Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams and the late Virginia Giuffre have jointly won the Freedom to Publish prize at this year’s British book awards, marking the first time the award has been shared.

Wynn-Williams, a former Facebook executive, was recognised for Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism, her bestselling memoir about her years inside Meta, formerly Facebook. The book makes allegations about the company’s internal culture and practices, including its approach to political influence, China and the wellbeing of teenagers. Meta has disputed the claims.

Giuffre received the award posthumously for Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, which recounts the abuse she said she suffered at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and others.

The award, presented by Yulia Navalnaya and supported by the free expression organisation Index on Censorship, was established in 2022 to highlight threats to writers, publishers and booksellers, and to recognise those who resist attempts at censorship.

Speaking at the ceremony, Wynn-Williams used a rare public appearance to warn of the growing influence of wealthy elites over public discourse and institutions.

“We are all living in a world that now, more than ever, is dominated by networks of powerful elites, whose wealth too often puts them above the law,” she said. “As they rewrite the rules, they grow arrogant with entitlement and impunity.”

Wynn-Williams has herself faced legal restrictions since the publication of Careless People. Meta secured a legal order on the eve of publication preventing her from publicly discussing aspects of the book, and she faces fines of $50,000 each time she breaches the order.

Referring to Giuffre’s memoir, Wynn-Williams said: “Virginia understood who silence protected and realised that only truth can protect everyone else.” She added that Giuffre had faced “coordinated suppression efforts, intimidation and litigation” after speaking publicly about Epstein and Maxwell.

“But here’s a strange thing,” Wynn-Williams said. “When you try that hard to silence a woman who is telling the truth, you announce to the whole world that the truth must be very dangerous indeed.”

“Virginia spent years exhausted by a battle she should never have had to fight,” she continued. “She did not get the ending her story deserves.”

Mike Harpley, publisher at Pan Macmillan, praised Wynn-Williams’s “astonishing bravery” in writing Careless People.

“She is now facing a considerable personal, legal and financial toll for bringing to light issues of crucial public interest, both here in the UK and internationally,” he said. “It is a breathtaking irony that while her book helped spark a global reckoning for social media, she is unable to take part in the conversation, silenced by a company that claims to champion free speech.”

Giuffre killed herself in April 2025, shortly before the publication of Nobody’s Girl. She began working on the memoir with journalist Amy Wallace in 2020, documenting both the abuse she alleged she suffered and the years she spent battling powerful individuals and institutions. She was a prominent accuser of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who repeatedly and strongly denied the accusations.

Accepting the award through a recorded message, Wallace said: “We worked together for more than four years, and it was the honour of my career … She always wanted this book to reach as many people as possible, and she particularly wanted it to help other survivors of sexual abuse, not just those who suffered at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, but anyone who’s been coerced into a sexual situation, and she’s clearly done that.”

Giuffre’s brother, Sky Roberts, said she had “inspired millions upon millions” by “speaking truth to power”, adding that she showed “an ordinary person can do extraordinary things”.

The Freedom to Publish award has previously been given to authors including Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Boris Akunin, whose books were banned in Russia after his criticism of Vladimir Putin.

Jemimah Steinfeld, chief executive of Index on Censorship, said the two books demonstrated how “the rich and powerful use legal pressure to try to silence those with less capital”. “The circumstances are very different and the stories are not morally comparable,” Steinfeld said, “but they share similarities.”

The British Book Awards celebrate authors, publishers and industry professionals across the UK book trade, in association with trade publisher The Bookseller. Elsewhere at this year’s awards, AF Steadman was named author of the year, Philippa Gregory won the fiction prize for Boleyn Traitor, and Florence Knapp took debut fiction book of the year for The Names, a bestselling novel exploring the long-term effects of domestic abuse.

My earliest reading memory
I was taught to read quite early, at five or six, probably so that I would sit quietly and not be a nuisance to the adults. And it worked. Once I’d entered a book, I didn’t want to come out. I remember how Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl turned my heart upside down. I was living with my grandmother at the time, and I cried under the blanket, terrified that one day she, too, would die.

My favourite book growing up
I read greedily and indiscriminately, picking books at random from my parents’ library. Thomas Mayne Reid’s adventure novels were favourites, especially The Headless Horseman. Jack London’s Martin Eden, too. Clearly, the idea of being both a hero and a writer appealed to me. Writers were not usually heroes. I also loved a textbook on criminology, which explained how to make invisible ink, what traces criminals leave behind, and so on – matters of extraordinary importance to any 10-year-old boy.

The author that changed me as a teenager
All novels that contained erotic scenes – because of the acute shortage of eroticism in the late socialist Bulgaria of the 1980s. Also around that time I discovered JD Salinger. I reread his stories obsessively, without being sure I understood everything. At 17, I decided to write him a letter, trying to provoke him into breaking his silence. Of course, I never sent it. Much later, that story found its way into my memoir, The Story Smuggler.

The writer who changed my mind
Jorge Luis Borges. When the first translations of his work appeared in Bulgaria, I was 21, shortly before the wall fell – a crucial moment. It was as if I suddenly understood what literature is capable of, and how there are no real borders between genres. I had an exhilarating sense of freedom, but also of a shared secret. Memory, erudition, heart, science and myth – all of it was there.

The book that made me want to be a writer
The poems of two tragic Bulgarian poets: Peyo Yavorov and Nikola Vaptsarov. I began writing poetry in secret. Later, I was found out.

The book I reread
Homer’s Odyssey. We probably mentioned it or read parts of it at school, and perhaps that was what put me off it for so long. After turning 40, I began to truly understand it – and to reread it, seeing it differently each time. The theme of the father increasingly drew me in, the bond between father and son. Then there’s the great theme of return – not only the return home but also to the past – and memory, the question of who remembers us unconditionally and recognises us, like the dog. In my last two novels I have been in dialogue with this book again and again.

The book I discovered later in life
Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. It always stood out on my bookshelf, but for years I never reached for it. I imagined it would be very gloomy, heavy, full of endless reflection. When I read it in my late 40s it wasn’t love at first sight, but the story didn’t let me go. I love books I can converse with, even enter into Socratic arguments with. It was very important to me while I was writing Time Shelter. You think you write in solitude, but in truth you are in constant dialogue with other books and authors.

The book I am currently reading
The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk. A powerful novel that seems, like Borges’s maps, to try to contain the world – and time – at a scale of 1:1. A book for slow winter reading.

Freedom to read advocates cheer decision in ‘PRH v. Gibson’

Aug 15 2025

Right to read advocates hailed a Florida court’s ringing defense of First Amendment rights this week. On August 13, U.S. District Court Judge Carlos E. Mendoza of the Middle District of Florida ruled in favor of plaintiffs in Penguin Random House v. Gibson, a lawsuit challenging Florida House Bill 1069. The decision came in a state besieged by school library book removals after threats of legal action by the state attorney general and education commissioner.

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Florida court upholds freedom to read in ‘PRH v. Gibson’

Aug 14 2025

In an order that sets a strong precedent for keeping books on public school library shelves, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida has upheld the freedom to read in Penguin Random House v. Gibson. Filed in August 2024, the lawsuit challenges key provisions of Florida House Bill 1069, which was signed into law by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in May 2023 and purports to bar “pornographic” materials and content that “depicts or describes sexual content” from school and classroom libraries.

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Free speech is in permacrisis – or so some would have you believe. Complaints that freedom of speech is under attack come mostly from the political right, from public figures who appear to the naked eye to be extremely free to say and do what they like, and see no irony in doing so via platforms with vast audiences.

These vigorous defenders of free speech also often have a curiously narrow set of interests over which they wish to exercise it. Far from the noble anti-authoritarian roots of the British liberal tradition, these figures – Nigel Farage, for example – prefer to use their platforms to punch down, often against already persecuted minority groups. Rather than wanting freer speech, what they actually want is freedom from the consequences of broadcasting their views. What the right calls cancel culture, philosopher Arianne Shahvisi writes, “is often just the supersized celebrity version of what the rest of us experience all the time: consequences for our mistakes and bigotries. You do something shitty and people distance themselves from you, especially if you refuse to acknowledge your wrongdoing and make amends.”

Our techno-libertarian overlords have recently decided to make speech freer. Meta, owner of the world’s biggest social media platform, announced earlier this year that it would dispense with factchecking for its 3 billion users on Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg described the move as “restoring free expression”. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, now X, he sacked 80% of engineers dedicated to trust and safety on the platform, resulting in what has been described as “a deluge of misinformation and toxic discourse”. X has now haemorrhaged millions of users in a continuing exodus to more decent places on the internet. Following Meta’s announcement, on the other hand, a flurry of decidedly fact-free memes have sought to point out the folly of the new policy, some more trenchantly than others. “Facebook Founder and Convicted Pedophile Mark Zuckerberg, Dead at 36, Says Social Media Sites Should Not Fact-Check Posts”, is one example. See what they did there?

The problem is that the definition of “free speech” has strayed far from its origins in the rights of ordinary folk to speak without interference from higher powers like governments. It has become a vacuous term, a plea to be able to act without any constraints, a dumb binary that either you’ve got or you haven’t. Wielded as a holy passphrase, it is often garnished with a quote misattributed to Voltaire about defending to the death the right of one’s opponent to make a bad argument. This ostensible piety is almost always false. The defence of a sacred social principle is a good cover for those who are in reality provocateurs, shills or even criminals. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the far-right agitator who styles himself “Tommy Robinson” is a prime example of a person whose questionable contributions to society had him fading into irrelevance until he jumped aboard the freedom of speech gravy train. As Nesrine Malik put it: Yaxley‑Lennon “managed to refashion himself from a convicted street thug to a principled crusader” and “disempowered his critics, because to attack him now was not to critique his politics, but his right to freedom of speech”.

It’s not just felons. Saying you’ve been silenced is a good way to get attention, followers and money, even as you skate over the absurd contradiction of making such claims in a national newspaper or popular podcast. According to professor of media Gavan Titley, “It is a transparent yet regularly efficient means of parlaying established public status into virtuous marginality, casting discredited ideas as deliberative propositions, reframing familiar, reactionary ideas as iconoclastic experiments.” In other words, feverish allegations of censorship have become a sort of seasoning, spicing up the very blandest of takes with the mystique of prohibition.

For evidence of a highly selective – and therefore disingenuous – championing of free speech, look no further than the world’s richest man. His social media platform X “strives to be the town square of the internet by promoting and protecting freedom of expression”. Not the freedom of expression of @elonjet though, an account that tracked Musk’s private jet in real time using public data before being suspended, alongside those of several journalists. No, the kind of free expression the Muskverse favours include false claims that the perpetrator of the appalling Southport stabbings was a Muslim, and that, in summer 2024, the UK was on the brink of civil war because of mass immigration. It is chilling to now learn that just before his killing spree, Axel Rudakubana watched a graphic video of a stabbing in Sydney on X that the company had refused to take down.

It’s time to be transparent and admit that nobody really desires completely free speech, and that opinions about limits on it, and the reasoning behind those limits, are different depending on your agenda. Invoking free speech as a stand-alone, abstract value, shorn of social context, historical conditions and any regard for the unequal playing field of public discourse is either foolish or deliberately obfuscatory. We need a strategy for sifting out the grifters, and power ought to be at the heart of any sensible discussion about speech. Who has more power? What are their political aims? Who stands to gain, and how? What are the intentions behind their speech, and its outcomes? While we may wait for ever for the broligarchy to get a bit more honest about these and other issues, in the meantime we can at least keep our bullshit detectors in good working order.

Further reading

We Need New Stories by Nesrine Malik (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99)

Arguing for a Better World by Arianne Shahvisi (John Murray, £20)

The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher (Quercus, £20)

Emancipation Day is a special holiday in Washington, DC. Observed annually on April 16, the day is meant to commemorate President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the 1862 bill that legally ended slavery in the nation’s capital. But what did slavery’s abolition mean and how did emancipation in DC connect to the significant transformations taking place in the region during the period? Created by award-winning scholar-storyteller Kate Masur, along with illustrator Liz Clarke, Freedom Was in Sight! A Graphic History of Reconstruction in the Washington, D.C., Region answers these questions and more.

Kate Masur is a professor of history at Northwestern University with a courtesy appointment in African American studies. Her work focuses primarily on the pre-1900 history of race, politics, and law in the United States. Most recently, she authored Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (2021), a history of how African American activists and white allies waged a struggle for racial equality in the free states and how that struggle shaped federal policy during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History and a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021.

Masur’s first book was a crucial precursor to her work on Freedom Was in Sight! Published in 2010, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. is a close-up study of politics and activism in in the nation’s capital during Reconstruction. Now, Freedom Was in Sight! expands our understanding of that history through a masterful collaboration with illustrator Liz Clarke. The graphic history harmoniously blends Masur’s research and storytelling prowess with Clarke’s captivating visuals. This appealing, accessible book is ideal reading both in classrooms and living rooms.

I sat down with Masur shortly after the release of Freedom Was in Sight! and our conversation was as kaleidoscopic as the book. We talked about the creation of Black institutions, the centrality of Black women’s labor and leadership, white reactions to Black freedom, and how she and Clarke approached this history with intention and care, particularly when it came to truthfully and humanely representing the violent aspects of the period. Luckily, the book was released in advance of DC Emancipation Day 2025 and gives us much to celebrate and consider for that local holiday season.

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Jessica Rucker (JR): I’ve recently been reading a lot about the ideas and activities of Black freedom and liberation seekers in the United States, and I’m grateful I added Freedom Was in Sight! to my list. In a section of the book where you provide an overview of the history of Reconstruction, you explain that Freedom Was in Sight! is not a “word-dominated, monochromatic history text.” I have been thinking about that. What do you mean by that?

 

Kate Masur (KM): In that section I was explaining why so many people supported the creation of a graphic history of Reconstruction. The book was commissioned by the National Park Service (NPS). An NPS historian named Dean Herrin came up with the idea; inspired by other graphic histories including John Lewis’s March series, Dean thought a graphic history of Reconstruction in the DC region would help illuminate an essential period in American history that too few people understand or think about—one that has important present-day resonances. He thought the graphic-history format had the potential to reach audiences and readers who might not want to read a more traditional history book. Dean applied for and was awarded an internal NPS grant to support the project. Then, in collaboration with the Organization of American Historians, he approached me about authoring the book. He thought I might be interested because he knew my first book, An Example for All the Land, and we had met a few times through NPS projects.

The next step, and what really makes this book so special, is that we were able to bring on board Liz Clarke, a wonderful, experienced artist who created the book’s gorgeous illustrations. Liz’s pictures are the opposite of monochromatic! They look completely different from black-and-white photos or sepia-toned artifacts from the past. The vibrant colors make the stories in the book feel very present and alive, creating a sense of energy that propels them forward. A graphic history is a really multidimensional text that engages readers on many levels. If you’re a very visual person, you can soak in individual frames, one by one, or consider the story that’s told through the illustrations alone. If you’re more oriented toward text, you might move quickly across the pictures, following the narrative via the words. Or you can do some of each. I think having those options—and getting to interact with rich, colorful images representing a period in the distant past—are two things that make a graphic history distinctive and fun.

 

JR: When does Freedom Was in Sight! begin the story of Reconstruction, and what impact do you think that beginning might have on our understanding of slavery, abolition, and freedom in the United States?

 

KM: Let me start by saying that many, many people—including folks who read a lot and have a lot of education—don’t know much about Reconstruction. Sometimes a friend or an audience member will say to me something like, “Sorry if this sounds dumb, but when you say Reconstruction, what do you mean?”

There are many ways to define Reconstruction, but in this book I define it as the period when Americans first and most intensively grappled with the abolition of slavery. If you think about it that way, it’s immediately clear that this would be a highly conflictual period and that it would begin with the beginning of the Civil War. When the war started in 1861, race-based slavery had existed in English-speaking North America for some 250 years. Enslaved people had been hoping and struggling for freedom from day one of their captivity, trying in small and large ways to resist, whether by eking out modest concessions within a horrific regime, attempting to escape, or engaging in forms of sabotage against their captors.

Many white Americans, of course, benefitted from slavery and wanted it to continue. By 1861, so many pro-slavery Americans cared so much about perpetuating slavery that they attempted to separate from the United States and fought a war to try to ensure slavery’s survival. Unfortunately for them, they lost that war and, in the process, hastened slavery’s destruction. In areas that came under US occupation or where battles occurred, enslaved people escaped to Union lines in droves. Their actions were so widespread and insistent that US civilian and military officials were forced to take note and form new policies in response. I begin Reconstruction with the beginning of the Civil War, because that is when a significant new stage in the destruction of American slavery began, setting off debates and conflicts that would resonate for years to come.

 

JR: This makes sense. If Reconstruction begins with the destruction of slavery during the Civil War, when does it end?

 

KM: The conventional view is that Reconstruction ended with the resolution of the contested presidential election of 1876. As a result of violence, corruption, and confusion, it was unclear who had prevailed in three of the states: Democrat Samuel Tilden or Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Congress formed an electoral commission to determine the winner, and the result—often called the “Compromise of 1877”—is typically considered the end of Reconstruction.

Freedom Was in Sight!, by contrast, argues that it’s more useful to understand Reconstruction as having ended at the end of the 1890s. When we center the abolition of slavery in the Reconstruction narrative, the year 1877 appears comparatively insignificant. The Republican-led US government had wavered in its commitment to enforcing Black civil rights and voting rights in the South well before 1877, and sporadic efforts to do so continued after that year. Meanwhile, in many places in the South, Black men continued to exercise their rights to vote and hold office well beyond 1877. The book shows how from 1879 to 1883, the Readjuster Party of Virginia—supported by Black and white Virginians who allied in opposition to the Democrats—dramatically changed politics for a while, advocating public education for all and justice for lynching victims, for example. Such dynamics are completely missed if we end Reconstruction in 1877.

By the end of the 1890s, however, we see the consolidation of a new order known as Jim Crow. It is definitely not the multiracial democracy desired by Black people and their white allies of the Reconstruction period. But it is not what the most die-hard white supremacists wanted either. Black institutions created during Reconstruction persisted well beyond the 1890s, which among other things meant that more and more African Americans attended school and Black literacy rates continued to rise; Black churches thrived and remained hubs of community life. This is not to soft-pedal the Jim Crow order, which represented a betrayal of the best promises of Reconstruction and was characterized by terrible poverty and harrowing white violence against Black people. It is, however, to say that by the end of the 1890s the nation did not see a return to the days of slavery but, rather, the emergence of an order that was new and distinctive.

 

JR: Right now, I am reading Black Reconstruction in America (1935) and finding that it pairs well with Freedom Was in Sight! W. E. B. Du Bois describes Reconstruction as one of the most dramatic periods in United States history. We are talking about 4 million enslaved people becoming free, and the nation grappling with whether to grant freedom, and what their status should look like, and what that should mean on a day-to-day basis. Like you, he focuses on the everyday choices of ordinary Black people.

Why did you choose to center the everyday choices Black people made during the era of Reconstruction?

 

KM: Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America has been hugely influential on historians of the period. I agree that it’s well worth reading! Du Bois’s closing essay on the racism of the historical profession at the time he was writing is especially bracing. It’s titled “The Propaganda of History.”

In terms of the orientation of Freedom Was in Sight!, we knew from the beginning that it would emphasize Black people and Black history. If Reconstruction is the history of the abolition of slavery and what followed, then the people who had borne the brunt of that awful institution ought to be highlighted—their choices and their decisions and their lives. We hope the perspective provided here, which is grounded in scholarship by generations of historians, will help readers see that the people who moved from slavery to freedom in this period were real, three-dimensional human beings who had families and aspirations, who experienced joy as well as sorrow, and who tried to make their way under conditions that could be both exciting and terrible. The book is also intended to demonstrate that Black history is not marginal to the larger story of “American” history; Black history is not a subject that only some people should be interested in or responsible for knowing about. Rather, we present Black history as essential to American history writ large.

Emphasizing Black people’s lives within the history of Reconstruction can also help us see familiar histories in new ways. For example, many people think slavery was abolished when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, or when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified. The reality is much more complicated. Policymakers in Washington often responded to the actions of enslaved people who showed, by escaping and by offering to serve the Union cause, what they thought the war should be about, and what freedom should mean. Those kinds of dynamics are part of what we wanted to capture in the book. Much of it illuminates how everyday people made meaning and created institutions in the wake of slavery.

 

JR: You really draw attention to women’s lives. Can you share some of the Black women who appear in the book, the choices they made, and why their stories are important?

 

KM: One thing that surprised and really delighted me was how the graphic history, as a genre, felt so well suited for representing the lives and experiences of women. Women can get submerged or sidelined in historical accounts because they aren’t as well represented in sources as men, or because we focus on aspects of life where we see a great deal of change (politics and elections, for example), as opposed to areas where changes seem to occur more slowly (family relationships or child-rearing practices, for example). The graphic history allowed us to make women literally visible in places like homes, fields, and churches. I loved that the genre made that possible.

For instance, as slavery ended, many Black families had their first opportunities to work for wages instead of being forced to work without compensation as someone else’s chattel property. Historical sources tell us that Black families often pooled their labor resources. That looked different in different places, and for different families. Very often, though, Black families decided that men and teenage children would work for wages for white employers, while women would take care of their homes and children and also grow food crops for the family’s use and to sell. In this way, Black women’s labor was absolutely essential to sustaining families and communities. We were able to show those kinds of dynamics graphically; illustrations in the book depict Black women doing things like cooking or looking after children or working in the garden, as well as working in the fields, which they also did.

Beyond showing relatively anonymous people living everyday lives in agricultural settings, the book offered wonderful opportunities to highlight the lives of individual Black women. Ida B. Wells is in the book, as is Anna Julia Cooper, who in 1886 delivered a powerful speech about the significance of Black women and girls for the project of Black freedom. One of my favorite examples of women in the book is the generations of women of the Plummer family of Prince George’s County, Maryland. During slavery, Emily Plummer was forced to live apart from her husband, Adam Plummer. Their daughter, Sarah Miranda, was essentially kidnapped from DC and sold in New Orleans right before the Civil War began. After the war, the parents, with help from their community, sent their son Henry to New Orleans to try to find his sister. Amazingly, he succeeded. Sarah Miranda had become a devout Baptist while in New Orleans, and when she returned to Prince George’s County, she led the family and their community to found a Baptist church and, later, an associated burial society. Henry and Sarah Miranda’s younger sister, Nellie, became a teacher in DC and wrote a book documenting their family’s history. Much of what we now know about the Plummer family is the result of Nellie’s efforts to collect her family’s stories and compile them in a book that she self-published in 1927. So the women of the Plummer family—Emily, Sarah Miranda, and Nellie—offer some excellent examples of the kinds of community-building, sustaining work that Black women did in this period.

 

JR: The book has a Black woman narrator named Emma Brown. What role does she play in the book and what does she reveal about the telling of Reconstruction in the Washington, DC, region?

 

KM: Freedom Was in Sight consists of a lot of different intertwined stories, not one single story, and as Liz Clarke and I finished chapter 1, I became concerned that there wouldn’t be enough glue to hold the different vignettes together. We decided that a narrator could help create that cohesiveness, providing a familiar voice and visual signpost to help readers feel like they were in good hands.

We chose Emma Brown as the narrator. In real life, Emma Brown grew up in DC as a free person of color and had the opportunity to attend Oberlin College before the Civil War began. In 1864 she was appointed to teach in DC’s first public school for Black children. She remained a prominent educator in Washington, eventually becoming the principal of the Sumner School, which was a state-of-the-art school constructed in 1872. That was a very prestigious job and she wrote that she was thrilled about it.

One reason I liked the idea of Emma Brown as the narrator was that there’s a photograph of her in the collections of the Library of Congress. So, we had a real depiction of her that Liz could use as she drew Emma for the book. I loved the idea of having a teacher as the narrator, and Liz had the brilliant idea of depicting her in front of a chalkboard on the title page of each chapter. Last but definitely not least, I thought it would be great to have a Black woman narrator for the book to model that Black women can and do have the authority to narrate history. Rather than ask whether it’s possible, the book simply and straightforwardly puts a Black woman in charge of telling the story. I hope readers will agree that she is a great narrator!

Vital and liberatory institutions created during Reconstruction did persist; people sustained those institutions, and the institutions in turn sustained people, even in very bad times.

JR: Some of the stories Brown helps tell explore how white people reacted to Black people’s freedom choices. As a Black woman and an educator from D.C., her narration provides helpful context and conveys the realities Black freedom seekers faced. It also unsettles myths of Reconstruction that have often circulated in popular culture. How did white people react to Black freedom during this period in the Washington, D.C., region and why might these reactions be important to consider?

 

KM: In many instances, the actions of Black Americans were shaped or limited by white people’s behaviors. White Americans were politically very divided in this period. As Emma Brown emphasizes, between 1865 and 1870, the nation adopted three new constitutional amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth. These amendments for the first time promised federal protection for basic individual rights and for Black men’s right to vote. The government was unable and ultimately unwilling to enforce the amendments, but the fact that they were ratified in the first place is a testament to the fact that many, many white Americans stood up for freedom and racial equality in this period. The book also offers examples of individual white people who were allies to Black Americans—for instance, people who promoted Black education in the South or sought to protect Black Americans against white terrorism and violence.

Yet white supremacy and white-led violence were crucial and sometimes overwhelming factors in this period. Many white Americans worked hard and very persistently to sabotage the democratic impulses of Reconstruction and to restore white rule in the absence of slavery. White folks in the DC region and elsewhere reacted violently against Black people’s assertions of freedom and attempts simply to live without being subjected to white authority. For instance, white Southerners regularly burned down Black schools in efforts not only to deprive Black communities of a cherished resource, but also to send a message of intimidation—that white people would go to violent lengths to demand Black subservience.

The book also grapples with lynching. In chapter 5, Emma Brown introduces the issue with a definition and a content warning. We discuss the 1879 lynching of James Carroll in Frederick County, Maryland. To this day, many people associate lynchings by white mobs with the Deep South, but the Equal Justice Initiative and local projects have demonstrated that such events also occurred in the DC region. The chapter also takes up the issue of police violence. There is an extensive record of racially discriminatory policing in Washington in this period, including violent arrests, beatings, and shootings of Black Washingtonians by police. The book shows not only police violence but African Americans’ mobilizations to combat it.

 

JR: I value the many times and ways Freedom Was in Sight! names and identifies Black resistance. One of the themes that most resonates is how Black people in DC, as well as in various counties in Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia, constructed and reconstructed visions of freedom despite white backlash. For example, Black people worked diligently to find and locate loved ones, they purchased land, they fostered a sense of community and belonging, and most compellingly and often with very modest means, they founded autonomous institutions.

Earlier, you mentioned that the book tells stories about everyday people creating institutions after emancipation. What were the most important institutions for newly emancipated Black folks in and around the nation’s capital? What made these institutions so important and meaningful?

 

KM: One of the questions I ask when doing history is, what are the ways that people come together to try to accomplish something? Institutions are the result of people acting collectively in some kind of formalized way. Sometimes institutions can be full of conflict and disagreement. Just because people participate collectively in an organization doesn’t mean everyone gets along or agrees on what the future should look like. But institutions represent the reality that people, by working together, create structures for organizing their communities, taking care of one another, establishing lines of authority, and getting stuff done.

The Black institutions emphasized in the book are families, schools, churches, and voluntary associations. Many historians have shown that Black communities after slavery were rooted in family relationships. During the era of slavery, enslaved family members were often sold away; people cultivated loving relationships but ultimately had little control over whom they lived with. There’s extensive evidence that as slavery ended, freedpeople sought to reunite with family members; they made families the basis of their economic lives; and they cultivated relationships of care and interdependence within complex and often difficult contexts. In the book, the family is the institution that grounds all others. People began by valuing family relationships and trying to develop them, and from there—with families at the center—cultivated additional institutions such as churches, schools, and mutual aid societies.

For Black institutions in the rural parts of the DC region, I relied heavily on a National Park Service study by historian Edith B. Wallace called “The Rural African American Experience, 1865–1900, in the National Capital Area.” Wallace’s study emphasized landscapes and the built environment and highlighted three key types of buildings that characterized postemancipation rural Black settlements in the region: churches, schools, and lodge halls. In the book, we used illustrations of those kinds of buildings to depict independent Black institutions and to show how they were places where community members gathered for rituals, fun, and celebration. In many cases I highlighted buildings from the period that are still standing; I hope at least a few readers will take time to visit those places.

JR: Freedom Was in Sight! does a lot of work, and if I was still a high school social studies teacher in DC—my home city—I imagine I would read this book with my students and use it in three primary ways. First, I would use it to engage students in critical conversations about Black spaces and what they meant to and for recently freed Black people in our area. Next, following the book’s lead, I would do my best to underscore freedpeople’s vision for democracy by highlighting their efforts at gaining, maintaining, and exercising political power. Finally, I would home in on the roles Black women took on during the era in our region with the hope of building on the book’s message of how important it is to preserve and narrate local histories.

This teaching approach would largely be possible because of the book’s organization and structure. Can you tell us how the book is organized and why it is structured this way?

 

KM: Thanks so much! Yes, the book is designed as a sort of package, in hopes that it will appeal to general readers and also be useful for educators at a variety of levels. It includes a brief introduction, the graphic history itself (which is more than 80 pages), an essay on Reconstruction that places events in the book in a broader context, eight wonderful primary sources, a timeline, an essay on sources, and a QR code that takes readers to resources developed by high school teachers for teaching it in high school classrooms. We wanted different kinds of educators to be able to imagine using the book in their classes, but we didn’t want the book to feel too textbook-y or to turn off folks who might encounter it in a bookstore or at a historic site.

 

JR: Building on the previous question, I’d like to talk a little more about the illustrations, which are both evocative and provocative. Chapter 5 especially reinforces the power of a graphic history as opposed to a “word-dominated, monochromatic” history of Reconstruction. Just like in the previous four chapters, we are greeted by our narrator, Emma Brown. But, unlike in those chapters, Brown’s facial expression looks very different, very solemn. Also, the first several pages use either an all-black background or dark hues, tones, and shades. The chapter brought up lots of feelings and thoughts for me. I was especially struck by the lynching of James Carroll. How do the visual choices of the chapter contribute to the stories being told throughout the book?

 

KM: Chapter 5, which is called “Reaction,” is the chapter that really consolidates the story of white resistance to Black freedom. A lot of thought and planning went into all the chapters, but this one probably most of all. Some of the aspects you’re describing—the black background, and how Emma Brown looks very serious—are the result of Liz Clarke’s genius. She made choices for every single panel about how to depict the characters and their facial expressions; she also suggested that we use black borders for the pages that depict James Carroll’s murder. When it came to representing the lynching itself, we took very special care.

For more than two decades I’ve been following evolving discussions of what it means to display images of lynching—and particularly of lynched Black bodies. Some of that conversation took shape in the early 2000s in response to Without Sanctuary, an exhibit of lynching photographs. Visual artists have participated in the conversation by producing art that reflects both on lynching itself and on how it has been represented. These discussions also connect to present-day conversations about the proliferation and circulation of images of Black people who have been murdered by police. Many people have made important points about how harmful it can be to be to circulate and recirculate images of murdered Black people, how such images may be disrespectful to the person who died, and how they may help entrench white supremacist ideas.

All those strands of conversation informed discussions Liz and I had via email about how to represent James Carroll’s murder by a white mob in Point of Rocks in Frederick County, Maryland. After we had a draft of the chapter, we sought input from folks including you, Jessica (thank you!), and a couple of other people who had either written about lynching or who had experience teaching about it in high school classrooms. We wanted to get people’s input on how best to avoid exposing people to the most hurtful, harmful aspects of lynching imagery, while also not sugarcoating or sidestepping the realities of history.

If Reconstruction is the history of the abolition of slavery and what followed, then the people who had borne the brunt of that awful institution ought to be highlighted—their choices and their decisions and their lives.

JR: I am really grateful for the care you two took with chapter 5. It takes great skill, and will, to use words and illustrations to simultaneously avoid depicting such a violent murder and retraumatizing readers, while also refusing to let the murderers off the hook. I think the chapter demonstrates the amount of collaboration that went into creating this book and why collaboration is so important.

One of the key takeaways of the book is that Reconstruction was a period of great transition in the United States. Americans fought for and won three constitutional amendments: the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the Fourteenth codified birthright citizenship and promised civil rights, and the Fifteenth barred racial discrimination in the right to vote. Plus, Black people and Black institutions were developing and in many cases thriving. For the first time in its history, Americans were building a multiracial democracy. Yet, a subset of white Americans worked hard to defeat Black freedom and citizenship, and many of the gains of the period were overturned.

In some ways our present moment seems reminiscent of the end of Reconstruction, sometimes called the “nadir” of Black history. A cacophony of threats to democracy have been orchestrated in ways that remind me of the events at the end of the 1890s and make me very uncomfortable.

Do you want to say anything about how this book connects to our current historic moment? Are there ways you think your book might offer some insights on where the United States is headed?

 

KM: Historians often think about time horizons and how we represent them. We ask where to begin and end the story we are telling, and also what constitutes the ending of a given period and what features of that period might persist beyond its designated ending. If you suggest that the end of Reconstruction meant the shutting down of all of the period’s possibilities for freedom and democracy, then you have no way of accounting for the continuing proliferation of Black institutions after the “end” of Reconstruction, the growing literacy rate, the Black colleges that trained generations of Black leaders, the growth and development of Black churches, the flourishing of Black arts and culture in cities like New York and Washington, DC, in the early 20th century, and more. I hope the end of Freedom Was in Sight conveys that even as Reconstruction ended and the Jim Crow order took shape in the South, not everything was lost. Vital and liberatory institutions created during Reconstruction did persist; people sustained those institutions, and the institutions in turn sustained people, even in very bad times.

We could apply that kind of perspective to this moment too. I hate to say anything that sounds Pollyannaish because I’m actually very, very worried about what’s going on right now. Time continues to unfold, however, and we aren’t always aware of how the things we do might make a difference, not only right away but down the road. The institutions that we build, the groups we participate in, the efforts that we make toward freedom, human equality, and dignity—we do those in our own moments for our own reasons, and we simply cannot know what the future holds. If we feel like our efforts are failing in the moment, we can’t know whether they are actually failing over the long term. I think one of the perspectives you get from history is the knowledge that things do change and people and institutions do make a difference. The alternative, capitulating, is also never the better choice. 

Featured photograph: Kate Masur.

In his 1925 essay “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” Arturo Schomburg writes, “There is the definite desire and determination to have a history, well documented, widely known at least within race circles, and administered as a stimulating and inspiring tradition for the coming generations.” Award-winning historian and writer Blair LM Kelley is a shining example of Schomburg’s call to action for creating a historical legacy that future generations will invoke for years to come.

Kelley is the current Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies and director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Her work focuses primarily on the Black American South and its activist legacies. For example, Kelley’s first book Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (2010) chronicles the everyday resistance of Black women and men against segregated streetcars and trains in cities across the early Jim Crow South.

Kelley’s newest book, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (2023), uses her family history and archival research to expand our understanding of race, gender, and class in the South. Black Folk is a dazzling testament of research, storytelling, and analytical rigor that is accessible to both academic and nonacademic audiences alike. It is the recipient of multiple awards, including the 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award, the 2024 Phillip Taft Labor History Award, and the 2024 Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize in Nonfiction.

I sat down with Kelley ahead of the paperback release of Black Folk. We had a wide-ranging conversation about Black joy, her careful excavation of the interior lives of working-class Black people, quiet protest and resistance, and the influence of working-class Black women on Black activism.

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Regina N. Bradley (RNB): I have been rereading Black Folk and I want to start with the title, which you address in the introduction and pointedly say is not a reference to W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. What made you feel like you had to distinguish between a Duboisian understanding of race and class, and the one that you present in the book?

 

Blair LM Kelley (BLMK): I called it Black Folk because I just wanted it to be us, and inhabit a Black point of view. Every reader is welcome, but I wanted it to be grounded in community, I wanted it to be home. Home folks who we know. And I wanted it to be discernible by us as a story of us, by us, for us.

 

RNB: For me, the book conjured up Zora. Do you see yourself in conversation with folks like Zora Neale Hurston and Albert Murray? If you were to put yourself in a genealogical conversation, which books do you feel would be with Black Folk?

 

BLMK: Absolutely, the work of Zora Neale Hurston is an inspiration. Particularly for my Athens chapter, the second chapter, “Sarah at Home, Working on Her Own Account,” which is the story of Sarah Hill, a Black washerwoman who lived and worked in Athens, Georgia, where I use historic, New Deal–era Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews. Hurston worked as a WPA interviewer and drew on her profound understanding of the work of Black women. I talk about Hurston’s analysis and scholarship in that chapter and I explicate her story of a washerwoman, the short story called “Sweat,” which is so thoughtful and brilliant and careful.

In “Sweat,” the site of Black women’s work is all encompassing. The main character, Delia, was both fighting for her independence but then also tethered to her household and to a husband who was awful to her. In the end, her independent spirit and willingness to fight back really liberates her. So I love that story and I love the ways in which she is not only there as a storyteller but also as an oral historian, this ethnographer whose work is in the WPA, whose criticism of the work of others in the WPA undergirds my own analysis of the things we are missing in those interviews if we take them on the surface. Hurston’s work and just the brilliance that Sarah exhibits, the woman who is the washerwoman whose story I dig into, is so incredible and so she is really an inspiration for that work of digging deep, that care work that has to go into how we listen to this generation.

Of course, I’m always indebted to historians like Robin D. G. Kelley, Tera Hunter, whose work taught me how to even think in these ways, how to build the infrastructure behind the ways I want to storytell. I want it to read like a story, but I want it to sit in a structure that is historical, that is archival, that is grounded in oral histories and the things that we can know, ways of knowing about the past. And so I’m always indebted to them.

I’m also a huge fan of Toni Morrison and so I always want to invoke the ways in which she wrote about space and household and time and care with such beauty. And I really wanted to bring the beauty back to the ways in which we talked about regular Black people on an everyday basis and invoke that Morrisonian tone if I could.

 

RNB: Traditional historical narratives are so dry and impersonable and sometimes they dehumanize the subject in order to preserve academic integrity. I didn’t get that with this book. I know that this book is nonfiction. It is grounded in fact, but the storytelling is so absorbing. It reminded me of the oral tradition and how significant that is in understanding Southern Black history. You do that so beautifully with this book.

Can you talk a little bit about the significance of storytelling as an engine for history? Why is storytelling important for making the stories and the narratives that you are trying to highlight accessible to nonacademic audiences?

BLMK: What is so important is that people learn through story. We learn our past through the stories that we can tell. When I’m reading regular history, I’m always thinking about my folks and thinking, Well, how does that sound for their experiences? I’m always looking for the sound and the feel, even when I’m reading more traditional history.

I am frustrated with the ways in which people who are not formally trained as historians become the greatest leading historians in the country, because they can write for general audiences and people love history and they want readable history. So I also want trained historians to rise to the occasion of writing for a general audience, so that people can read our work. Folks should benefit from the things that scholars know, but it should be given to them in ways that they can be comfortable, that they can fall through the story on any level. You could read this book and not know any theory at all.

The other thing is that some of the beauty and the synchronicity of the story is bigger than me. It is ancestral. It is, there is no way in hell that I would have been able to find all these pieces that sit together so carefully, to find the stories that I found. Finding Sarah Hill, the washerwoman born in Elbert County, where my maternal ancestors are from, which I didn’t even—I never knew about Elbert County until I started working on my genealogy. Like Minnie Savage that I write about in the fifth chapter, who happened to be born in Accomack, the place where my grandfather was born, migrating probably within the same two- or three-year period as my grandfather to the city of Philadelphia. I have no idea if they knew each other or didn’t know each other, but her story, her oral history, fully narrates a story of migration from Accomack, Virginia, to Philadelphia that I can’t ask my grandfather about because he died before I was born. But just the happenstance of the way that finding Minnie rounds out the story I want to tell, that is just bigger than me. On top of all that, she was such a great storyteller! I mean, she snuck out of church to go run away to migrate, like who does that? And so, all of these things coming together at the same time, that is not just me. Me discovering in Accomack a whole labor organization started by Black workers that ends up in a racial massacre that I never read about in any history book. I’m writing a book about the working class, my grandfather is from this very, very tiny rural place; then, boom, I find a labor movement.

All those little pieces that snap together, they feel like the synchronicity that has been given to me, in order to tell this story. So, over and over and over again, it just felt like my path was laid.

 

RNB: It makes me think about how your book represents what Morrison calls “literary archeology.” You take bits and pieces of known fact and add sustenance and depth to it to make the story more rich and to humanize the subject. Your treatment of people in this book is not just as blips in history who are quickly covered over by whatever other significant and more well-established historical moments show up. For example, you brought up the Accomack protests, I remember saying to myself, “Wow. This is a lot even though the story sounds familiar.” I am familiar with the racial massacres and racial tension of the era but not familiar with Accomack as a place or the people. I am familiar with stories of Black people migrating from the “Deep South” but not the intimate particulars of why. You create an inside story, an interior narrative, that complicates larger historical events.

Black Folks gives an inside look into Black lives that would otherwise be frozen in time and unassuming in archival pictures, not knowing what their names were, what they did, or who they were.

Can you talk a little bit about how you created this interior understanding of not only Black working-class folk, but of the Black South?

 

BLMK: When I write, my goal is to sit on the shoulder of the folks I am writing about. What do they see when they wake up in the morning? What does that space look like? Who is family? Who is community? What is their neighborhood? Who is supporting them? Who is their enemy? Who is their friend?

So I just build out all those little things. I make maps and story charts for everybody that I write about. I use the technology that is available to me. I love a Google map. I will go back to an old neighborhood and if it still exists, I’m going to look at someone’s house. I am going to follow the pathway from the train to their house. What did they pass and what did the buildings really look like, and what did the train station look like?

My goal is to move through that neighborhood and make it feel as evocative and as cared for as an everyday experience as I possibly can. There are a lot of things that I do to research and build out a story that don’t even show up in a really direct way, but they help, they inform me, they enrich those small details.

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RNB: Black women are front and center in this book. For example, your research about washerwomen should win an award on its own. I’m going to read back to you a quote that I highlighted: “All Black women’s laundry work was born both in compliance with and defiance of white authority.” This made me think about my own great-grandmother, Mary Jones, who said, I will wash y’all’s clothes, I am not going to clean y’all’s house. She was very adamant about that. Your book made me think about how domestic workers connected to ideas of respectability and being ladylike, and how to maintain dignity and respect while pushing forward and taking care of their families.

Could you talk about how these women balanced the expectation to be neat and humble with the grind, the hustle, the I’m not going to just sit here and let y’all tell me what I can and can’t do.

 

BLMK: I love looking at the labor numbers around washerwomen and women who are maids inside households, cooks inside households. There was a trend toward women who had children, who had to care for family, who had obligations, wanting to do washer work. So, in fact they are the first stay-at-home generation who is working from home. They want to be there for their children, to raise their children, to be in proximate space, to build a household in ways that they were not allowed to as enslaved women. They set the terms of how the laundry will be taken in, when it will be done, when it will be bought back. They pushed back against all the stigmatization that happens about them.

They are a really formidable group of people, but they are behind so many of the protests against segregation that I studied in my first book, Right to Ride. They are riding streetcars to move that laundry around, so they don’t want to be insulted and degraded in those spaces. So they fight back. They don’t succeed in this first generation, but they are key to it.

When those women organize, they verbalize the need for protection from sexual assault that happens in white households. They verbalized that well before the turn of the 20th century. They are the very first people who I can see as the workers who are seeking out protection from being raped in those households, in labor organizing as early as the 1870s.

There is clarity of purpose that you can find among these brilliant washerwomen. And it just, it overwhelmed me, how powerful they really were.

RNB: This idea of thinking about the subtleties of Black activism, and how that made so many white folks uncomfortable, is one theme that kept coming up for me while reading your work. Especially in the Accomack chapter, where agricultural laborers organized for higher pay. Their resistance wasn’t loud. It seemed like many just said: I’m going to talk to you while we get something to eat, I’m going to talk to you while we working in the field. I’m going to talk to you after church. Usually when we think protest, we think loud and demanding. It really struck me how quiet much of the resistance was that you shared in the book.

Did you find that interesting in your research: Quiet resistance and how that pushes back against this popular narrative that you had to be loud and boisterous to invoke change? Because a lot of the change that you talk about in this book happened very quietly.

 

BLMK: I love that. A good Marxist would say that you can’t find this resistance among this population. It is a rural population; they haven’t developed consciousness enough to do this work; they have to move to an urban space; they have to be working in a factory; they would build their consciousness there.

But that just is not necessary. It wasn’t necessary, so much so because Black people in slavery developed those habits, those quiet habits that we can see in freedom, that is where they come from. You couldn’t do anything out loud as an enslaved person and live, at least not for long.

Black people developed the ability to speak in code, to talk in front of other folks and have them not understand exactly what was meant. They sang songs that sounded like one thing but in reality meant something completely different. They worshiped in secret and developed a brand of Black Christianity grounded in a different viewpoint, drawing on African cosmologies and a Black reading of the Bible. Black folks had been doing many things quietly all along, so they organized quietly too. They knew how to talk to one another without everybody hearing. And so of course as free people, they maintained those habits. They don’t appear to be organizing as a union until white people slowly start to recognize, well, wait a minute, no one is going to wash my clothes over the Christmas holiday, wait, none of y’all will wash my clothes over Christmas? That’s when they began to see that washerwomen had been talking, organizing. No one is going to pick these sweet potatoes because we wouldn’t let Black farmers join the all-white agricultural co-op, what? Huh? All the farmworkers in the county are going to ask for more money for their labor? How did that happen? Black workers used that church space, that grocery store, the field, the family gathering, the juke joint, communal wash pots in the backyards as a space to talk and think and theorize as workers. They were smart people.

I remember when I first went to graduate school, I got in some debate with somebody who said that people who did physical labor didn’t have time to think, and I thought, you’ve never worked with your hands before, have you? My first job was at a supermarket just scanning stuff and I had plenty of time to think. I was thinking the whole time.

So if you are in bondage or you are oppressed, while you are doing the work, you are thinking. You have plenty of time to share a quiet idea. You have time to develop a consciousness about the world and your place in it. They didn’t need labor organizers to tell them how to resist. No, the consciousness, the desire to organize was already there.

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RNB: Black Folk pushes back against the idea that integration is the dream. There is this notion that Black folks assimilate into society and everything will be all hunky-dory. But so many of the firsthand accounts that you included in this book said something like, I didn’t want to mess with no white folks.

What they are saying disrupts an indoctrinated narrative that we have been told about previous generations, that Jim Crow–era Black folks just wanted to be accepted by white people. I didn’t get that with this book, for which I thank you, by the way. Was that intentional? Did you consistently see that in the oral histories that you reviewed? How can you further break down that myth that Black people always have to be in proximity to white folks?

 

BLMK: The very first thing I did in graduate school was participate in a project called Behind the Veil at Duke University, which went out and interviewed Black Southerners about their experiences with Jim Crow. I was in two different Southern sites, my team did perhaps 50 interviews over that summer. And oh boy, people were just trying to get the safe buildings and good textbooks and equipment that white people had for their children, so that is why they wanted to integrate schools. It was not because they really liked white people or trusted them. After all, they knew white people just fine; their jobs had them working with white folks all the time. Especially people who worked in white households, they knew them, their children, their marriages, they probably knew more than the neighbors knew. White employers would forget that Black workers were there, they became invisible to them, so Black employees listened. They understood white people just fine, there was no magic sauce about white people, they were human like everyone else. Black agricultural workers knew that their knowledge of crops and science made white landholders wealthy. Black factory workers saw that the white supervisors sometime didn’t know as much about the work that they were doing. White supremacy meant that white workers didn’t have to know more to receive better jobs.

So Black people didn’t buy into the myths of white supremacy. They had to behave accordingly to live, but at no point are they thinking, Oh, white people, that is it. They got the nice stuff and we have the jacked-up stuff because they are better than us. No, they know it is because they took it. They took it. So they figured out that perhaps the best way for Black children to have better books and decent buildings that don’t fall down around them, would be to just integrate the schools. But the motivation was to get the better books and decent buildings. It wasn’t the idea that children needed to sit together because there is something magic that comes off of a white child that goes to the Black child and makes the Black child elevated. Black people knew that the Black child is just as good as the white child. They were never confused about that.

And so those interviews just hammered that home again and again. It was a strategy, it was an outcome of the planning of the NAACP, saying, I see you building this parallel world, it probably would be easier to get there if you just question segregation, go straight at the question. So that is an NAACP strategy, that is not Black thought.

Black thought really is more complex than that. Black people wanted what was due them. They did not think of their spaces and their institutions and their schools and their teachers and their ministers and their community as inherently less than just because they were Black. That is what white people thought.

 

RNB: That paranoia of quotidian everyday Black experiences angered me. I felt an irritation as I was reading that felt ancestral.

But joy is also a strong presence in this book. I want to hear your theorization of Black joy, especially as it relates to labor and the working class, because that is supposed to be oxymoronic. You are supposed to be working class and just toil day in and day out, and you don’t have any type of release. That is the expectation.

How calculated was it that you included these moments of happiness and community as joy? How do you theorize Black joy as a historian?

 

BLMK: Joy is a uniquely interesting Black experience. We talk about joy a lot, we sing about joy. The world didn’t give it, but the world can’t take it away. And that joy is transcendent; that is, despite the circumstances that are always going to be around, one can think, I have something inside me that isn’t dependent on you and how you treat me. I know who I am, I know the secret of whose I am, I got my folks, I got my ancestors, I got my God, and I’m all right, and I’m going to laugh with my folks. I am going to eat with my folks. We are going to drink, we are going to play, we are going to do fun things.

I never experienced being Black as an unjoyful thing. My grandparents, they could argue like crazy people, but then break into joy: like, what are we going to eat, and where are we going, and who is coming? And then it would just be in the yard, everybody talking and eating and laughing and playing games and jonesing on each other, my grandparents could tease the hot dickens out of anybody at any time, my grandfather was just hilarious, like he was just quick and mean and funny and just, always going back and forth with everything. So I experienced home as joyful and funny and full of music and laughter and dancing and celebrating.

They weren’t wealthy people, they weren’t ubersuccessful in any traditional American capitalistic accounting, but that didn’t make them unhappy. It probably made them a little bit happier than some other people just to have those spaces, where none of that was at play, where none of that was in effect. It was our space, they were hungry for those spaces: My grandfather and his brother sought out land in an all-Black enclave and they lived there and they were comfortable there, they built homes there, from their own hands because they knew that that turn within would help to keep them safe and would give them those spaces that were just free for their children, and grandchildren.

I write about my grandmother holding my hand so tightly when we were in public; on that land, my grandmother let my hand go because she knew she was at home.

RNB: Can we talk about home for a minute? I’m curious to hear your thoughts about an intentional pushback against South as a homeland to folks who aren’t white. When you think about the South as home, folks automatically go to the Confederacy, they go to the lost cause. And I say, Well, how does that include these other groups of people who don’t subscribe to that understanding of southernness?

I wonder how thinking about labor in the South speaks home? How can we tease out a stronger connection between home and labor and land, that is such a distinctively Black Southern thing. You have made it if you own land and if we get this land, you better not sell it.

 

BLMK: You got to keep it.

 

RNB: Yes. So, how do some of those markers indicate thinking about region as home, especially for Black folks?

 

BLMK: I think a lot about my grandmother’s garden. She was so tied to that land. She would wake up before dawn and be out in that field and paying attention to her vegetables and her fruit; she had a grape vine and strawberries and okra and string beans and greens and different lettuces and those big old cornstalks that would get so, so tall that they looked like towers to me as a little girl. She just knew everything about the soil, she would taste the soil a little bit to make sure it was right and did you need to amend it in any way? She would teach me about the green beans and when they were ready and when the strawberries were ripe and the right time of day to pick something. She would just put baskets out on the curb so that other people could take the fruits and vegetables that she had too much of. And she would take some to the church because somebody passed away, she was going to make that her thing on that line that were serving at the repast.

It was so powerful to me how that garden gave her space and peace and communion with her God. It gave her the ability to feed her family. It gave her a future through feeding her babies and grandbabies. It gave her the ability to be in community with other women and to mourn with those who mourn. It gave her preparation and a safety, those cans in that closet if things got bad, you just open a jar and then you have the basis of your dinner, even if things got tight financially. She would share those jars with different women who would come to the door.

That care was just so profound and that land gave that to her. So I can imagine what it was like for her when she first migrated and she couldn’t find an apartment where children were allowed, so her daughter, my mom, had to stay with someone who was not her blood relative. My grandmother lost the opportunity to mother her own child.

So, the migration was really a sacrifice for her. She lost a lot. She lost her relatives to tuberculosis, as they encountered disease environments that they weren’t prepared to live in, they started dying. Generations started dying in her family. So that land—that home she eventually built— represented safety, and allowed her to put her family and community back together.

All of those things told through her story tell you so much about what it means to be home, what it means to work and what it means to labor.

 

RNB: One of the things that I really appreciated was how you deromanticized the idea of the Great Migration.

 

BLMK: All my grandparents were migrants. And when they moved north, they were both stigmatized as country bumpkin Southerners but then they learned to embrace what the South gave them. My paternal grandfather had chickens in the alley in Philadelphia, he had a victory garden, he went to south Jersey to cultivate on land and from a man who was from his home county of Accomack. They must have had a little network and my grandparents met in Philadelphia, both from the Eastern Shore—like how the heck did that happen? They were talking. They are in community. Those communities had meaning over time. They were Southerners, they used the resources that they have in this new place to do new things, they don’t come empty handed.

RNB: Southern Black grandmothers are pillars in the community. I’m speaking as a grandmother’s girl, my grandmama was my world. Everything that I understand about the world I owe to her for giving me some kernel of insight and truth. Black grandmothers play such a pivotal role in your book too: What role do Black grandmothers play in how we understand southernness, class consciousness, and race consciousness?

 

BLMK: I’m in New Jersey, right, I’m not in the South, but I feel in part Southern because of her culture that she shared with me, that my grandfather shared with me. Their household, you could pick it up and put it in Georgia or South Carolina, and it would have made sense. Because of the way they ate, what they believed in, how they worshipped. It is so powerful to be raised by someone who was not ashamed of where she was from. It was a calling card, it was a connection. And for her to be like, baby, you are Geechee like me, because you love that rice. So I’m a preschool-aged girl wondering What is Geechee? because I’m more than 600 miles away from that space, but I am there because I’m in her kitchen, I’m eating her okra, corn, and tomatoes. I’m raised with an ethic passed down to her from her enslaved grandparents. She was born in the place where generations of her family had been held in bondage. And I carried that name. Blair is the last name of her ancestors, her mother’s maiden name, and the name of who held us in bondage, and the name of the plantation where they were held. She always wanted me to understand where she came from.

My nana, my paternal grandmother in Philadelphia, she was from the Eastern Shore. And so, even in the midst of Philadelphia, in a very urban space, she has these Southern habits and it is just so powerful to see: They are Southerners, they are not giving up, they are not ceding that as something that was wrong. They moved because they needed to, they had to support themselves and to find ways forward, to escape violence, but they aren’t saying, That is not who I am.

When I came to the academy a few decades ago, to say that you were a scholar of the South meant that you weren’t working on Black people. I’m trying to complicate that now in this moment, so many scholars have been in the process of complicating that and so I hope the Black Folk does the work of doing that too.

I’m really ready to write another book. This book is about my grandparents’ generation and now I want to write my parent’s generation. Just give me a contract to write it, dang it, and then I will be ready to go. 

Featured image: Blair LM Kelley. Courtesy of Blair LM Kelley

Freedom to read advocates notch a legal victory in Alaska

Nov 04 2024

After a favorable legal ruling in August, freedom to read advocates in Alaska have scored a significant victory in court over would-be book banners. In an October 31 filing, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District in Alaska agreed to pay $89,000 to settle claims that the district improperly removed dozens of books, including several works of classic literature, from school libraries.

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