A High Price for Freedom
Raising Hidden Voices from the African American Past
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
The author and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library Publishing Project gives voice to long silent African Americans from the past, allowing them to tell their own stories that shed new light on critical moments in the Black Freedom Struggle, challenging what we think we know about Black history.
History is at its best when new findings and perspectives challenge old ideas and notions about the past, and even overturn common wisdom.
What if a former enslaved man in Galveston, Texas, witnessed the first Juneteenth and told a completely different story from what most of us know about that day? Why were slave ships most prone to rebellion, including those carrying the most African women? How has Islam found its way into R&B, soul, jazz, and other American popular music? Who was Benjamin Banneker, really?
In A High Price for Freedom, historian Clyde W. Ford addresses these and other questions, amplifying little-known voices from the African American past. In this wide-ranging, impeccably researched book, Ford begins with the 1656 court case of a woman named Elizabeth Key, who won a verdict for her freedom against her would-be enslaver—a victory that would forever change the nature, brutality, and course of American slavery.
Ford examines a range of topics, from the role of women in fomenting slave revolts to an in-depth look at how Selma was not really about voting rights or even Martin Luther King, Jr, but about a twenty-six-year-old Black man named Jimmie Lee Jackson who was killed by an Alabama state trooper. As he laying dying in the only hospital that would treat Black people in February 1965, Jimmie Lee whispered to his nurse, a Catholic nun, “Sister, isn’t this a high price for freedom?”
Eye-opening, enlightening, and often counterintuitive, this fascinating history includes compelling, heartrending, and factual accounts about people and events in the African American past that teach us things we never learned and challenge the stories we thought we knew.
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Information
Table of contents
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: From the Womb of Struggle
- Chapter 2: The Legend of Molly Welsh, the Story of Benjamin Banneker
- Chapter 3: الله أعظم ، أمريك [Arabic] Allahu Akbar, America: Islam and the Black Freedom Struggle
- Chapter 4: Black Bodies, White Medicine
- Chapter 5: We Knowed What Was Goin’ On
- Chapter 6: Music, Myth, and Stono
- Chapter 7: Hollerin’ for Freedom
- Chapter 8: Blue Notes
- Chapter 9: The Minister and the Mahatma
- Chapter 10: Black Troops Only
- Chapter 11: The March That Never Happened, the Man Who Was Never There
- Chapter 12: A High Price for Freedom, Part I
- Chapter 13: A High Price for Freedom, Part II
- Acknowledgments
- Bibliography
- About the Author
- Copyright
- About the Publisher