| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow. By Thad Sitton and James H. Conrad. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. 248 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 0-292-70618-9. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-292-70642-1.)

Thad Sitton and James H. Conrad have made an important contribution to African American and southern history with their study of communities fashioned by freedmen in the years after emancipation. Although Freedom Colonies focuses narrowly on the independent black communities created by freedmen in Texas, its significance reaches far beyond that limited scope. It transcends the focus in two important ways. First, freedmen in other southern states created similar communities, and Sitton and Conrad both describe the process they likely followed and provide a model for how such studies of them should be conducted. Second, while their book chronicles the experiences of African Americans living in a world largely beyond the reach of the plantation, it also illustrates the strategies they employed in dealing with white individuals and institutions and thus throws light on the severe constraints that all African Americans, whether in freedom colonies or on plantations, endured in the Jim Crow era.

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