Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War

by Kendra Taira Field

Overview

The masterful and poignant story of three African-American families who journeyed west after emancipation, by an award-winning scholar and descendant of the migrants

Following the lead of her own ancestors, Kendra Field’s epic family history chronicles the westward migration of freedom’s first generation in the fifty years after emancipation. Drawing on decades of archival research and family lore within and beyond the United States, Field traces their journey out of the South to Indian Territory, where they participated in the development of black and black Indian towns and settlements.
 
When statehood, oil speculation, and Jim Crow segregation imperiled their lives and livelihoods, these formerly enslaved men and women again chose emigration. Some migrants launched a powerful back-to-Africa movement, while others moved on to Canada and Mexico. Their lives and choices deepen and widen the roots of the Great Migration. Interweaving black, white, and Indian histories, Field’s beautifully wrought narrative explores how ideas about race and color powerfully shaped the pursuit of freedom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300248395
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	11/19/2019
Series:	The Lamar Series in Western History
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Kendra Taira Field is associate professor of history at Tufts University.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction 1

1 "Intruder of Color": Freedom, Sovereignty, and Kinship in Indian Territory 23

2 Passing for Black: White Kinfolk, "Mulatto" Freedpeople, and Westward Migration 58

3 "He Dreamed of Africa": Kinship, Class, and Peoplehood 104

4 "No Such Thing as Stand Still": The Chief Sam Movement and the "African Pioneers" 135

Epilogue 165

Notes 175

Index 217

Editorial Reviews

This book will remain at the fingertips of future scholars interested in migration and the early Jim Crow years in America” — Robert Cassanello, Journal of American History

“An important work of American history drawn from [Field's] personal family history.”—Publishers Weekly

“A masterpiece in the areas of personal narration, family genealogy, and African American historiography.”—Library Journal, starred review

“In short, this book is about race, family, memory, community, and the search for a better life, and is a must read.”—Choice

“Field offers a compelling interpretation of a series of migration movements initiated by rural African American people between 1865 and 1915.”—Melissa N. Stuckey, Journal of African American History

 

Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War by Kendra Field is a finalist for the Museum of African American History (MAAH) Stone Book Award

“This is a wonderful, capacious narrative about a country that remains always a dodgy work in progress. Field's seamless interweaving of family, race, and nation—-of the particular, the subordinate, and the superordinate—recaptures exceptionalist possibilities that will upend and enrich her readers’ understanding of the American past.”—David Levering Lewis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography

“Personal and profoundly learned, Field, by unearthing the deeper roots of the Great Migration and back-to-Africa movement, explodes the simple structures of inherited histories while complicating understandings of race and nation in an America that never was, and never shall be, purely black and white.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

“Growing Up with the Country is a work of startling brilliance and originality, of heart-wrenching beauty and theoretical innovation. In Kendra Field’s able hands, her family stories become a window into the struggle for freedom in an era when emancipation and the dismantling of Indian sovereignty gave way to new forms of unfreedom, constriction, and possibility.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

“The most fascinating and cutting edge study to date on black settlers in Indian Territory and Oklahoma during the eras of Reconstruction and westward expansion.”—Tiya Miles, author of Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom

“Kendra T. Field skillfully draws family stories and community histories into a sweeping and compelling critique of the competing sovereignties, conflicting claims to freedom, and shifting racial regimes that shaped the United States.”—Craig Steven Wilder, author of Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities

From the Publisher

11/27/2017
Field, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University, debuts with an important work of American history drawn from her personal family history. In the second half of the 19th century, three of Field’s ancestors—Thomas Jefferson Brown, Monroe Coleman, and Alexander “Elic” Davis—left the postemancipation South for Indian Territory (Oklahoma) searching for freedom. Field cogently argues that the lives of her relatives and the tens of thousands of freed people who moved west between 1865 and 1915 expose the “deeply transnational and multiracial dimensions of freedom’s first generation.” She skillfully portrays the interaction of freed people with Native Americans in Oklahoma to reveal the links among national identification, racial constructions, and class divisions. Some freed people used marriage to Native Americans to distance themselves from an oppressive history and to gain access to land, a source of stability and independence. Some pushed Congress to create a “black state” within the Oklahoma territory. The story that Field relates regarding the 1913–1915 Chief Sam back-to-Africa movement is exceptionally fascinating. Readers looking for an innovative hybrid of history and memoir won’t find that here; rather, Field’s family history further enriches her fine scholarly work. Maps & Illus. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 12/01/2017
Field (director, Ctr. for the Study of Race and Democracy, Tufts Univ.) splendidly traces three families of former slaves and their successive and often harrowing migrations from the South in the years following emancipation. Between 1865 and 1915, former slaves experimented in land ownership, town building, and emigration to the Mississippi Delta and beyond. But access to land was hindered by Jim Crow segregation, racially motivated land allotments, disfranchisement, vigilantism, debt peonage, and oil speculation. Thomas Jefferson Brown, Monroe Coleman, and Alexander "Elic" Davis became victims of these conditions, and would eventually join Chief Alfred Sam's ill-fated 1914 Back-to-Africa movement. In telling the story of her ancestors, Field relies on family lore, storytelling, and archival research. She concedes that "History may be the enemy of memory," as historian Richard White has written, but agrees that "there are regions of the past that only memory knows." Despite criticism of Chief Sam's ventures by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, Field offers a reasoned defense of the Back-to-Africa movement in her epilog. VERDICT A masterpiece in the areas of personal narration, family genealogy, and African American historiography. Highly recommended for U.S. Civil War/Reconstruction and African American scholars and enthusiasts, genealogical specialists, and all readers.—John Carver Edwards, formerly with Univ. of Georgia Libs.

Library Journal