The Black Woods : : Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier / / Amy Godine.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2023
• VerfasserIn: Godine, Amy,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (510 p.) :; 29 b&w halftones, 2 maps

The Black Woods chronicles the history of Black pioneers in New York's northern wilderness. From the 1840s and '60s, they migrated to the Adirondacks to build farms and to vote. On their new-worked land, they could meet the $250 property requirement New York's constitution imposed on Black voters in 1821, and claim the rights of citizenship.Three thousand Black New Yorkers were gifted with 120,000 acres of Adirondack land by Gerrit Smith, an upstate abolitionist and heir to an immense land fortune. Smith's suffrage-seeking plan was endorsed by Frederick Douglass and most leading Black abolitionists. The antislavery reformer John Brown was such an advocate that in 1849 he moved his family to Timbuctoo, a new Black Adirondack settlement in the woods.Smith's plan was prescient, anticipating Black suffrage reform, affirmative action, environmental distributive justice, and community-based racial equity more than a century before these were points of public policy. But when the response to Smith's offer fell radically short of his high hopes, Smith's zeal cooled. Timbuctoo, Freemen's Home, Blacksville and other settlements were forgotten. History would marginalize this Black community for 150 years.In The Black Woods, Amy Godine recovers a robust history of Black pioneers who carved from the wilderness a future for their families and their civic rights. Her immersive story returns the Black pioneers and their descendants to their rightful place at the center of this history. With stirring accounts of racial justice, and no shortage of heroes, The Black Woods amplifies the unique significance of the Adirondacks in the American imagination.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Notes on Language, Spelling, and Surnames -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- A Scheme of Justice and Benevolence -- Chapter 1 He Feeds the Sparrow -- Chapter 2 Gerrit Smith Country -- Chapter 3 Three Agents and Their Reasons -- Chapter 4 Theories into Practice -- Chapter 5 On Fat Lands under Genial Suns -- Chapter 6 Something besides “Speechifying” -- The Black Woods -- Chapter 7 Trailblazers -- Chapter 8 The Second Wave -- Chapter 9 A Fluid Cartography -- Chapter 10 We Who Are Here Can See and Know -- Chapter 11 I Begin to Be Regarded as an “American Citizen” -- Chapter 12 If You Only Knew How Poor I Am -- Chapter 13 Nothing Would Be More Encouraging to Me -- John Brown Country -- Chapter 14 To Arms! The Black Woods at War -- Chapter 15 An Empowering Diaspora -- Chapter 16 White Memory, Black Memory -- Chapter 17 Pilgrims -- Epilogue -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index