselves into a political people - an embryonic dark-colored country. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the fantastic occurrences of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the type and boundaries of politics and political practice. Emphasizing the value of kinship, labor, and systems of communication, A Region under Our Feet explores the political relations and sensibilities that developed under slavery and shows that they set the stage for grassroots mobilization. Hahn presents us to local market leaders, and shows how political communities were built, defended, and rebuilt. He also identifies the quest for self-governance as an important goal of dark-colored politics across the rural South, from contests for local vitality during Reconstruction, to emigrationism, biracial electoral alliances, cultural separatism, and, eventually, migration. Hahn shows that Garveyism and other popular varieties of black nationalism absorbed and elaborated these early on struggles, thus linking the first generation of migrants to the metropolitan North with those who continued to be in the South. He offers a fresh framework - looking out from slavery - to comprehend 20th-century varieties of black political awareness as well as appearing battles for civil protection under the law. It is a robust story, informed here for the first time, and the one that presents both an inspiring and a troubling perspective on American democracy.
