The University of Arkansas Press
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Fourth in the University of Arkansas Press series in
Black Community Studies, this book-length monograph on the black
community of Savannah, Georgia, during the antebellum and Civil
War periods is a groundbreaker. It begins in 1788 with the
founding of Savannah's first black public institution, an
independent church, and closes in 1864 with General William
Tecumseh Sherman's capture of Savannah and the subsequent end to
slavery.
Using a wide range of primary sources, including the little-used Southern Claims Case Files, and a vast number of secondary sources, Whittington Johnson elucidates the most important features of slave and free African-American life in this period. Johnson maintains that, unlike Charleston and New Orleans, Savannah had a comparatively small population of free blacks, containing only a slim majority of mulattoes and few large property owners, which affected the contours of the black class structure.
Black Savannah focuses upon efforts of African-Americans, free and slave, who worked together to establish and maintain a variety of religious, social, and cultural institutions, to carve out niches in the larger economy, and to form cohesive black families. The result was an autonomous black community in a key city of the Old South.
Whittington B. Johnson is professor of history at the University of Miami (FL). Winner of several awards, honors, and fellowships, he has previously published The Promising Years, 1750-1830: The Emergence of Black Labor and Business (Garland Publishers, 1993).
May
6" x 9"
232 pages
$30.00 cloth (s), 1-55728-406-7
October 3, 2000