46 pages • 1 hour read
Tera W. HunterTo ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Racial Repression and Resistance
One thread that Hunter traces throughout her work is the relationship between racial repression and resistance as African Americans and whites renegotiated their relationship after the emancipation of slaves. Hunter’s account focuses on how this contest for power changed most particularly when it came to labor and leisure.
In terms of labor, working-class black women pushed back against the historical legacy of slavery, which defined black women as workers only. Hunter points out that even during slavery, African-American women slaves thwarted efforts to define them as mere working bodies. They engaged in seemingly harmless activities such as dressing themselves in their owners’ clothes, refusing to work, or doing work poorly. During slavery, whites had every expectation that they would set the terms for their slaves’ work because they had the force of law behind them. With the advent of freedom, African-American women engaged in increasing resistance against white efforts at repression, with varying degrees of success.
In Atlanta, the complicated interactions between resistant black women and repressive white employers focused primarily on black domestic workers because most working-class black women (as high as 90 percent plus in some moments) worked in this area. Whites likely assumed that they could dominate the relationship because these negotiations took place in white homes, there were few other employment opportunities for African-American women, and they frequently had the law on their side.
African-American women during Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction resisted white domination explicitly, using strikes, work slowdowns, and collective action. When whites re-asserted control by threating to regulate black labor, African Americans turned the threat on its head by interpreting regulation as protection. Whites ultimately surrendered their efforts to regulate domestic workers—especially washerwomen—because they did not want to surrender their individual control over laborers to government.
In Hunter’s account, several events conspired to shift the balance of power to whites, including the hardening of legal segregation during the early 20th century, explicit violence during the race riot of 1906, and the chilling effect of conscription and vagrancy laws during World War I. The ultimate act of resistance by working-class African Americans, including women, was simply to leave the South. Hunter also examines how leisure activities, including public dancing, represent efforts to carve out a space of freedom in the face of white dominance.
Writing African American, Working-Class, and Women’s History
In both implicit and explicit ways, Hunter addresses some very particular challenges to writing the history of working-class African-American women. As she makes clear in her preface and prologue, the bulk of material available to historians replicates the devaluation of working-class African-American women by leaving them out of the record entirely.
The process of writing women’s history, African-American history, and working-class history without access to many primary sources requires creativity and an ability to marshal a wide variety of unique sources. Hunter’s work won numerous awards in part because of how she combines several approaches in order to tell a fuller story of this neglected part of American history.
Hunter fills this gap by using a wide variety of sources that address working-class black women’s lives in the aggregate. For example, she cites population statistics to paint a picture of the sheer visibility of African-American women in Atlanta during and after the Civil War. She extrapolates details about efforts to control the behavior of working-class black women’s comportment in public spaces by examining arrest records, sermons, and city council minutes.
Hunter chooses to focus on these accounts of ordinary women in part to undercut the assumption that elite African-American women who did manage to get into the historical record had the final word on the lives of their working-class counterparts. As a result, Hunter is frequently able to show that some of what people think they know about black working-class women of this period is a reflection of larger social and economic forces and anxieties.
Finally, Hunter focuses on working-class culture, including dance and music, to provide a more nuanced understanding of how her subjects, under an oppressive racial regime, still managed to engage in self-expression and racial self-representation. They subverted the dominant narrative about who they were and what they should be allowed to do with their own bodies.
The New South
The “New South” was the brainchild of Atlanta Constitution editor Henry W. Grady. Grady’s vision, widely embraced by elites, business interests, investors, and industrialists, was that the South could reintegrate into the United States following the Civil War by focusing on urban development and industrialization along the lines of Northern and mid-Atlantic cities. Throughout the book, Hunter emphasizes that one of the ironies of the New South was that it wedded progress with retrograde racial and class ideology.
Hunter makes clear that Atlanta, which served as a distribution and transportation hub during the Civil War, was primed to play an important role in the New South. After Sherman destroyed the city, the first sector to be rebuilt was industry. African Americans and working-class people in some ways bought into the promise of the city because it offered economic opportunities not available in the rural South. African Americans also believed in the promise of the city because it got them away from the dangerous, oppressive rural areas where they were more vulnerable to racial violence.
What many working-class and African-American people found was that the profits of the New South went to elites. While the labor of black working-class women allowed even working-class whites to devote themselves to earning money, African-American women seemed to be stuck in low-paying domestic jobs and a high cost of living that left them with little options. This was by design. Hunter notes that Southern elites’ salesmanship of the New South to investors hinged on having cheap, subservient black labor on hand.
In the end, the New South was much like the old South: whites and economic elites used the law, violence, and mechanisms of social and economic control to extract profit from African Americans. They cloaked their efforts to exert control in the language of reforming the South so that it was up to par with the rest of the country. When working-class African Americans gave up hope that the promise of freedom was not to be had in the South, they simply left in large numbers to pursue that same dream in the Northeast and other urban spaces.
