Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from.
In nineteenth-century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), a story unfolds that ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land that had been taken from others.
Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, for a short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma statehood in 1907.
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Release date
March 12, 2021 -
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- ISBN: 9780812297980
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- ISBN: 9780812297980
- File size: 5097 KB
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- English
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Library Journal
March 19, 2021
Historian Roberts draws on her family history, oral accounts, government records, and other sources to discover a hidden history of the land that was once Indian Territory and eventually became the U.S. state of Oklahoma. She explores the histories of the people inhabiting the area, including members of the Muscogee (Creek), Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole nations; white settlers; Black people who were enslaved by any of the above groups; and Black Americans who had been freed from slavery. In this book, Roberts recasts the histories of Indian removal, slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, and the years after reconstruction, and emphasizes the importance of place in shaping enslaved and free societies and cultural adaptations. She masterfully untangles the many complicated arrangements in the U.S. government's settlement of Indian Territory and its imposition of racial categories and restrictions that, with its statehood in 1907, made Oklahoma a Southern state. Roberts ends her account with a brief history of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. VERDICT Roberts's original book will cause historians to reexamine generalities about Indigenous and Black people in Oklahoma and their empowerment and identity; and to extend the story of Reconstruction and its aftermath westward in time and space--a big achievement for a short book.--Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Formats
- Kindle Book
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subjects
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- English
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