At Freedom's Door: African American Founding Fathers and Lawyers in Reconstruction South Carolina

Description

At Freedom's Door rescues from obscurity the identities, images, and long-term contributions of black leaders who helped to rebuild and reform South Carolina after the Civil War. In seven essays, the contributors to the volume explore the role of African Americans in government and law during Reconstruction in the Palmetto State. Bringing into focus a legacy not fully recognized, the contributors collectively demonstrate the legal acumen displayed by prominent African Americans and the impact these individuals had on the enactment of substantial constitutional reforms - many of which, though abandoned after Reconstruction, would be resurrected in the twentieth century.

Reviews

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2000-08-17
Summary: "Forces a major reevaluation of Reconstruction"

This is a bitter-sweet book that should go far in convincing people of all races of the existence of a cadre of educated and capable progressive Black people in South Carolina during reconstruction. The sadness is that the white power structure extinguished this at the end of Reconstuction with a segregated Jim Crow society unseen before in South Carolina. This book will go far to extinguish the myth of crude unschooled Blacks manipulated by northern carpetbaggers to "rule" the state after the Civil War. The African-Americans who were able to gain a foothold on the American Dream during this period were to become the nucleus of the civil rights movemement in the US. Given a less pig headed white power structure, racial tensions of the past century might have been avoided.