Freedom's Children.

Freedom's Children by Velma Maia Thomas Random House, September 2000, $32.50 ISBN 0-609-60481-3

Breathtaking in its scope and successful in its delicate handling of historical facts and memorabilia, Thomas strikes gold again with this interactive follow up to her best-seller Lest We Forget (1997). The previous volume detailed Maafa--or the African holocaust--from Africa through the middle passage, and into the day-to-day American realities of the centuries-long transatlantic slave trade. This newest collection--and it is worthy of the status of collector's item straight off the shelf--looks at the newly freed blacks who built America and stood ready to be forgotten, taking readers "from Emancipation to the Great Migration."

In 1865 slavery was declared illegal in the United States by executive decree. Displaced Africans, from recent arrivals to those who had been here for generations, were left technically free, but with no education, few employment opportunities and no real infrastructure to support them. Thomas, creator and curator of the Black Holocaust Exhibit in Atlanta, begins her journey here and constructs a well-researched and painfully documented history of African American life during the Reconstruction period.

Readers have the opportunity to not only read about the migration, during which thousands of black women and men headed north and west for work and the freedom to live without hostile intervention, but also to hold in their hands reproductions of historical documents such as western-bound train tickets, letters and newspaper clippings which detailed the movements of those seeking freedom from southern tyranny. Look at the 1870 news clipping about an African American U.S. senator from Mississippi (the Reconstruction period had the largest rates of southern black elected officials in history, until Jim Crow laws all but stripped blacks of voting rights). Thumb through "The Freedman's Third Reader" a small textbook put together to help former slaves learn to read. Read about the historical mistrust of banking institutions and flip through an 1867 savings deposit book charting the hard-earned pennies of a former slave, lost in the collapse of the Freedman's Savings Bank.

Throughout, Thomas' passion for her people and the struggle for freedom drips from the prose as she painstakingly puts into context vital information which could so easily have been lost. Freedom's Children is a gift to a world still reeling from the legacy of the slave trade. Thomas sheds light on the struggles that have brought people from across the African diaspora to the various planes, from wild success and near-freedom to devastating poverty and continued lack of opportunity, to where we find ourselves today. At the same time, she toots loudly the trumpet of triumph for the spirit within that thankfully keeps us pressing forward.