Resource: Fugitive Freedoms: A Race, Politics & Black Culture Circuit Before Civil Rights

By: Thulani Davis

January 1, 2014

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing

This study is an analysis of African American political formations from 1865 to 1900, work that embraced overlapping struggles for civil rights, labor needs, community services, and desires for belonging, expression and self-enrichment. The study shows that emerging African American organizing in the post-emancipation South formed circuits along shipping routes, and shows how local organizing gave rise to movement building over time. The state circuits constituted a network I call the Emancipation Circuit, later the circuit traveled for union building, black press distribution, and blues tours. The diverse efforts by freedpeople to exercise citizenship rights was the first mass black movement in that it was done in active connection with allies across the region and in conscious awareness of acting as a collectivity.