Shirley Ann Wilson Moore. Sweet Freedom’s Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails, 1841–1869.
2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 123; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ahr/123.2.586
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography
Resumo“Behind I leave the whips and chains, / Before me spreads sweet Freedom’s plains,” went a popular hymn, “The Flying Slave,” included by abolitionist William Wells Brown in an 1848 compilation in 1848. It is difficult to say exactly how many enslaved and free African Americans “flew” to the Pacific Coast during that year or during the entire period preceding the completion of the transcontinental railroad. Best estimates suggest that of the nearly five hundred thousand people who crossed the continent on overland trails, no more than 3 percent were black. Yet these did so “with an abiding conviction that they were more than disposable chattels or anonymous laborers” (4). Popular culture has exaggerated the level of violence in westward migration, so imbuing the topic with iconic imagery of Conestoga wagons, hearty pioneers, and rugged individualism that it becomes difficult for scholars not to scoff. In Sweet Freedom’s Plains, Shirley Ann Wilson Moore bravely makes this narrative essential for her shift of the black western history paradigm from attention to twentieth-century grassroots activism—of African Americans in the West—to a focus on nineteenth-century migration, of black Americans going to the West.
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