Virginia Slavery and King Salt in Booker T. Washington's Boyhood Home

by Larry Linwell Rowe

506 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2019

Reviews

[Jay]

This is a good synthesis of scholarship on slavery in Virginia. The narrative style is digressive and more like an oral history, with a wealth of local history of the industrialization of the Kanawha Valley and strong detailed accounts of not only local institutional and church histories, but the histories of prominent local families in the context of the issue of slavery. The author makes many interesting observations on the demographics and economics of slavery and their importance to the development of the local communities and of Virginia overall. That said, it is a complicated read.