Unveiled Voices, Unvarnished Memories: The Cromwell Family in Slavery and Segregation.

Unveiled Voices, Unvarnished Memories: The Cromwell Family in Slavery and Segregation, 1692-1972. By Adelaide M. Cromwell. Introduction by Anthony Cromwell Hill. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, c. 2007. Pp. [xviii], 348. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8262-1676-2.)

This chronologically ambitious study traces the elite, black Cromwell family from enslavement in the seventeenth century through the twentieth-century experiences of the volume's author, Adelaide M. Cromwell. Cromwell is a sociologist by training, but Unveiled Voices, Unvarnished Memories: The Cromwell Family in Slavery and Segregation, 1692-1972 is not a scholarly treatise in the strictest sense. Although the author employs the academic apparatus of the footnote liberally, generic peculiarities abound. She acknowledges that this book is as much a "memoir" as anything else (p. 320).

The account is centered on the life of the author's grandfather, John Wesley Cromwell Sr. (1849-1927), an extraordinary man born to slave parents who managed to purchase freedom for themselves and their children. After coming from such humble--albeit remarkable--origins, John Wesley had an astonishingly diverse career. A graduate of the Howard University law school, he found employment as a federal civil servant, as an educator in the Washington, D.C., public school system, as a historian of the black experience, and as the founder of the People's Advocate, a black weekly newspaper published first in Alexandria, Virginia, and then in the nation's capital.

John Wesley serves both as the source for the oral history of the slave experiences of the Cromwells and as the keeper of the family archive. A good portion of the text consists of letters written to John Wesley from members of his family and from prominent outsiders such as the prolific black journalist John Edward Bruce.

What emerges from these letters is a fascinating look inside black intellectual life in the post-Reconstruction era as John Wesley's correspondents engage in dialogue about racial advancement. They write frankly about other members of the black intelligentsia and political elite, including Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alexander Crummell. Scholars interested in the various political, cultural, and educational philosophies of this generation of black leaders will no doubt find these discussions illuminating.

Perhaps equally compelling are the letters written by two of John Wesley's children, Otelia Cromwell and John Wesley Cromwell Jr. Like their father, both were tremendously accomplished. Otelia attended Smith College and later earned a doctorate in English from Yale University, while John Wesley Jr. studied at Dartmouth College. Unlike many of the other letters in the volume, this correspondence does not concern the issue of racial progress. Instead, these letters offer the reader an intimate glimpse into the daily lives of the black elite. The younger Cromwells write about their studies, their school vacations, their future plans, and their finances, among other topics. These documents shed important light on the everyday concerns of educated African Americans during this era.

Cromwell endeavors to place these various primary documents into their proper historical context. Due perhaps to the sweeping scope of the chronology, the narrative she constructs is somewhat lopsided. Inexplicably, some chapters in the family history receive much more extensive analysis than other episodes. Because the author abruptly switches between the personas of historian, archivist, biographer, and memoirist, the book's progression is challenging to follow, and the authorial voice is difficult to discern.

In the introduction to the book, Cromwell's son, Anthony Cromwell Hill, writes that it is his mother's hope that "the publication of this material may inspire others to make more extensive exegeses" of the primary documents she presents (p. 14). No doubt others will be able to do so with a greater level of scholarly detachment and will be freed from the strictures of fitting the experiences of several generations into the pages of one volume. Such studies would be a worthy use of this rich body of primary material.

JENNIFER JENSEN WALLACH

Georgia College and State University