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To 'Joy
My Freedom
Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors
after the Civil War
By Tera W. Hunter
Reviews
The
Emancipation Proclamation did not bring freedom to the four
million African-Americans who lived in slavery in 1863. Instead,
blacks had to claim and define that freedom in tens of thousands
of acts of self-assertion during the decades that followed
slavery's legal demise.
To 'Joy
My Freedom vividly depicts one neglected aspect of that struggle by
focusing on the lives of urban black women, in particular those
who worked as domestic laborers in the post-Civil War South.—Drew Gilpin Faust, New
York Times Book Review
Tera Hunter's
imaginative uncovering of these struggles in Atlanta challenges
conventional understandings of what is work and who is a worker.
It represents the best of the recent marriage of labor history
and cultural studies. It builds on feminist theory, which has
expanded the conception of labor to include housework,
mother-work, and sex work...Grounded in Atlanta's rise from
Sherman's ashes, this is no ordinary community study. It
addresses a major theme in Southern history: the contestation
between freedom with Emancipation and its violent restriction
with disfranchisement and Jim Crow...To restore the voices of
the black masses is itself a form of hard work.
Hunter's genius is
to read against the grain of police reports and planter diaries
as well as to mine newspapers to recover stories sometimes only
seen through shadows cast on white society.—Eileen Boris, The Nation
Historian Tera W. Hunter looks at how
black working-class women defined and experienced freedom between
the Civil War and the World War I-era 'Great Migration' of blacks
northward, a period when they were excluded from electoral
politics as well as from most grass-roots union organizing. Hunter
shows that these women saw their work as a means to shore up their
self-ownership after slavery, rather than as an end in itself.
Black women negotiatied work conditions and, when they found these
unacceptable, they quit. The dramatic centerpiece of Hunter's book is a
threatened strike by black Atlanta washerwomen in the summer of
1881...To 'Joy My Freedom is a worthwhile read, powerfully evoking the
chaos of the Civil War and the transition of black women workers from
slave to free and from rural to urban people. It joins a growing canon
that points to the development of political consciousness among black
working-class women.—Dale Edwyna Smith, Washington
Post Book World
Tera
Hunter's book is a meticulously researched, cogently
argued analysis of the `dialectic of repression and
resistance' shaping the lives of African American women in
the postbellum South. Better still, it's a terrifically
told story--a tale of everyday women doing the radical
work of defining and demanding freedom for themselves
and their communities in a country largely hell-bent on
denying them their rights.—Cynthia Dobbs, San
Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
Hunter's
achievement in bringing these black women's stories to life is
remarkable. Scouring newspaper accounts, personal diaries,
household records, government reports and political cartoons,
Hunter has reconstructed the myths and stereotypes about black
female workers in and around Atlanta. In the process, she sheds
light on a chapter of American history and the Southern labor
movement that has heretofore remained unexamined...To 'Joy
My Freedom is a brilliant reconstruction of New South
history...Analytical and objective as this work of history is, [it] is
also written with such passion that the stories of these women and the
events that shaped their lives—and
American history—reads
like the best fiction. Hunter's work is a tour de force, valuable and
prophetic as America continues to struggle with the issues of work,
fairness, sex and race.—Paula L. Woods, Atlanta
Journal/Constitution
In
To 'Joy
My Freedom, Tera W. Hunter charts the efforts of African-American
women in Atlanta to live fulfilling lives despite an
all-pervasive racism, which was most terrifying in the city's
infamous race riot of 1906...One can only applaud Hunter's
efforts to recover the experience of her subjects from
obscurity.—Times Literary Supplement
Tera Hunter's
book is an exemplary effort to illuminate the particular history
of black women domestic workers in Atlanta. By painstakingly
pulling together disparate sources, she fashions a story of
resistance and backlash that illustrates how these women bravely
attempted to achieve true freedom in the face of attacks on their
femininity, the stigma of tuberculosis, and outright mob violence.
Her account skillfully integrates the oppressive nature of
dominant gender roles, the role of class in intraracial
subordination, and disease as stigma, although the reasons for
the attachment of this stigma particularly to black washerwomen
remains unclear. Overall, Hunter succeeds in showing the
complexities of a fifty-year struggle by black women workers,
who, in their words, fought 'to 'joy my freedom.'—Bayo Holsey, Transforming
Anthropology
To 'Joy My
Freedom is a new departure in recent written history of
African American women. Here, working-class women take center
stage while black middle-class and elite woman are peripheral. For
those who fear tackling the history of women whose personal
records are few to nonexistent, Tera W. Hunter's book is at once
instructive on how to write such a history and an example of a
sophisticated blend of labor, social, and cultural history...Rich
in detail and told with compassion and understanding, To 'Joy
My Freedom fills in the gaps between contemporary histories of
slavery and middle-class female uplift reform. Hunter
demonstrates that professional skill, exhaustive research, and
ingenious use of sources can give voice to people who leave few
personal records and who do not show up in organizational
minutes.—Deborah Gray White, Journal
of American History
Tera W. Hunter has
written a superb study of the lives and labors of some of the
African-American women who struggled through the violent
upheaval of emancipation and the crushing imposition of racial
segregation in the American South from the Civil War to the
1920s. Hunter's sparkling prose, extensive reading of a wide
range of texts, and layered, complex and incisive analysis
reveal the work of an impressively humane, imaginative, and
mature historian. Her acute descriptions of local conditions and
cogent insights into the larger historical context stunningly
illuminate the dynamics of race, class, and gender as they
played out on the frightening, brutal terrain of southern
segregation...Her text constantly engages and re-engages the
reader, helping us to imagine the lives of dozens of individuals
who walk through the pages of history...This study is a triumph
of research, astute analysis, and engaging imagination that
deserves to be widely read by students of African-American,
labor, and women's studies and of American history.—Michael Honey, American
Historical Review
At the end of
the Civil War newly emancipated women moved to Atlanta to find
employment as household labourers and washerwomen. This is a study
of the workplace experiences and everyday culture of these black working
women in the period until the beginning of World War I. Tracing the ways
they constructed their own world of work, culture and community
organization, Professor Hunter argues that their experiences and efforts
were central to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice.
The implementation of Jim Crow laws and segregation from the 1880s
onward, however, spurred growing numbers of black working women to
migrate to the North.—International Review of
Social History
Hunter
offers valuable explorations into the complexities of
African American feminine laborers and the
contextualization of their lives. She is to be applauded
for providing scholars with easier access to source
materials, particularly primary sources. An important
contribution to suffragist activism, feminist
scholarship, and African American studies.—Library Journal
To 'Joy
My Freedom is a tour de force. Moving deftly between white
households and black communities, churches and blues clubs, city
hall and city streets, Tera Hunter brings black domestic workers
alive, body and soul, smashing all stereotypes along the way. By
placing black working class women at the center of her
narrative, she rewrites the history of the New South and the
nation. Her vibrant, complex, beautifully rendered portrait of
black working women's struggles at the dawn of the century will
move you as surely as it will alter the way we write history.—Robin D. G. Kelley, New York
University
By bringing to
life the experiences, aspirations, and struggles of the black
domestic workers of Atlanta, Tera Hunter opens a new window on the
study of emancipation and its aftermath and, in so doing,
tremendously enriches our understanding of Reconstruction and
the New South.—Eric Foner, Columbia
University
"To 'Joy
My Freedom is a work of utmost originality and significance. Tera
Hunter brings the virtually invisible world of black
working-class women to life [and then] uses those lives as a
vantage point from which to reconsider the transition from
slavery to freedom, the nature of southern Progressivism, the
Great Migration of blacks out of the South during World War I,
and the relationship and tensions between work, play, and
politics in the New South.—Jacquelyn Dowd Hall,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
With great
breadth, sensitivity, and intellectual integrity, Tera Hunter
reorients southern history toward the urban working class. This
tour de force further liberates African-American history from
the need always to relate to whites. Bravo!—Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton
University
http://www.history.cmu.edu/faculty/Tera_Hunter.html
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Tera W. Hunter is Associate
Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University.
Ph.D.: Yale University, 1990 / Department
Member Since1996
Department of History /Carnegie
Mellon University /Baker Hall 240 /Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Office: BH 240C / Phone: 268-1869 / Fax:
412-268-1019 /E-Mail: thunter@andrew.cmu.edu |
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Hunter is a social and cultural historian of 19th
and 20th century U.S. History. Her areas of
specialization are African American, Women's, Labor, and
Southern history. Her book, To 'Joy My Freedom, is a
community study of working-class women in the urban
South, focused primarily on Atlanta, Georgia, from the
Civil War through the Great Migration. This study looks
at the work, family, community, and leisure lives of the
domestic workers. The book is multidisciplinary in its
approach, borrowing methods and theories from a range of
disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Her
next major project is a study of ideas about black women
in medical and scientific thought and practice in the
U.S., primarily, but also throughout the African
Diaspora. |
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Her 1993 Labor History article, "Domination and
Resistance," won the 1994 Letitia Brown Memorial Article
Prize. To 'Joy My Freedom is the winner of the H.L. Mitchell
Award, 1998 (Southern Historical Association); Letitia Brown
Memorial Book Prize, 1997 (Association of Black Women's
Historians); Book of the Year Award, 1997 (International Labor
History Association); "Exceptional Books of 1997",
(Library Booknotes, Bookman Book Review Syndicate--One of two
books recognized, based on all books reviewed in 1997 for
library acquisition.)
Publications
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"'Sexual Pantomimes,' the Blues
Aesthetic, and Black Women in the South," in Ron
Radano and Phil Bholman, eds.
Music and the Racial
Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
forthcoming).
To 'Joy
My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors
after the Civil War (Harvard University
Press, 1997).
"Work that Body': African-American Women, Work,
and Leisure in Atlanta and the New South," in
Labor
Histories: Class, Politics and the Working-Class
Experience, Eric Arnesen, Julie Greene, and Bruce
Laurie, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1998). |
"'The "Brotherly Love" for which this City is
Proverbial Should Extend to All': Working-Class Women in
Philadelphia and Atlanta in the 1890s," in M. Katz and T.
Sugrue, eds.,
W. E. B. DuBois, Race, and the City (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1998).
"Introduction," in M. Cuney-Hare,
Norris Wright Cuney: A Tribune of the Black People (G. K. Hall and Co.,1995).
"Domination and Resistance: The Politics of Wage
Household Labor in New South Atlanta," Labor History 34
(Spring/Summer, 1993): 205-220.
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Audio:
My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
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Slavery’s
Constitution:
From Revolution
to Ratification
(2009)
By David Waldstreicher
Taking on decades of received wisdom,
David Waldstreicher has written the
first book to recognize slavery’s place
at the heart of the U.S. Constitution.
Famously, the Constitution never
mentions slavery. And yet, of its
eighty-four clauses, six were directly
concerned with slaves and the interests
of their owners. Five other clauses had
implications for slavery that were
considered and debated by the delegates
to the 1787 Constitutional Convention
and the citizens of the states during
ratification. This “peculiar
institution” was not a moral blind spot
for America’s otherwise enlightened
framers, nor was it the expression of a
mere economic interest. Slavery was as
important to the making of the
Constitution as the Constitution was to
the survival of slavery.By
tracing slavery from before the
revolution, through the Constitution’s
framing, and into the public debate that
followed, Waldstreicher rigorously shows
that slavery was not only actively
discussed behind the closed and locked
doors of the Constitutional Convention,
but that it was also deftly woven into
the Constitution itself. |
For one thing, slavery was
central to the American economy, and since the
document set the stage for a national economy, the
Constitution could not avoid having implications for
slavery. Even more, since the government defined
sovereignty over individuals, as well as property in
them, discussion of sovereignty led directly to
debate over slavery’s place in the new republic.
Finding meaning in silences
that have long been ignored, Slavery’s Constitution
is a vital and sorely needed contribution to the
conversation about the origins, impact, and meaning
of our nation’s founding document.
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Panel on Literary Criticism
26 March 2010
National Black Writers Conference
Patrick Oliver, Kalamu ya Salaam,
Dorothea Smartt, Frank Wilderson discuss
the use of literature to promote
political causes and instigate change
and transformation. The event is at the
Medgar Evers College at the City
University of New York.
C-Span Archives
Panel on Politics and Satire
26 March 2010
National Black Writers Conference
Herb Boyd, Thomas Bradshaw, Charles
Edison and Major Owens discuss how
current events are reflected in the
writings of African Americans. The
event is at the Medgar Evers College at
the City University of New York.
C-Span Archives |
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The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's
wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in
1937, after her cousin was falsely accused
of stealing a white man's turkeys and was
almost beaten to death. In 1945, George
Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled
Florida for Harlem after learning of the
grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie
party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing
Foster made his trek from Louisiana to
California in 1953, embittered by "the
absurdity that he was doing surgery for the
United States Army and couldn't operate in
his own home town." Anchored to these three
stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist
Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively
researched study of the "great migration,"
the exodus of six million black Southerners
out of the terror of Jim Crow to an
"uncertain existence" in the North and
Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates
sociological and historical studies into the
novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling,
and Pershing settling in new lands, building
anew, and often finding that they have not
left racism behind. The drama, poignancy,
and romance of a classic immigrant saga
pervade this book, hold the reader in its
grasp, and resonate long after the reading
is done. |
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posted 22 June 2008 |
