Nestled between the Chesapeake Bay and the Patuxent River, this tiny peninsula county is home to one of the oldest African American communities, established when the first settlers arrived. Located just south of Washington, D.C., Calvert County's African American community can be traced back to the county's beginning in the 17th century. From a time when Calvert County's black population grew to approximately 60 percent of the populace, to its present-day residents representing the national average of 12 percent, Calvert's African Americans have attempted to hold on to many of their rich cultural traditions. Although their livelihoods as farmers and watermen have mostly ceased to exist these days, they continue to maintain strong ties to the land and an unwavering commitment to family values and community. The beautiful photographs and documents in this volume give a glimpse into the past of these proud people who continue to flourish while holding onto their distinctive identity.
Recognizing the lives of the enslaved at the historic site of Mount Clare Enslaved African Americans helped transform the United States economy, culture, and history. Yet these individuals' identities, activities, and sometimes their very existence are often all but expunged from historically preserved plantations and house museums. Reluctant to show and interpret the homes and lives of the enslaved, many sites have never shared the stories of the African Americans who once lived and worked on their land. One such site is Mount Clare near Baltimore, Maryland, where Teresa Moyer pulls no punches in her critique of racism in historic preservation. In her balanced discussion, Moyer examines the inextricably entangled lives of the enslaved, free Black people, and white landowners. Her work draws on evidence from archaeology, history, geology, and other fields to explore the ways that white privilege continues to obscure the contributions of Black people at Mount Clare. She demonstrates that a landscape's post-emancipation history can make a powerful statement about Black heritage. Ultimately she argues that the inclusion of enslaved persons in the history of these sites would honor these "ancestors of worthy life," make the social good of public history available to African Americans, and address systemic racism in America. Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Fifty Years in Chains: Or, the Life of an American Slave (1859) was an abridged and unauthorized reprint of the earlier Slavery in the United States (1836). In the narratives, Ball describes his experiences as a slave, including the uncertainty of slave life and the ways in which the slaves are forced to suffer inhumane conditions. He recounts the qualities of his various masters and the ways in which his fortune depended on their temperament. As slave narrative scholar William L. Andrews has noted, Ball's oft-repeated narrative directly influenced the manner and matter of later fugitive slave.
The definitive account of the lynching of twenty-three-year-old Matthew Williams in Maryland, the subsequent investigation, and the legacy of "modern-day" lynchings. On December 4, 1931, a mob of white men in Salisbury, Maryland, lynched and set ablaze a twenty-three-year-old Black man named Matthew Williams. His gruesome murder was part of a wave of silent white terrorism in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, which exposed Black laborers to white rage in response to economic anxieties. For nearly a century, the lynching of Matthew Williams has lived in the shadows of the more well-known incidents of racial terror in the deep South, haunting both the Eastern Shore and the state of Maryland as a whole. In The Silent Shore, author Charles L. Chavis Jr. draws on his discovery of previously unreleased investigative documents to meticulously reconstruct the full story of one of the last lynchings in Maryland. Bringing the painful truth of anti-Black violence to light, Chavis breaks the silence that surrounded Williams's death. Though Maryland lacked the notoriety for racial violence of Alabama or Mississippi, he writes, it nonetheless was the site of at least 40 spectacle lynchings after the abolition of slavery in 1864. Families of lynching victims rarely obtained any form of actual justice, but Williams's death would have a curious afterlife: Maryland's politically ambitious governor Albert C. Ritchie would, in an attempt to position himself as a viable challenger to FDR, become one of the first governors in the United States to investigate the lynching death of a Black person. Ritchie tasked Patsy Johnson, a member of the Pinkerton detective agency and a former prizefighter, with going undercover in Salisbury and infiltrating the mob that murdered Williams. Johnson would eventually befriend a young local who admitted to participating in the lynching and who also named several local law enforcement officers as ringleaders. Despite this, a grand jury, after hearing 124 witness statements, declined to indict the perpetrators. But this denial of justice galvanized Governor Ritchie's Interracial Commission, which would become one of the pioneering forces in the early civil rights movement in Maryland. Complicating historical narratives associated with the history of lynching in the city of Salisbury, The Silent Shore explores the immediate and lingering effect of Williams's death on the politics of racism in the United States, the Black community in Salisbury, the broader Eastern Shore, the state of Maryland, and the legacy of "modern-day lynchings."
Citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States was an ever-moving target. The Constitution did not specify its exact meaning, leaving lawmakers and other Americans to struggle over the fundamental questions of who could be a citizen, how a person attained the status, and the particular privileges citizenship afforded. Indeed, as late as 1862, U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates observed that citizenship was "now as little understood in its details and elements, and the question as open to argument and speculative criticism as it was at the founding of the Government." Black people suffered under this ambiguity, but also seized on it in efforts to transform their nominal freedom. By claiming that they were citizens in their demands for specific rights, they were, Christopher James Bonner argues, at the center of creating the very meaning of American citizenship. In the decades before and after Bates's lament, free African Americans used newspapers, public gatherings, and conventions to make arguments about who could be a citizen, the protections citizenship entailed, and the obligations it imposed. They thus played a vital role in the long, fraught process of determining who belonged in the nation and the terms of that belonging. Remaking the Republic chronicles the various ways African Americans from a wide range of social positions throughout the North attempted to give meaning to American citizenship over the course of the nineteenth century. Examining newpsapers, state and national conventions, public protest meetings, legal cases, and fugitive slave rescues, Bonner uncovers a spirited debate about rights and belonging among African Americans, the stakes of which could determine their place in U.S. society and shape the terms of citizenship for all Americans.
"A fascinating, sensitive, and well-researched book that enhances our understanding of the history of Shady Side, the history of Maryland, and the history of America. It's a story that's entertaining, educational, and important." --Kenneth T. Walsh, journalist and author of "Family of Freedom: Presidents and African Americans in the White House" "A must-read, interesting book. Full of mores of yesterday and today." -- Mohan Grover, unoffi cial Shady Side mayor; owner of Renno's Market "When Ms. Widdifield first approached me about her book-writing project, I was skeptical. After all, what could a spit of a woman with dainty eyes and light blond hair who spends her winters in sunny Florida possibly know about the lives of African Americans? Yet she approached this project with a passion and confidence that I have not seen in many seasoned historians. The results of her efforts say it all. Widdifield has brought the lives and stories of this waterside community alive and, in the process, has filled avoid in the history books of southern Maryland." -- Judith A. Cabral, Kunta Kinte-Alex Haley Foundation "Passing Through Shady Side is a rich, vivid account of a largely untold story: the history of African American families that have farmed and worked the waters surrounding the Shady Side peninsula for nearly two centuries. Ann Widdifield has brought to life the generations that have given Shady Side its special character, traditions and vitality." -- Terence Smith, journalist and Shady Side resident
Because of the growing need for labor in the South and an overabundance of slaves in Maryland and Virginia, Baltimore became the main port for the selling and shipping of slaves to New Orleans.
