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This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people-an embryonic black nation. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice. Emphasizing the importance of kinship, labor, and networks of communication, A Nation under Our Feet explores the political relations and sensibilities that developed under slavery and shows how they set the stage for grassroots mobilization. Hahn introduces us to local leaders, and shows how political communities were built, defended, and rebuilt. He also identifies the quest for self-governance as an essential goal of black politics across the rural South, from contests for local power during Reconstruction, to emigrationism, biracial electoral alliances, social separatism, and, eventually, migration. Hahn suggests that Garveyism and other popular forms of black nationalism absorbed and elaborated these earlier struggles, thus linking the first generation of migrants to the urban North with those who remained in the South. He offers a new framework-looking out from slavery-to understand twentieth-century forms of black political consciousness as well as emerging battles for civil rights. It is a powerful story, told here for the first time, and one that presents both an inspiring and a troubling perspective on American democracy. Emphasizing the role of kinship, labor, and networks in the African-American community, the author retraces six generations of black struggles since the end of the Civil War, revealing a "nation" under construction throughout this entire period.… (more)
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Land plays a pivotal role in Hahn’s argument. He writes, “Whatever their experiences in slavery, it became apparent during the war that freedpeople widely shared the desire to obtain land and use it as a basis for securely planting their families and kinship networks” (pg. 79). While many in the South believed that Northern agitators created the desire for land redistribution, Hahn writes, “Whatever many planters preferred to believe, rural freedpeople did not need tutors or outside agitators to nurture their desire for, or sense of entitlement to, the land” (pg. 135). Even without organized land redistribution, the threat of the idea offered a form of political power as freedpeople could hold “off from signing contracts until the new year,” thereby creating “a temporary labor shortage” that “weakened the landowners’ attempts to tie them down and dictate the terms” (pg. 156). In the end, these conflicts demonstrated the problems with Presidential Reconstruction.
Beyond the acquisition of land, Hahn focuses on the role of literacy. African Americans who escaped to Union lines during the Civil War took advantage of opportunities to learn. Hahn links this with the creation of political agency writing, “The wartime military, by its very nature, thus provided the sort of basic political educations that enslaved people had found almost impossible to come by” (pg. 97). Describing the role of printed matter in promoting colonization, Hahn writes, “We can see in this process the extension and vitality of a new popular culture of belief and verification tied more closely to the printed or written, rather than the spoken, word” (pg. 326).
Finally, Hahn argues that women gained more political agency in the wake of Reconstruction. Though women could not vote, they could help shape votes within their communities. Hahn writes, “Manipulating gender conventions and the expectations of courtship and sexual favor, they both shamed reluctant menfolk into performing their political duties and wreaked the most intimate and humiliating vengeance on those who strayed from the fold” (pg. 228). The shift in the focus of African American political life in the early 1900s toward the church, school, and home offered other opportunities, though men continued to dominate. As Hahn writes, “There was, in other words, not so much a stepping back of the men and a stepping forward of the women as a necessary redeployment to terrain in which both had recognized roles and authority, although the roles and authority still tilted power and leadership toward the men” (pg. 463).