The lush landscape and subtropical climate of the Georgia coast only enhance the air of mystery enveloping some of its inhabitants—people who owe, in some ways, as much to Africa as to America. As the ten previously unpublished essays in this volume examine various aspects of Georgia lowcountry life, they often engage a central dilemma: the region's physical and cultural remoteness helps to preserve the venerable ways of its black inhabitants, but it can also marginalize the vital place of lowcountry blacks in the Atlantic World. The essays, which range in coverage from the founding of the Georgia colony in the early 1700s through the present era, explore a range of topics, all within the larger context of the Atlantic world. Included are essays on the double-edged freedom that the American Revolution made possible to black women, the lowcountry as site of the largest gathering of African Muslims in early North America, and the coexisting worlds of Christianity and conjuring in coastal Georgia and the links (with variations) to African practices. A number of fascinating, memorable characters emerge, among them the defiant Mustapha Shaw, who felt entitled to land on Ossabaw Island and resisted its seizure by whites only to become embroiled in struggles with other blacks; Betty, the slave woman who, in the spirit of the American Revolution, presented a “list of grievances” to her master; and S'Quash, the Arabic-speaking Muslim who arrived on one of the last legal transatlantic slavers and became a head man on a North Carolina plantation. Published in association with the Georgia Humanities Council.

From the eighteenth century to the eve of the Civil War, Georgia's racial order shifted from the somewhat fluid conception of race prevalent in the colonial era to the harsher understanding of racial difference prevalent in the antebellum era. In Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750--1860, Watson W. Jennison explores the centrality of race in the development of Georgia, arguing that long-term structural and demographic changes account for this transformation. Jennison traces the rise of rice cultivation and the plantation complex in low country Georgia in the mid-eighteenth century and charts the spread of slavery into the up country in the decades that followed. Cultivating Race examines the "cultivation" of race on two levels: race as a concept and reality that was created, and race as a distinct social order that emerged because of the specifics of crop cultivation. Using a variety of primary documents including newspapers, diaries, correspondence, and plantation records, Jennison offers an in-depth examination of the evolution of racism and racial ideology in the lower South.

After Reconstruction, against considerable odds, African Americans in Atlanta went about such self-interested pursuits as finding work and housing. They also built community, says Allison Dorsey. To Build Our Lives Together chronicles the emergence of the network of churches, fraternal organizations, and social clubs through which black Atlantans pursued the goals of adequate schooling, more influence in local politics, and greater access to municipal services. Underpinning these efforts were the notions of racial solidarity and uplift. Yet as Atlanta's black population grew--from two thousand in 1860 to forty thousand at the turn of the century--its community had to struggle not only with the dangers and caprices of white laws and customs but also with internal divisions of status and class. Among other topics, Dorsey discusses the boomtown atmosphere of post-Civil War Atlanta that lent itself so well to black community formation; the diversity of black church life in the city; the role of Atlanta's black colleges in facilitating economic prosperity and upward mobility; and the ways that white political retrenchment across Georgia played itself out in Atlanta. Throughout, Dorsey shows how black Atlantans adapted the cultures, traditions, and survival mechanisms of slavery to the new circumstances of freedom. Although white public opinion endorsed racial uplift, whites inevitably resented black Atlantans who achieved some measure of success. The Atlanta race riot of 1906, which marks the end of this study, was no aberration, Dorsey argues, but the inevitable outcome of years of accumulated white apprehensions about black strivings for social equality and economic success. Denied the benefits of full citizenship, the black elite refocused on building an Atlanta of their own within a sphere of racial exclusion that would remain in force for much of the twentieth century.

In Women's Work, Men's Work, Betty Wood examines the struggle of bondpeople to secure and retain for themselves recognized rights as producers and consumers in the context of the brutal, formal slave economy sanctified by law. Wood examines this struggle in the Georgia lowcountry over a period of eighty years, from the 1750s to the 1830s, when, she argues, the evolution of the system of informal slave economies had reached the point that it would henceforth dominate Savannah's political agenda until the Civil War and emancipation. The daily battles of bondpeople to secure rights as producers and consumers reflected and reinforced the integrity of the private lives they were determined to fashion for themselves, Wood posits. Their families formed the essential base upon which, and for which, they organized their informal economies. An expanding market in Savannah provided opportunities for them to negotiate terms for the sale of their labor and produce, and for them to purchase the goods and services they sought. In considering the quasi-autonomous economic activities of bondpeople, Wood outlines the equally significant, but quite different, roles of bondwomen and bondmen in organizing these economies. She also analyzes the influence of evangelical Protestant Christianity on bondpeople, and the effects of the fusion of religious and economic morality on their circumstances. For a combination of practical and religious reasons, Wood finds, informal slave economies, with their impact on whites, became the single most important issue in Savannah politics. She contends that, by the 1820s, bondpeople were instrumental in defining the political agenda of a divided city--a significant, if unintentional, achievement.

A richly illustrated, accessibly written book with a variety of perspectives on slavery, emancipation, and black life in Savannah from the city's founding to the early twentieth century. Written by leading historians of Savannah, Georgia, and the South, it includes a mix of thematic essays focusing on individual people, events, and places.

An exploration of the political and social experiences of African Americans in transition from enslaved to citizen Claiming Freedom is a noteworthy and dynamic analysis of the transition African Americans experienced as they emerged from Civil War slavery, struggled through emancipation, and then forged on to become landowners during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction period in the Georgia lowcountry. Karen Cook Bell's work is a bold study of the political and social strife of these individuals as they strived for and claimed freedom during the nineteenth century. Bell begins by examining the meaning of freedom through the delineation of acts of self-emancipation prior to the Civil War. Consistent with the autonomy that they experienced as slaves, the emancipated African Americans from the rice region understood citizenship and rights in economic terms and sought them not simply as individuals for the sake of individualism, but as a community for the sake of a shared destiny. Bell also examines the role of women and gender issues, topics she believes are understudied but essential to understanding all facets of the emancipation experience. It is well established that women were intricately involved in rice production, a culture steeped in African traditions, but the influence that culture had on their autonomy within the community has yet to be determined. A former archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration, Bell has wielded her expertise in correlating federal, state, and local records to expand the story of the all-black town of 1898 Burroughs, Georgia, into one that holds true for all the American South. By humanizing the African American experience, Bell demonstrates how men and women leveraged their community networks with resources that enabled them to purchase land and establish a social, political, and economic foundation in the rural and urban post-war era.

Lines in the Sandis Timothy Lockley’s nuanced look at the interaction between nonslaveholding whites and African Americans in lowcountry Georgia from the introduction of slavery in the state to the beginning of the Civil War. The study focuses on poor whites living in a society where they were dominated politically and economically by a planter elite and outnumbered by slaves. Lockley argues that the division between nonslaveholding whites and African Americans was not fixed or insurmountable. Pulling evidence from travel accounts, slave narratives, newspapers, and court documents, he reveals that these groups formed myriad kinds of relationships, sometimes out of mutual affection, sometimes for mutual advantage, but always in spite of the disapproving authority of the planter class. Lockley has synthesized an impressive amount of material to create a rich social history that illuminates the lives of both blacks and whites. His abundant detail and clear narrative style make this first book-length examination of a complicated and overlooked topic both fascinating and accessible.