Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Nathans, Sydney, author.

Title A mind to stay : White plantation, Black homeland / Sydney Nathans
Published Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, [2017]
©2017

Copies

Description 1 online resource (x, 313 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates) : illustrations, map
Contents Prologue: Unexpected -- Part one. Proving ground: Spared -- "Emigrants" -- "So detested a place" -- Held back -- Reversals -- Part two. A foothold in freedom: -- Exile's return -- "Against all comers" -- "If they can get the land" -- Part three. Beyond a living: "Hallelujah times" -- "A game rooster" -- Sanctuaries -- Part four. Heir land: "That thirties wreck" -- New foundations -- "unless it's a must" -- Epilogue: "A heavy load to lift."
Summary A Mind to Stay is a unique and extraordinary historical narrative of generations of a Black family with roots in slavery and in the South. This family won their freedom with emancipation but, instead of fleeing the poverty and oppression of the White plantation, decided to stay on the homeland of their White masters and then to purchase it for themselves within a decade. In a true counterpoint to the predominant tale of the Black exodus north in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, these African Americans chose to hold onto the land that they had rightfully inherited and to risk all to keep it in the ensuing decades. Sydney Nathans, in his deep research into family and plantation papers and archives, as well as in invaluable oral interviews, has uncovered a slice of history that would otherwise have remained unknown. It is the story of a White plantation, Cameron Place, its owners who kept their slaves in family units, and who then sold their plantation to the same families in the 1870s. Those land-owning Blacks chose to remain on their land in the South through the tumultuous years of Reconstruction and Jim Crow and to claim all the rights due to a landowner up to the present. It is an unusual and original story told with great sensitivity and poignancy by Nathans who has the perseverance of a detective in seeking out the hidden tale and the skills and empathy of the historian in relating it.-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes In English
Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed March 28, 2017)
Subject Freed persons -- Alabama -- Hale County
Rural African Americans -- Alabama -- Hale County -- History
African Americans -- Land tenure -- Alabama -- Hale County
Land tenure -- Alabama -- Hale County
Plantation owners -- Alabama -- Hale County
POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Public Policy -- Cultural Policy.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Anthropology -- Cultural.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Popular Culture.
HISTORY / African American
African Americans -- Land tenure
Freed persons
Land tenure
Plantation owners
Rural African Americans
Alabama -- Hale County
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780674977884
0674977882
0674977890
9780674977891