Amy Godine. The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier.

Le résumé fourni par la source

Since its founding, the American nation has predominately been an agricultural society infused with notions of freedom, independence, and economic advancement through farming labor. The small independent farmer became a romantic symbol, which was most popularly referenced by Thomas Jefferson, to epitomize the ideal American citizen. However, such agrarian traditions were often denied to millions of African Americans and their descendants. The “forty acres and a mule” became the symbol of this obstructed promise of mass landownership after freedom. As the preeminent scholar W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote, “The vision of ‘forty acres and a mule’ . . . was destined in most cases to a bitter disappointment” (The Souls of Black Folk [1903], 26). Amy Godine explores an earlier short-lived pursuit of this Black agrarian vision in The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier. The Black Woods examines a little-known history of a land giveaway project of forty-acre plots to Black New Yorkers. Implemented from 1846 to 1853, this project was created by the abolitionist and large landowner Gerrit Smith, who broke up 120,000 acres of his land located in the remote northern New York wilderness of Adirondack. This land was intended for farming and gifted to three thousand Black people. Though eventually viewed as a failure, an analysis of this land giveaway reveals the earlier aspirations of Black agrarian pursuits.

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