| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 214 words from this article are provided below; about 536 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Thad Sitton and James H. Conrad. Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow. (Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture, number 15.) Assisted by Richard Orton. Austin: University of Texas Press. 2005. Pp. 248. Cloth $50.00, paper $19.95.
Thad Sitton and James H. Conrad seek to discover how thirty-one percent of African Americans in rural Texas became landowners by 1900. In so doing, they provide a pointed counternarrative to the story of African Americans subjugated to the crop-lien system. While two-thirds of Texas rural blacks failed to gain land, the other side of the account is that almost a third of them did.	1
Steven Hahn and others have shown that freed people very much wanted their own land. In Texas, they attained it at the margins of white settlement: in swampy river bottoms, sandy hillsides, deep pine forests, anywhere Anglos thought the land too infertile or too inaccessible to farm successfully. Sitton and Conrad document the numerous ways in which African American Texans acquired land, including squatting, saving wages, pooling resources with siblings, and following a preacher or an entrepreneur. Some colonies developed in symbiosis with segregated white villages that needed their services.	. . .

There are about 536 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.