Promiseland: A Century of Life in a Negro Community Book

In these last years of sorrow, as we have learned over and over again just how far we have fallen short of our goals of equality in the United States, only to have yet one more tragedy in Charleston drive home that awful lesson, I am drawn back again to stories of the African-American experience. "Promiseland" is the story of how an African-American community in South Carolina grew and developed to the incredible dislocation of emancipation, followed by half-hearted Reconstruction and the full onset of Jim Crow. Better said, in this case, Reconstruction seems to have been pretty well skipped altogether The stories in "Promiseland" are not particularly violent, especially in comparison to what other African-American communities in the South endured, but they do make clear just how difficult it was to establish and maintain churches, businesses and schools despite poverty and official hostility. Eventually, moving to the north for better jobs, serving in the Army and civil rights made things better for individuals. The astonishing thing about these communities is not how much they suffered under such conditions but how hard they worked to build and how much they achieved. Not nearly enough is said about that.