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A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland

Amazon.com Price:  $26.95 (as of 19/04/2019 14:33 PST- Details)

Description

The exodus of millions of African Americans from the rural South is a central theme of black life and liberation Within the twentieth century. A Mind to Stay offers a counterpoint to the narrative of the Great Migration. Sydney Nathans tells the rare story of people that moved from being enslaved to becoming owners of the very land they had worked in bondage, and who have held on to it from emancipation in the course of the Civil Rights era.

The story started in 1844, when North Carolina planter Paul Cameron bought 1,600 acres near Greensboro, Alabama, and sent out 114 enslaved people to cultivate cotton and enlarge his fortune. Within the 1870s, he sold the plantation to emancipated black families who worked there. Drawing on thousands of letters from the planter and on interviews with descendants of Folks who bought the land, Nathans unravels how and why the planter’s former laborers purchased the website online in their enslavement, kept its name as Cameron Place, and defended their native land against challengers from the Jim Crow era to the present day.

Through the prism of a single plantation and the destiny of black families that dwelt on it for over a century and a half, A Mind to Stay brings to life a vivid cast of characters and illuminates the changing meaning of land and landowning to successive generations of rural African Americans. Folks who remained fought to make their lives fully free―for themselves, for their neighbors, and for individuals who might one day return.

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