Book Cover Image of I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land by Alaina E. Roberts

I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land
by Alaina E. Roberts

    Publication Date: Apr 05, 2021
    List Price: $34.95
    Format: Hardcover, 224 pages
    Classification: Nonfiction
    ISBN13: 9780812253030
    Imprint: University of Pennsylvania Press
    Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
    Parent Company: University of Pennsylvania

    Description of I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land by Alaina E. Roberts

    Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of 40 acres and a mule—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I’ve Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from.

    In nineteenth-century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), a story unfolds that ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land that had been taken from others.

    Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, for a short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma statehood in 1907.




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