Black History

With over a hundred photos collected by G. Faye Dant, and with an introduction by renowned Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin.

When Mark Twain published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885, he turned Hannibal, Missouri, into one of the most famous towns in the American imagination. But like Twain’s novel, Hannibal’s idyllic façade often elided the darker racial violence that had marked its past, and it overlooked the history and humanity of the Black residents who have called Hannibal home for generations. Without them, there would be no “America’s hometown.”

In Hannibal’s Invisibles, G. Faye Dant, a Hannibal resident and the executive director of Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center, tells the incredible story of the Black community in this small Missouri town, giving voice to a history that has been marginalized far too long. Hear first-hand accounts from those who survived enslavement, faced racism after emancipation, endured Jim Crow, and contributed to the triumphs of the civil rights movement. These are the stories of Black doctors, entrepreneurs, and teachers who helped uplift the community, and remembrances of the countless individuals who gave richness and meaning to Hannibal’s everyday life. The vintage photographs and historical documents collected here are a celebration of these resilient people who built and sustained this corner of the Midwest, despite the immense obstacles they met at every turn. 

Author and historian Chris Dier reveals the horrifying true story behind the St. Bernard Parish Massacre.

As African American men gained the right to vote, white Democrats of St. Bernard Parish feared losing their majority. Armed groups mobilized to suppress these recently emancipated voters in the hopes of regaining a way of life turned upside down by the Civil War and Reconstruction. Days before the tumultuous presidential election of 1868, the parish descended into chaos. Freedpeople were dragged from their homes and murdered in cold blood. Many fled to the cane fields to hide from their attackers. The reported number of those killed varies from 35 to 135. The tragedy was hidden, but implications reverberated throughout the South and lingered for generations.

June Bug's Grocery and the Cornfield Jook: A South Albany Oral History 

The vibrant South Georgia scene was pure Americana—a picturesque, old-fashioned grocery store next to a thriving jook joint in the heart of a South Albany African-American community. Originally more secluded, this nucleus of the neighborhood became a familiar sight to all Albany residents with the opening in the 1980s of a roadway that passed by the scene and across a new bridge over the nearby Flint River. The waters of the Flint proved to be much too near in 1994, when a catastrophic flood damaged beyond repair the grocery, jook, and hundreds of homes along the river.

Deeply touched by that enormous community loss, Mary Sterner Lawson used her own 1987 photographs to paint a watercolor of the once-flourishing South Albany scene. She never imagined how overwhelming the public response would be when the painting was exhibited in the main lobby of a busy local hospital in 1996. A veritable flood of reminiscences came her way—tales of childhood memories, community gatherings, friendships, brotherhood, families, prostitution, moonshine, and murder. Inspired by the community members who encouraged and aided her efforts, Lawson began recording the rich recollections. June Bug’s Grocery and the Cornfield Jook registers these voices of the community, the voices behind the painting.

Mary Sterner Lawson has taught humanities, literature, and composition at Albany State University since 1973. A natural extension of her longtime involvement with people, art, oral history, and community development, this volume will find a treasured place on Albany bookshelves and will be embraced by young and old, black and white, for generations to come.

A part of the Underground Railroad, read here of enslaved people and their stories of using Virginia's waterways to achieve freedom.

Enslaved Virginians sought freedom from the time they were first brought to the Jamestown colony in 1619. Acts of self-emancipation were aided by Virginia's waterways, which became part of the network of the Underground Railroad in the years before the Civil War. Watermen willing to help escaped slaves made eighteenth-century Norfolk a haven for freedom seekers. Famous nineteenth-century escapees like Shadrack Minkins and Henry Box Brown were aided by the Underground Railroad. Enslaved men like Henry Lewey, known as Bluebeard, aided freedom seekers as conductors, and black and white sympathizers acted as station masters. Historian Cassandra Newby-Alexander narrates the ways that enslaved people used Virginia's waterways to achieve humanity's dream of freedom.

Author and researcher Char McCargo Bah recounts the stories of the men and women buried in Alexandria's freedman's cemetery and the search for their descendants.

At the beginning of the Civil War, Federal troops secured Alexandria as Union territory. Former slaves, called contrabands, poured in to obtain protection from their former masters. Due to overcrowding, mortality rates were high. Authorities seized an undeveloped parcel of land on South Washington Street, and by March 1864, it had been opened as a cemetery for African Americans. Between 1864 and 1868, more than 1,700 contrabands and freedmen were buried there. For nearly eighty years, the cemetery lay undisturbed and was eventually forgotten. Rediscovered in 1996, it has now been preserved as a monument to the courage and sacrifice of those buried within.