African American frontiers

by Alan B. Govenar

"The hard road from slavery to citizenship passed through many frontiers. A new collection of writings now offers an overview of and insights into African American frontiers, from the publication of the first slave narrative in 1703, to 1948 when President Truman integrated the armed forces. The book is an invaluable historical resource that brings together diverse first-person accounts of individual African Americans through slave narratives and oral histories, including the stories of Henry "Box" Brown, who escaped the South by express mailing himself to Philadelphia in a wooden crate; Herb Jeffries, who introduced the black cowboy in Westerns; and Eunice Jackson, whose funeral home was destroyed in the Tulsa race riot of 1921. Such little-known stories, most of them previously unpublished, resonate with the determination, forbearance, moral strength, and imagination of the tellers and give readers an opportunity to see the world as it once was, as told by the men and women who lived