Steven Hahn. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration.

Steven Hahn. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. 618 pp. $35.00 cloth/$12.95 paper.

Steven Hahn begins A Nation Under Our Feet by insisting that "this is a book about extraordinary people who did extraordinary things...." Yet most of the names that people the pages of this formidable historical study are the names of the forgotten. Hahn effectively dismantles victim/oppressor paradigms by chronicling the political struggles of heroic individuals and communities in the South. His task is to reveal the adamant refusal of "rural black folk" to "sink into the valleys of resignation and fatalism." What is remarkable about this book is its scope: it straddles a number of periods of African American history, providing a synthetic look at African American forms of resistance from the antebellum period through the Great Migration. It focuses on African American men and women living in rural communities in the South and their persistent struggle for equal rights in the face of unremitting racism.

While it is certainly true that part of Hahn's project is to underscore the efforts of the numerous individuals who worked against the brutal domination imposed on African Americans, he clearly believes that collectivity was central to this enterprise. In Chapter 1, he suggests that mobilizing communities of slaves was, in and of itself, a method of resisting the individuating force of slavery. Often these groups centered on familial work formations, but those who were relegated to more isolated and scarcely populated plantations managed to create extended communities beyond their plantation's borders. Skilled workers "hired out" by their masters frequently served as conduits between plantations, and some slave communities even established bartering systems and other reciprocal exchanges. As revolutionary movements spread in the Atlantic world and abolitionist fervor mounted, slaves received this news through clandestine communication networks. Hahn points out that the increasing political awareness of slaves coincided with the exact moment that slaveholders tightened their hold on both slave and free blacks.

Yet the tightening control of slaveholders was unable to stem the flow of excitement experienced by slaves as the North-South conflict gained ground. When the war broke out, slaves immediately rebelled by running off to join the Union army. These fugitives formed "contraband camps" where they experimented with self-governing communities. Hahn notes that there were racist conditions within the Union Army, but he suggests that the military did provide a useful contact zone for blacks from different backgrounds. When Republicans concentrated their efforts on disempowering planter "aristocrats" and virtually ignored Southern blacks, black men led their own fight for suffrage, delineating a citizenship model tied to their military service.

The third chapter describes the political initiatives that took shape after the Emancipation Proclamation. Hahn emphasizes the importance of "rumor" in post-emancipation life. He posits rumor as an important discursive practice for any oppressed group, and contends that "it may be regarded as a form of popular political discourse, a discourse of expectation and anticipation." Using the already established channels of communication during slavery, blacks broadcast "extravagant expectations" through the "grapevine telegraph." These rumors, often ensconced in religious and millennial metaphors, conveyed their expectations of land redistribution. During the summer and fall of 1865, freedpeople's conventions took place in the former Confederate states. Enthusiasm for these conventions among African Americans was high and allowed for "spirited discussion" over how blacks would mobilize. Hahn marks the meetings in rural districts as early signs of grassroots mobilization. As blacks organized, whites responded by inciting a panic over fears of black insurrection, even notifying federal officials of this fear and requesting a militia for enforcement.

When the right of suffrage was finally granted to African American males, they overwhelmingly chose the Republican Party. In Chapter 4, Hahn argues that freedpeople continued to use the same organizing strategies they had used during slavery: kinship ties, work formations, leadership skills, and religious beliefs. In addition to organizing themselves into units that would allow them to perform agricultural labor more efficiently, they held "mass meetings" where they conducted military drills for the purpose of self-protection. Hahn argues that Union Leagues played a critical function in the Reconstruction era, serving as a kind of "political school" for newly enfranchised blacks. Consequently, the participation of blacks in the state Republican conventions during the summer of 1867 was strong. When the elections were finally held, blacks represented more than a quarter of the delegates from the former Confederate states. Many of these delegates came from a privileged perspective. Yet they would successfully expand the discourse on the "nature and compass of political rights."

Likewise, African Americans understood that their involvement in local politics was also important. Hahn relates the stories of local activists such as Thomas M. Allen, a shoemaker and Baptist preacher, who organized a Union League chapter in Jasper County, Georgia, and George Washington Albright of Mississippi, a former slave who helped organize a black volunteer militia to protect the "common people" from landlords and former slaveowners. Black women also played a crucial role during this period, pressuring the men in their communities to vote Republican. The efforts of these local activists helped to establish enclaves of black power. Hahn attempts to redirect the traditional impulse of historians to downplay the "Negro rule" that white conservatives complained about so much at the time by suggesting that there was, indeed, a grounding to these anxieties.

As African Americans gained more confidence, they increasingly became dissatisfied with the limited concessions of white Republicans. Factionalism began to grow within the Republican Party, and blacks diverged from one another in their interests as well. Because of the wide gulf between the elites who served in state legislatures and the laborers whom they represented, rural black folk began to turn to "colored mens" and "colored labor" conventions as avenues through which they could assert their political rights.

In Chapter 6, Hahn again prompts a historical reconsideration by insisting that vigilante violence during Reconstruction was connected to a history of violence against African Americans and was not an aberration as has been suggested. For example, he points out that African Americans believed these vigilante groups derived from slave patrol groups. The Union Leagues were a primary target of the Klan, and to this end, they attacked or killed grassroots leaders. When state militia proved to be ineffective in protecting blacks from paramilitary violence, some blacks responded by boycotting a white landowner thought to be involved in the Klan. Others armed themselves in self-defense, marched in quasi-military formations, and fought back when attacked. Eventually, vigilante violence proved to be too much for blacks after White Leagues and "White-Liners" helped to overthrow Republican rule. When federal troops were withdrawn from the South, blacks seemed to have been defeated. Once more, Hahn disputes this assumption.

In the face of these dire circumstances, some African Americans considered emigration as an alternative. Disappointment over Republican Party policies, collapse of Reconstruction regimes, and the fear of paramilitary violence all served to generate or revive interest in emigrationism. Hahn connects migration schemes to Kansas and Indiana to those bound for Liberia. He insists that, at its heart, emigrationism was a grassroots movement, advocated mostly by landless farming folk. It was further evidence of the growing chasm between "representative" black leaders and their constituents. He suggests that this distance was one way in which the relationship between leaders and the led were being renegotiated. In the end, only limited numbers of black folk actually emigrated due to limited resources and white coercion; however, the impulse did affect political activism and offered a new means of collective struggle.

As the emigration movement began to dissipate, African Americans in the rural South searched for yet another way to constitute themselves as self-governing citizens. In Chapter 8, Hahn describes their attempts at biracial political coalitions. Most notably, the Readjuster Movement in Virginia provided an insurgency movement whereby African Americans could join whites in Virginia and successfully challenge Democratic rule. In some places, African Americans and Democrats found it mutually beneficial to ally together in what were known as "fusionist" political parties. Elsewhere, insurgency movements such as Greenbacks and Populists continued to be a viable alternative for blacks. Ultimately, however, blacks found that they were unable to find a "just" biracialism.

In the final chapter of the text, Hahn describes the unique challenges of blacks laboring in the agricultural South in the face of rising capitalism and international markets. When whites excluded blacks from their Farmers' Alliance, blacks mobilized their own Colored Farmers' Alliance and Knights of Labor chapters. These groups attracted a variety of workers, agitating for benefits such as higher wages. Hahn connects the lynching of black men to the prevailing economic tensions in rural communities. In the end, however, African Americans felt compelled to turn inward, to embrace a self-reliance that promoted land acquisition, literacy, and civic and associational life. This self-reliance later fostered the popularity of such nationalist figures as Marcus Garvey, whose political activism is depicted in the Epilogue.

Steven Hahn has produced a laudable piece of scholarly work that tells the story of a determined people who unwaveringly insisted upon political agency. A Nation Under Our Feet is a testament to blacks' organizational strategies, leadership skills, and collective strength. It is unquestionably one of the most important historical studies of recent years.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez

University of Puget Sound