William Hannibal Thomas (1843–1935) served with distinction in the U.S. Colored Troops in the Civil War (in which he lost an arm) and was a preacher, teacher, lawyer, state legislator, and journalist following Appomattox. In many publications up through the 1890s, Thomas espoused a critical though optimistic black nationalist ideology. After his mid-twenties, however, Thomas began exhibiting a self-destructive personality, one that kept him in constant trouble with authorities and always on the run. His book The American Negro (1901) was his final self-destructive act. Attacking African Americans in gross and insulting language in this utterly pessimistic book, Thomas blamed them for the contemporary “Negro problem” and argued that the race required radical redemption based on improved “character,” not changed “color.” Vague in his recommendations, Thomas implied that blacks should model themselves after certain mulattoes, most notably William Hannibal Thomas. Black Judas is a biography of Thomas, a publishing history of The American Negro, and an analysis of that book’s significance to American racial thought. The book is based on fifteen years of research, including research in postamputation trauma and psychoanalytic theory on selfhatred, to assess Thomas’s metamorphosis from a constructive race critic to a black Negrophobe. John David Smith argues that his radical shift resulted from key emotional and physical traumas that mirrored Thomas’s life history of exposure to white racism and intense physical pain.

Contents -- Foreword / James C. Cobb -- Introduction / Randy Finley and Thomas A. DeBlack -- Publications by Willard B. Gatewood Jr. -- In the Shadow of the Revolution: Savannah's First Generation of Free African American Elite in the New Republic, 1790-1830 / Whittington B. Johnson -- "A Model Man of Chicot County": Lycurgus Johnson and Social Change / Thomas A. DeBlack -- "I Go To Set the Captives Free": The Activism of Richard Harvey Cain, Nationalist Churchman and Reconstruction-Era Leader / Bernard E. Powers Jr. -- "This Dreadful Whirlpool" of Civil War: Edward W. Gantt and the Quest for Distinction / Randy Finley -- James Carroll Napier (1845-1940): From Plantation to the City / Bobby L. Lovett -- Robert E. Lee Wilson and the Making of a Post-Civil War Plantation / Jeannie M. Whayne -- Reward for Party Service: Emily Newell Blair and Political Patronage in the New Deal / Virginia Laas -- "A Generous and Exemplary Womanhood": Hattie Rutherford Watson and NYA Camp Bethune in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, 1937 / Fon Gordon -- Tufted Titans: Dalton, Georgia's Carpet Elite / Thomas Deaton -- Sara Alderman Murphy and the Little Rock Panel of American Women: A Prescription to Heal the Wounds of the Little Rock School Crisis / Paula C. Barnes -- Notes -- List of Contributors

Includes adjourned, extra, and reconvened sessions.

The Legacy of Reconstruction: A Postscript -- Appendix -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Reconstruction is one of the most complex, overlooked, and misunderstood periods of American history. The thirteen essays in this volume address the multiple struggles to make good on President Abraham Lincoln’s promise of a “new birth of freedom” in the years following the Civil War, as well as the counter-efforts including historiographical ones—to undermine those struggles. The forms these struggles took varied enormously, extended geographically beyond the former Confederacy, influenced political and racial thought internationally, and remain open to contestation even today. The fight to establish and maintain meaningful freedoms for America’s Black population led to the apparently concrete and permanent legal form of the three key Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as the revised state constitutions, but almost all of the latter were overturned by the end of the century, and even the former are not necessarily out of jeopardy. And it was not just the formerly enslaved who were gaining and losing freedoms. Struggles over freedom, citizenship, and rights can be seen in a variety of venues. At times, gaining one freedom might endanger another. How we remember Reconstruction and what we do with that memory continues to influence politics, especially the politics of race, in the contemporary United States. Offering analysis of educational and professional expansion, legal history, armed resistance, the fate of Black soldiers, international diplomacy post-1865 and much more, the essays collected here draw attention to some of the vital achievements of the Reconstruction period while reminding us that freedoms can be won, but they can also be lost.