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Dennis B Downey, African Americans, Death, and the New Birth of Freedom: Dying Free during the Civil War and Reconstruction, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 2, September 2024, Pages 356–357, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae126
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Extract
Taking as her point of departure African American death and funerary rituals in the postemancipation South, Ashley Towle has written a thoroughly researched account of Black struggles for freedom and citizenship during Reconstruction.
Faced with old racial barriers and new social impediments to safety and security, Black southerners adapted to and often transcended exclusion and violence through rituals of mourning and remembrance. New bonds of community and family ties were created, often centered on cemeteries and collective grieving for lost loved ones. This trend complemented political activism and self-defense leagues in protecting freedpeople.
But it is the subject of Black death that preoccupies Towle, and the juxtaposition of death and freedom provides a strong narrative thread through five long chapters. Much as it was for those who bore arms against slavery, “Death was an ever-present facet of Black noncombatants' experience in the war,” she writes (p. 2).
Towle notes the influence of Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering (2009), but she treats the subject differently in an eclectic grouping of chapters related to her central theme of death and freedom. Into the era of Jim Crow segregation, cemeteries were a “site to commemorate their history and to protest the injustices they [freedpeople] faced” (p. 31). In short, “Black deaths matter” (p. 163).
