African Americans in the post-emancipation South [electronic resource] : the outsiders' view / Alton Hornsby, Jr.

This study uses first-hand accounts and documents to attain glimpses of African American life in the post-emancipation South. Spanning from the 1860s through the New Deal this study incorporates a broad cross-section of the views of European travelers and Euro-American visitors from the North, based upon travel books as well as articles and essays from periodicals and scholarly journals. The study synthesizes the outsiders' observations and assesses their summaries' overall validity for increasing our understanding of the lives of blacks in the post-emancipation South. Furthermore, these accounts allow for a reconstruction of African American life and labor in the major aspects of black culture--religion, education, politics, criminal justice, employment and entrepreneurship, social life and status--of the times.