Emancipation's Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest

by Leslie A. Schwalm

Most studies of emancipation’s consequences have focused on the South. Moving the discussion to the North, Leslie Schwalm enriches our understanding of the national impact of the transition from slavery to freedom. Emancipation’s Diaspora follows the lives and experiences of thousands of men and women who liberated themselves from slavery, made their way to overwhelmingly white communities in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and worked to live in dignity as free women and men and as citizens.

Schwalm explores the hotly contested politics of black enfranchisement as well as collisions over segregation, civil rights, and the more informal politics of race — including how slavery and emancipation would be remembered and commemorated. She examines how gender shaped the politics of race, and how gender relations were contested and negotiated within the black community. Based on extensive archival research, Emancipation’s Diaspora shows how in churches and schools, in voting booths and Masonic temples, in bustling cities and rural crossroads, black and white Midwesterners — women and men — shaped the local and national consequences of emancipation.

Genres: History

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Dr. Schwalm is a social historian of 19th Century U.S. History at the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Iowa City, Iowa).
Academic profile: http://clas.uiowa.edu/history/people/...

Reviews

[Marvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

About 15 years ago, Robert Dykstra published his brilliant, long-awaited account of Iowans’ struggles with the issue of race in the nineteenth century. Now University of Iowa professor of history Leslie Schwalm has published a book that could be described in the same way but is actually a very different sort of book. Whereas Dykstra focused largely on white Iowans’ debates about what rights they should grant to the state’s African American residents, Schwalm tells the story almost entirely from the perspective of those African American residents themselves. Far from passive recipients of rights granted to them by white Iowans, they struggled to make lives for themselves and to claim their “inalienable” rights in the face of considerable obstacles. Furthermore, in every chapter, Schwalm highlights the contributions of African American women to every issue involved in the struggle of African Americans in Iowa and the upper Midwest for freedom and civil rights.
A brilliant book--perhaps the most important book on Iowa history in the past decade.