| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations. By Mary Frances Berry. (New York: Knopf, 2005. xiv, 314 pp. $26.95, ISBN 1-4000-4003-5.)
Mary Frances Berry's My Face Is Black Is True is the equivalent of a paradigm-shaping archeological discovery. It is destined to become a seminal work in African American history.	1
Berry's book uncovers the story of Callie House and National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association (ESMRBPA). Berry skillfully demonstrates how the combination of social conditions and House's determination in the face of government repression transformed her into an extraordinary if forgotten mass leader. According to Berry, ESMRBPA estimated a membership of six hundred thousand in the early 1900s; the federal government alleged three hundred thousand in their 1916 indictment of House (p. 254n2). ESMRBPA was apparently the second largest African American mass movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, trailing only another working class-organization of which we know very little, the Colored Farmers' Association. The erasure of the ESMRBPA from historical memory should make us suspicious of the conventional historical narrative, which, in the case of ESMRBPA, was unduly shaped by government suppression.	. . .

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