The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom

by Thulani Davis

In The Emancipation Circuit Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This interdisciplinary history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid. Mapping the emancipation circuits, Davis shows the geography of ideas of freedom---circulating on shipping routes, via army maneuvers, and with itinerant activists---that became the basis for the first mass Black political movement for equal citizenship in the United States. In this work, she reconfigures understandings of the evolution of southern Black political agendas while outlining the origins of the enduring Black freedom struggle from the Jim Crow era to the present.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics, Sociology, American History

464 pages, Paperback

Published June 30, 2022

About the author

Born in 1949.

Reviews

[Emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

Straight up bad reading. It could have used a couple of editing rounds to tighten its focus. The argument was super unclear, even in the introduction. Avoid.

[Adina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense, thorough, thoughtful. I learned a great deal from this shifting of perspective on Reconstruction.