My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations

by Mary Frances Berry

“My face is black is true but its not my fault but I love my name and my honest dealing with my fellow man.” –Callie House (1899)

In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed historian Dr. Mary Frances Berry resurrects the remarkable story of ex-slave Callie House (1861-1928) who, seventy years before the civil-rights movement, headed a demand for ex-slave reparations. A widowed Nashville washerwoman and mother of five, House went on to fight for African American pensions based on those offered to Union soldiers, brilliantly targeting $68 million in taxes on seized rebel cotton and demanding it as repayment for centuries of unpaid labor. Here is the fascinating story of a forgotten civil rights crusader: a woman who emerges as a courageous pioneering activist, a forerunner of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography, African American, Race, Historical, American History

314 pages, Paperback

First published September 6, 2005

Reviews

[H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Callie House did not accomplish what she aimed to do. It is very rare to read a biography like that.

Born into slavery in 1861, she spent most of her life as a washer woman and the leader of the Ex-Slave Association. I knew nothing about the fight for ex-slave reparations, and it now seems astonishing that this was never mentioned to me in school. (And it’s a very good argument for Black History Month: You have something to learn.)

It seems simple: Human beings were forced to perform unpaid labor for centuries. A war was fought to make this stop; during the war the winning side promised reparations to the ex-slaves. The war ended and Reconstruction began. It seemed likely that ex-slaves would get what was unquestionably, legally owed to them: The $62 million in taxes collected from the cotton of the Southern rebels, from the very plantations that the ex-slaves had recently toiled on. (At one exciting point, the U.S. government promised ex-slaves the plantations of their former masters.)

Abraham Lincoln died, and repairing the unity between the North and the South seemed “more important” than giving reparations to ex-slaves. Reconstruction ended too soon. The ex-slaves were provided with no money, no land, and no schools. This created an excellent foundation for sharecropping, Jim Crow laws, and the continued inequality that exists today.

Callie House was an uneducated black woman. She was a widow with five children who dedicated her life to traveling the country, fighting in court, and organizing ex-slaves to demand reparations from Congress. Ultimately she was unsuccessful. But she held tight to a political goal for decades, despite being shot down again and again. Her fight was eventually continued by the Civil Rights Movement, only to be passed down once more to the progeny of ex-slaves and lawyers of today.

Mary Frances Berry’s book drove home for me how recent slavery was. “In 1900 … 21% of the African-American population … had been born into slavery.” I don’t know why this is surprising to me, but it was nevertheless an eye opener.

The great-great grandchildren of ex-slaves have still not been paid the money that is due to them. Nevertheless, Berry outlined the struggle to try to make this happen, highlighting the cause’s most persistent and determined fighter. As she says, “Mrs. House was just a black woman with the audacity – and no money – to stand firmly on claims of citizenship rights for herself and freedmen and freedwomen. She had much to fear.” Callie House faced 19th-century style government surveillance, censorship, false charges, and prison. She didn’t succeed, but her movement matters in United States history. Berry is right in honoring it.

[Tinea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Important, fascinating story buried in a long, dry, historically-detailed text. Callie House was an African American woman who helped found and organize a movement for reparations for slavery, in the form of pensions for the cohort of quickly aging formerly enslaved people. Her organization, the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association, functioned on two levels. Nationally, members' initial dues paid for organizers to lobby congress and press litigation in support of pensions modeled after the generous pensions given veterans of the Civil War. Locally, members continued to pay regular dues which became a fund to support medical and burial expenses for destitute former slaves. The hope of government pensions was important, but the material reality of a safety net through mutual aid is what kept the organization relevant and rooted in the needs and leadership of its membership.

The US government would have none of this. Enslaved people's freedom often took the form of being kicked off the land they had worked and grown their whole lives into wandering or marginal livelihoods of destitution for lack of assets, lack of income, and violent, racist reprisal against any prosperity. Treatment under slavery and poverty-- poor healthcare and nutrition, heavy labor, etc-- made it difficult or impossible for former slaves to support themselves as they aged (no savings, no assets to sell, poorer health and poor family's for whom supporting aging relatives could be a burden-- though of course that is how most families survived). Yet, the idea of pensions for aging former slaves, whose labor had created free wealth for the government and white people, was deemed so dangerous to the system of white supremacy and capitalism as to be impossible. The US Postal Service prosecuted the Ex-Slave Association for fraud: even petitioning the government for reparations was fraudulent because the reparations could not happen; reparations are anathema to the system. Early in the movement, the Postal Service literally shut out the Association from using the mail, including the personal mail for the Association's officers. Without internet and phones and all, this meant Callie House and others never received important news, like the illness of her children. They had to travel to get information and spread the Association's message, which they did, forging personal relationships with far-off rural chapters. Callie House's personal interaction with her organization's membership prefigures Ella Baker's same approach to organizing the NAACP a generation later.

But Berry points out that the 1890s were a much worse time to organize for racial justice, as the elite in the US were busy reconciling divisions amongst whites North and South for an era of Robber Baron capitalism. Organized ex-slaves stood in the way of the myth of capitalism; in this first or second generation of ex-slave organizing, they were shut down. Callie House pushed against the fraud order and for pensions for over a decade, but eventually the government came down hard and imprisoned her. She did her hard time alongside Emma Goldman of all people! Berry's descriptions of the prison are drawn directly from Goldman's memoirs, but the author notes Goldman never noticed this other political prisoner sharing her cell block, despite the overlap in their calls for mutual aid and economic justice. Hey hey silencing of women of color organizing, and three cheers for women of color historians correcting the record. The prison time came after a dozen years of tireless travel and struggle under targeted and personal repression. Callie House stepped back from the Association after her release, and died a year later. But her work was a crucial foundation for the 1920s NAACP organizing and eventually the Civil Rights Movements, her movement linking rural African American communities with others also striving for bread and roses, mutual aid survival strategies and justice through reparations.

The book itself was mired down too much in legal documentation. Like the Association's attackers, Berry focused too much on the national movement for pensions; she reproduced House's claim that the local mutual aid societies were the most important part of the Association but failed to give them enough attention to really dig into their structure and how they figured into the lives of members. This could be a bias of the historical record, and my impatience with the focus on lobbying is representative of my anarchist bias for self-help instead of petitioning the government. Regardless, Berry has an awesome intersectional class analysis, and pushes hard against movements for racial justice that left out the poorest of the poor, the rural ex-slaves themselves. In Berry and House's work, racial equality is meaningless if it does not account for the economic structures and root injustices of enslavement and 'freedom' that impoverished a class of unpaid, exploited, literally enslaved workers. Hot damn, good book.

[Jazalyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very important story and person to know. The reparations movement has a long history of struggle and long history of resistance, especially from the federal government. It's crazy to hear how the US postal service was a main player in diminishing and actively going after Callie House based on illegitimate reasons. Side note, it's telling that laws such as fraud by mail are applied disproportionally to Black activists when they don't like the message, but not to people and companies actually employing fraud. The double standards and hypocrisy are outstanding, even within this government. And then there's a "rule" that says the government cannot be sued without the government's permission, so various lawsuits have been thrown out. Just think if the government had given Callie House and the movement a fair chance to make her case and given ex-enslaved people pensions, we may not be looking at 10+ trillion reparations today.. which still need to be made. So Callie House is on my list of sheroes now. Recommended read.

[Dianna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Callie House is an ex-slave who demands a pension after serving as a house slave. She spent 70 years petitioning the Justice Department for ex-slave reparations.

I Saw Mary Frances Berry on Meet the Press; she really sold this book well. She had researched Callie House, a black ex-slave, for 8 years tracing her steps to get ex-slave reparations. I thought it was going to be a story about Callie House and her family. Instead it is a chronological listing of all acts, proclamations and laws regarding the political and economic statues pertaining to the blacks from the time of the emancipation proclamation until today. It’s a good read if that’s what you are looking for. I personally did not enjoy it.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this would have worked better as a long article -- there was a lot of filler and repetition. It was enlightening learning about the harassment of Callie House and her organization by the federal government, and the history of the reparations movement.

[Iejones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mary Berry presents the hereto unknown life of ex-slave and movement organizer House in three dimensions. House was poor, Black, female, and widowed with five children in 1890s America. Her world was one full of toil and hard work in an uncaring society reeling from the devastation of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
In this world, ex-slaves suffered. Many had no money or property others remained on their former plantation as sharecropper. After hearing unending stories of harsh slave life, House sought to alleviate this condition and organized the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association in 1896
Over the course of her life, House would become a target of the Federal government that harassed and ultimately imprisoned her. In response House stated “If the Government had the right to free us, she had a right to make some provisions for us since she did not make it soon after Emancipation she ought to make it now.” The beleaguered Association did not reach its goal, the U.S. Congress failed to pass legislation to compensate the former enslaved. In 1928, House died at age 67 from uterine cancer. Although her efforts met strong opposition, the cause of reparations lives on in purpose and principle by descendants of the still uncompensated former enslaved.
Thus, the question of reparations is still a nagging legacy of America's flirtation with enslavement, jim crow and white supremacy.

[Bob Schmitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

One thing that I have come to understand is that the civil rights movement for Blacks in the US started before the end of slavery and continued unabated to the present. This book chronicles the efforts of ex-slave Callie House (1861-1928) who headed an organization demanding ex-slave reparations. Though she was a poor, uneducated laundress from Nashville she pushed relentlessly and fearlessly for this cause until finally silenced with a trumped up suit and prison sentence by the federal government. She is an American hero no one has heard of.

First let me say that it is obvious to me that slaves should have received reparations and perhaps still should in some manner. Cotton was 60 or 80% (I don’t remember the exact percentage) of the US exports prior to the 1860. The wealth of America, north and south, was built on the backs of unpaid labor. The mansions of the south were built by slaves, the land cleared, the swamps drained and the roads built by slaves. Brown University where my son attends school today was built by money from a slave ship owner. And for 300 years the slaves were paid with corn gruel, rags and cold huts while the US became an economic powerhouse. It is even clearer that the many blacks who served in the Northern army during the war should have received equal pay and pensions which they did not in most cases.

Harriet Tubman served in the US Army as a cook, nurse, scout and spy and did not receive an army pension until the last years of her life despite support from Secretary of War and Union Army officers. Blacks especially from the south were often denied pensions because of lack of surnames, birth records, marriage certificates and of course race.

Even slaves owned by wealthy people mostly ate corn. They were shoe-less even in winter. Slave owners had to work hard to keep slaves from getting together. They were not allowed to have Church services without a white person present. They worked hard and took great risks to form communities among the slaves slipping off to go to dances that night at other plantations and talking at the marketplace all of which efforts were resisted and could even result in a whipping. Whites did not want slaves to have any sense of community. Aside from the poverty and sense of entrapment the thing that was most hurtful to the slaves were seeing their families and other families torn apart by having members sold off to plantations.

At the close of the Civil War the state of black former slaves in the south was horrible, they had no clothes, no food, no tools, no money, no education, they were illiterate and had no way to support themselves. Former slaves were eager to better themselves and schools were built throughout the south by black churches and by the Freeman's Bureau. Eventually the southern states passed laws that brought all schools under the umbrella of the state where they made sure that black schools were vastly inferior to the white schools and had much less funding.

Callie House and her organization pushed to have federal legislation providing pensions and one time payments, “bounties,” for freed slaves and veterans who were destitute was not supported and even was undermined by wealthy blacks whose main goal was political power and voting rights. House felt at times that her worst enemies were wealthy blacks who cared less than anyone else about the plight of destitute African-Americans.

One potential source of money for these pensions, and bounties was the cotton confiscated from
southern plantations by northern forces during and after the war. This amounted to billions of dollars in today's money and many blacks felt that this should provide money for the former slaves who had done the work to grow the cotton. In fact they had done the work to build the entire structure of the South.

After the war blacks were promised 40 acres by Sherman and some land was distributed to blacks in South Carolina. This policy was stopped and even the distributed land was given back to the previous white owners. Many blacks ended up essentially back in slavery working as sharecroppers for the former owners.

With the help of Isaiah Dickerson, House chartered the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association in 1898, and was named the secretary of this new organization. Eventually House became the leader of the organization. In this position she traveled across the South, spreading the idea of reparations in every former slave state with relentless zeal. During her 1897-1899 lecture tour the Association's membership grew by 34,000 mainly through her efforts. By 1900 its nationwide membership was estimated to be around 300,000.

To many people this was threatening and the federal government sent investigators far and wide to look at this movement to see if it was engaged in fraud, i.e. collecting dues, pennies a month, for the enrichment of House herself. No evidence was ever found. However, the Federal Pension Bureau thought that the movement was riling the Negroes and could cause the government problems in “managing the race,” and “if this continues the government will have some very serious questions to settle in connection with the control of the race.” The Postal Service declared that the organization was a fraud and cited complaints by whites that mostly indicated that they thought it was a fraud. House was furious she wrote that “ex slaves were left with the clothes on their backs, no shoes on their feet, no shelter, no food and no education and had to look to the man who previously had the power to whip them to death and now had the power to starve them to death.”

Postmaster Gen. decided that the Association was a fraud since there was no possibility that the government would grant pensions or bounty to ex slaves and thus began a 20 year effort to shut House down. The post office refused to take the associations mail and House had to rely on Wells Fargo and American Express to make deliveries, but this was more expensive.

Postal service officers complaint to the Atty. Gen. that House and her association was defiant in their attitude and seem to believe that Negroes could do whatever they want this country. (Imagine
that!) Latter with the Roosevelt administration people in the fraud department of the post office were investigated and fired for corruption as there had been a scandal in which they would work with private companies to avoid fraud orders.

There was great hope that the Jim Crow laws would be pushed back with Pres. Theodore Roosevelt. Early in his term he invited Booker T. Washington not only to meet him but tovdine with him. This outraged southerners.

In 1902 the pension Bureau of the US government enlisted the Grand Army of the Republic a northern army veterans your organization that had become extremely powerful to join in the suppression of the Houses association. The commissioner of pensions in soliciting their help used phrases such as “encouraging the Negroes” and “whites are the dominant race.” The Atty. Gen. the assistant Atty. Gen. was also involved in blocking the Association’s mail in some cases

When House sued to have her mail service unblocked the Supreme Court including Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled that Postal Service was not a essential right guaranteed by the Constitution and thus there was no requirement for due process. People with fraud orders had no recourse in the government.

The flow of dues to the national Association slowed to trickle greatly hampering legislative petitioning efforts.

In 1909 still under the fraud claim of the post office Callie House hired an attorney Jones who argued before the Washington District Court that the ex slaves should receive reparations from the fund of $60 million that has been collected as taxes on cotton that was produced during slavery in the south. the judge found against Jones and the Postal Service began to investigate him also filing a claim against him for $1000.

Woodrow Wilson's four freedoms apparently didn't extend to African-Americans. Prior to his administration black-and-white workers worked side-by-side in Washington. His administration segregated the government. Wow, I never heard that before. Wilson also showed the first film in the White house “Birth of a Nation,” which he praised as history at a fast pace.

In 1917 the government declared that House had committed fraud by mailing pamphlets that had an
insignia on them that could represent to “ignorant, illiterate” Negroes a connection to the US government. Apparently there was an eagle in one corner, a crescent moon, a star and the word USA. Nowhere in the document were any words claiming any connection with the US government only that the organization was formed as a mutual aid and organizations seeking pensions. Miss House was then arrested and jailed for several months until her bail was paid. The prosecution claiming once again that she has participated in fraud. They seemed confident that she would take a plea bargain and were assured of that by the district attorney, however, she did not. When called before the judge she said she did nothing wrong. The trial was scheduled and the prosecution made many claims about her misleading poor uneducated Negroes. They produce witnesses who they thought would profess to her misleading them but when they got on the stand they said no such thing. They said it was very clear that House told them that the money would be used to organize people and push for legislation to provide former slaves pensions.

The all white, all-male jury found her guilty. She could have paid $5000 but not having that she went to prison for one year. Interestingly in prison the ladies were required to be silent except after their nine hour workday in which they sewed garments including selling private labels into the garments. This was sold to retail stores the profit going to the state.

House died at age 67 in 1928.

The author who grew up in the same neighborhood as Callie House mentions that in the writing of the history of the Civil War in US memory there were two dominant themes. One was a war for
constitutional liberties and states’ rights by brothers and the other a fight to end slavery. Eventually the former won out as the dominant American narrative history of the Civil War. In his second inaugural address Lincoln commented publicly on the issue of reparations. He said that he hoped that the destruction of all of the vast amounts of wealth accumulated by the South in the in the errors of slavery and the blood of the lash would be replaced by the blood of the sword indicating obliquely that he thought that America's debt to slavery had been debt to the slaves have been paid by the efforts to obtain their freedom.

In American mythology redress for the defeated became the main narrative not reparations for former slaves. The Civil War was seen as an epic battle between whites, between white brothers, the 186,000 blacks who served in the northern army were largely forgotten. Whites in the north and the south worked to heal the harm that they had done to each other largely forgetting the harm done to African-Americans.

In any fair history of the United States House might be raised up as an example of a poor, powerless person rising up against the tyranny of the state, a true American heroine. And yet who has heard of House?

[Paris Chanel · Rating 5 out of 5]

“If the government had the right to free us, she had a right to make provision for us. And since she did not make it soon after Emancipation, she ought to make it now.”

My Face Is Black Is True details Callie Guy House’s life, heartbreaking journey and resilient spirit in remaining steadfast in leading the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association — one of the first organizations to campaign for reparations for chattel slavery in the United States. It was not only an awakening step forward for the ancestors in light of that time, it’s a mission that will never cease until fully achieved by us descendants. For that reason, she never failed. She created the spark.

The United States is our homeland through lineage, and the ancestors forcibly built from scratch while generating the country’s wealth (that made it the powerhouse it is) through federal and state-sanctioned domestic slave trading, slave breeding farms (reproductive labor), and other forms of increasing a capitalistic strong arm, leading to the idea of the country mortgaging the ancestors, turning those mortgages into bonds, resulting in the ancestors being the first (human) stocks and bonds sold on Wall Street, for example.

Since the Emancipation Proclamation, Black Americans have experienced the concentration camp extermination in Mississippi known as the Devil's Punchbowl by US troops, businesses and neighborhoods burned and bombed through federal and state sanctions, properties seized (land theft) through eminent domain and turned into things like man-made lakes and bridge pathways, Jim Crow, redlining, domestic terrorism, genocide, stolen intellectual property for decades, inhumane medical experimentations (early gynecology and the likes of having Henrietta Lacks’ cells being taken without consent to aid in (the world’s) medicinal research for everything from AIDS and cancer to the polio vaccine and Covid-19, for example). All of this to generate the wealth of the US government through sanctions, while harming us and stunting/stealing our wealth.

The lineage-based reparations movement for the debt owed to Black Americans continues just as Callie Guy House led. We’re closer than ever and will def succeed in receiving and passing down the owed wealth our ancestors never had a chance to pass down to us descendants instead of poverty and the lack thereof.

SN: NAARC and NCOBRA, which this book mentions, are organizations made up of people with different ethnicities/homelands who want to undermine lineage-based redress for the unconstitutional and harmful “race-based reparations.” That’s yet again stealing wealth. They will never prevail.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Up until a semester at University at Buffalo, I have never heard of the story of Callie House and the National Ex-Slaves Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association. I was recommended this text by a dear mentor and professor of mine while on the topic of reparations , Reconstruction and Jim Crow. While being familiar with the efforts of Rev. Garrison Frazier and later movements like the Republic of New Afrika advocating for reparations for American Descendants of Slaves, I never stumbled upon this episode of injustice. A Tennesee Native, born of slave parents and inheriting slave status as an infant and small child , House would later become a fierce and powerful advocate of reparations in the form of pensions for " old, decrepit and sickly slaves" and their descendants who had become an underclass in a post emanicpated world. She along with comrade Isaiah H. Dickerson would begin agitating among former slaves and their families the idea that they were justly owed compensation for years of unpaid toil. Quickly gaining recognition, it would soon become notoriety as they would attract the attention of state , federal and post office agents. After a campaign of demonization, repression and a court case, the two leaders were harassed and put in court for charges of fraud on the basis of " promising ex slaves reparations while knowing they would never receive them". Though Dickerson's charges would soon be overturned, House would serve several months in prison. The movement would be discredited by opponents, both white and black , as shucksters eager to exploit the "uneducated, destitute and illiterate negro population". A legitimate political movement reduced to con artistry by a white supremacist state, this book is a must have for those interested in Reparations and justice for African American Descendants of Slaves.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first heard about this book on the Philadelphia Free Library podcast. What interested me is that Callie House was unknown to the author and turned out to be (in the author's opinion) an important figure in early African-American organizations.

The book doesn't really pick up steam until several chapters in (at least half way through the book), when Berry begins exploring the government harassment of the Ex-Slave Association (the name of the pension/community assistant movement House organized). The earlier chapters, which provide background on slavery and why this reparations movement sought pensions, is slow going and felt like filler to me. It's worth hanging on though (or skipping ahead) to get to the story of several seemingly all-powerful Post Masters and less-powerful, but still annoying, prosecutors bent on destroying the movement.

[Alexander Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a pretty quick read. It focused on the reparation movement of exslaves and primarily on House and her specific association. The best part of the book was its ability to surface direct quotes from House, her colleagues, and the Postal Service workers who tried to destroy the cause. The direct quotes were interested and gave a great social dialect to the characters, demonstrating the lack of education most exslaves had and the surprising eloquence of House's speech. The book was fairly repetitive and i would argue the book could probably have been shorter. I would not say i am a die hard fan for reparation books but i learned a lot and thought it was a fine read.

[Kimberly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting topic, but it reads like an 11th grade history paper.
The book is supposed to be about Callie House, a former (female) slave who worked to receive pensions for slaves, but there is a lot more "filler" than an actualy story about Callie. A lot of the book is also very redundant and it generally does not flow well.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I give this book four stars for enlightening me about Callie House and her unfair trial.

In my opinion, Callie House, though important in this work, does not seem to be the main subject. It probably should be called "My Face Is Black Is True: The Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations and Callie House." There is some repetition in the text, and a highly notated bibliography.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a scholarly book about the struggle for reparations for former slaves. Callie House was born during the civil war and worked hard and was subject to prosecution for her efforts. She died in 1928.

Background and historical perspective fleshes out the book. Marcus Garvey and current efforts are also touched on.

[Stephanie Grajales · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was hoping for more about the larger movement, but appreciated the extent to which the book documented how the U.S. government suppressed the movement.

[Landon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a serious story about the largest African American protest movement you've never heard about seriously. A black history of the post-reconstruction era is typically close to Jim Crow, black schools and colleges, black clubwomen, sharecropping, or Ida B Wells and the anti-lynching movement if you're looking for something to alleviate the grimness. Lost in history, this is a must-read. Very enlightening. Dr. Berry cleared-up many questions are lurking in my head as to what happened to the freed slaves after the emancipation, esp. How did they live and much more? Besides being informative, the script is very well written in a style that holds the reader's interest; that is, it is not monotonous. I highly advocate it for reading for all Americans.

[Meter]

Like Zinn, the first 100 something pages pissed me off too much to read further. I'll come back to it in the future.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating and heartbreaking exploration of the origins of the reparations movement, led by a former slave who for her activism was harassed, falsely accused and unjustly jailed by the federal government.

The story of Callie House's efforts to win pensions for former slaves was buried for decades before Mary Frances Berry uncovered it. The bill to treat freed slaves like Union soldiers – providing them bonuses and a lifetime pension based on their age – was introduced multiple times in Congress, but the notion of Black men and women organizing and demanding their rights proved too threatening to overcome; the U.S. Postal Service under administrations of both parties hounded the organization and its leaders into oblivion.

Nearly a century after House's death, the idea of paying reparations to the descendants of those slaves remains controversial, although it's hard to argue against the justice of the argument. After all, that unpaid labor essentially built the American economy; providing a portion of it back to the descendants of those who had it stolen from them is only fair.

That question of justice is at the forefront of Berry's book. Northern abolitionists and Southern racists agreed that reparations to freedpeople was not only just, but would stimulate economic growth in the war-ravaged South. House struggled for decades to make that justice a reality, collecting pennies and dimes from former slaves to both fund petition drives to Congress and provide mutual aid for housing and burials for those ex-slaves otherwise too impoverished to afford them. The government accused her of committing fraud – for the patently absurd and racist argument that because reparations were unlikely to succeed, and by implication because ex-slaves were too ignorant and gullible to understand the law or the process of legislating, House and her organization were defrauding them of money by arguing that they could succeed.

My Face Is Black is True is alternately inspiring and maddening. House is a long-lost heroine, a civil rights forerunner who persevered in the face of opposition, not only from paternalistic and uncaring Whites but also from middle- and upper-class Black men who dismissed her efforts in favor of other activism (or no activism at all, in Booker T. Washington's case). Her story is well told here, and well worth reading.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was never aware of Callie House and the work of the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, who worked for reparations to ex-slaves in the late 19th and early 20th century. I was fascinated to know that they existed, and to learn of their work. However, after reading this book, I was no more interested in them and her than I was when I read the cover. I don't think Berry tells the story in a particularly interesting way, and I don't know that I gained any deeper appreciation for House's work by reading the book itself.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A remarkable life story and great hero of the reparations effort make Callie House a hero for today.
Her perseverance was incredible and there are excellent side stories, such as the washerwomen's strike of 1881. Concludes with a mind-blowing anecdote about $30M being distributed as a "black tax" reparations payment to individuals in the past 20 years through an income tax resistance and action.

[Ellison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shares the efforts made to try and get a pension for those who were released from slavery but had noting to show for their years of work. No education and only physical skills they were worn down by work. Extreme poverty. Government efforts to prevent pension payments to occur. Occasional insight of sadness, occasionally lumbers.

[Cedrick Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book about a woman we should've learned about in school. Callie House fought to get slave pensions and was harassed and eventually imprisoned for trying to make the U.S. live up to its promise.

[Maryann Jorissen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-researched and written book. Deplorable actions on the part of the American Government.

[Sofie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting and well-crafted social biography. Callie House was a formidable woman, and her story is super fascinating. Great opportunities for discussions about class, gender, and racial dynamics. Highly recommend.

[kenzie :) · Rating 4 out of 5]

for my class :)