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    Robin Friedman

    Galveston, Oh Galveston. Galveston, Texas has a rich and diverse history. "African Americans of Galveston" (2013) focuses on the vibrant African American presence in Galveston from the city's earliest days. The book is part of the "Images of America" series of Arcadia Publishing which documents many places and aspects of American local history in short, uniform volumes of photographs and textual commentary. The authors of this book, Tommie Boudreaux and Alice Gatson, are lifelong residents of Galveston who have both served as chairs of the Galveston Historical Foundation's African American Heritage Committee.

    As the book explains, Galveston, founded in 1839, is a city on an island located in the Gulf of Mexico about 45 minutes south of Houston. The city's location gave it a rich maritime heritage and exposed it to the vagaries of the weather. It became home to an unusually diverse group of people and nationalities. As a somewhat remote island, Galveston also acquired the reputation of an "open city" where vices and other activities flourished in a way that would not be tolerated on the mainland. The diversity and free culture of Galveston worked to the benefit of African Americans.

    The book shows both the national and the local nature of African American life in Galveston. It begins with the notorious pirate and slave trader Jean Lafitte (1776 -- 1823) who smuggled slaves into Galveston for years. Texas had a large slave population and became the last state of the Union to abolish slavery. On June 19, 1865, a Union general read a proclamation in Galveston formally decreeing the end of slavery. The Galveston proclamation, General Order No. 1, is the basis for the holiday of Juneteenth.

    In the Reconstruction years, Galveston produced an African American leader of note in Norris Wright Cuney (1846 -- 1898) whose many accomplishments as a businessman, labor leader, civil rights activist, and political leader are well, if briefly depicted in the book. Perhaps the most famous incident in Galveston's history was the hurricane of 1900 which killed at least 6000 people, the most destructive storm in United States' history. The book shows the impact of the storm together with the heroic efforts of Galveston's African American community to help relieve the suffering in the storm's wake and to rebuild the city.

    The book includes many rare old photographs of Galveston which show the harbor, the maritime workers and the distinctive city streets and buildings in the African American community. Chapters of the book describing African American community leaders, educational institutions, churches, medical facilities, and community organizations give a sense of the local life of Galveston's African Americans. The final chapter of the book describes African Americans from Galveston who achieved fame in education, business, music, sports, and other fields. Among these figures are Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight boxing champion, the renowned singer Esther Phillips and the blues singer and pianist Camille Howard. The book reminded me of these artists and moved me to listen to their music.

    The portrayal of the city may have been sanitized somewhat as the book does little more than mention the wide-open quality of Galveston life. It would have been valuable to see the city beyond domestication. Still, the book fascinated me. I have never been to Galveston and I would like to go or at least to learn more. Readers with an interest in Galveston or in local African American life will enjoy this photographic history of the African American community of Galveston.

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    The Last Children of Mill Creek

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    A bestselling memoir of a vibrant childhood spent in a thriving St. Louis African American community before “urban renewal” changed everything.

    Vivian Gibson grew up in Mill Creek Valley, a segregated working-class neighborhood in St. Louis that was razed in 1959 to build a highway, an act of racism disguised under urban renewal as “progress.” A moving memoir of family life at a time very different from the present, The Last Children of Mill Creek chronicles the everyday lived experiences of Gibson’s large family―her seven siblings, her crafty, college-educated mother, and her hard-working father―and the friends, shop owners, church ladies, teachers, and others who made Mill Creek into a warm, tight-knit African American community. In Gibson’s words, “This memoir is about survival, as told from the viewpoint of a watchful young girl―a collection of decidedly universal stories that chronicle the extraordinary lives of ordinary people.”

    Winner of a Missouri Humanities award for literary achievement, The Last Children of Mill Creek is an important book for anyone interested in urban development, race, and community history―or for anyone who was once a child.

    Praise for The Last Children of Mill Creek

    2022 Missouri Author of the Year Winner

    Missouri's “Great Reads from Great Places” Selection for the 2023 National Book Festival

     

    “This is a story borne aloft by the sheer human joy of storytelling, of memory, of tender love for a mother and a father and for a vanished time and place. It is a book that, while steadfastly refusing the American fiction of color blindness, just as steadfastly refuses to portray Black life through the single warped lens of white-induced pain.” —TheLos Angeles Review of Books
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    North Carolina Slave Narratives

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    The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who endured. Although most of these accounts appeared before the Civil War, more than one-third are the result of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA. Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the peculiar institution, to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave in the United States. —Norman R. Yetman, American Memory, Library of Congress  This paperback edition of selected North Carolina narratives is reprinted in facsimile from the typewritten pages of the interviewers, just as they were originally typed.
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    The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who endured. Although most of these accounts appeared before the Civil War, more than one-third are the result of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA. Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the peculiar institution, to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave in the United States. —Norman R. Yetman, American Memory, Library of Congress  This paperback edition of selected South Carolina narratives is reprinted in facsimile from the typewritten pages of the interviewers, just as they were originally typed.
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    Virginia Slave Narratives

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    The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who endured. Although most of these accounts appeared before the Civil War, more than one-third are the result of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection—a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA. Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the peculiar institution, to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave in the United States. —Norman R. Yetman, American Memory, Library of Congress  This paperback edition of all of the Virginia narratives is reprinted in facsimile from the typewritten pages of the interviewers, just as they were originally typed.
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    The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who endured. Although most of these accounts appeared before the Civil War, more than one-third are the result of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA. Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the peculiar institution, to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave in the United States. —Norman R. Yetman, American Memory, Library of Congress  This paperback edition of selected Alabama narratives is reprinted in facsimile from the typewritten pages of the interviewers, just as they were originally typed.
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    Underground Railroad in Ohio, The

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    Ohio was at the heart of it all.

    During a dark time in United States history, thousands of freedom seekers traveled the Underground Railroad through Ohio. The Buckeye State hosted about half of all fugitive slave traffic of the antebellum era. A mix of Northern and Southern settlers in the state added drama to a struggle that led to major benefits for the state and the country. Unfortunately, this epic past was obscured by silence and secrecy and then distorted with misinformation and folklore—until now.

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