The Black Towns Norman L Crockett by Norman L. Crockett instant download after payment.

From Appomattox to World War I, Black Americans continued their quest for a secure position in the American system. The problem was how to be both black and American—how to find acceptance, or even toleration, in a society in which the boundaries of normative behavior, the values, and the very definition of what it meant to be an American were determined and enforced by whites. A few Black leaders proposed self-segregation inside the United States within the protective confines of an all-Black community as one possible solution. The Black-town idea reached its peak in the fifty years after the Civil War; at least sixty Black communities were settled between 1865 and 1915.
Norman L. Crockett has focused on the formation, growth and failure of five such communities. The towns and the date of their settlement are: Nicodemus, Kansas (1879), established at the time of the Black exodus from the South; Mound Bayou, Mississippi (1897), perhaps the most prominent Black town because of its close ties to Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee Institute: Langston, Oklahoma (1891), visualized by one of its promoters as the nucleus for the creation of an all-Black state in the West; and Clearview (1903) and Boley (1904), in Oklahoma, twin communities in the Creek Nation which offer the opportunity observe certain aspects of Indian-Black relations in this area.
The role of Black people in town promotion and settlement has long been a neglected area in western and urban history, Crockett looks at patterns of settlement and leadership, government, politics, economics, and the problems of isolation versus interaction with the white communities. He also describes family life, social life, and class structure within the Black towns.
Crockett looks closely at the rhetoric and behavior of Black people inside the limits of their own community—isolated from the domination of whites and freed from the daily reinforcement of their subordinate rank in the larger society. He finds that, long before
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