This dissertation explores lasting familial relationships and friendships among southern African Americans from the antebellum years to the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on southern Maryland, the dissertation shows how free and enslaved African Americans cultivated familial and non-familial relationships in towns and rural neighborhoods. Over the course of...
During the 1870s and 1880s, state governments in the former slaveholding South established eleven public institutions for black higher learning. Given the volatile, impoverished, often repressive climate of the region, how did black political and educational leaders mobilize to expand state support for black higher education? Furthermore, how did they...