There have been a lot of mixed messages coming from the Federal government about celebrating Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and the like since January 20.  Even though President Trump has officially proclaimed February Black History Month, many agencies are canceling events related to theses “cultural celebrations.” (It’s possible this will have all be unwound by the time you read this. Things are moving quickly. )

As far as I’m concerned,  February is Black History Month–and  it is even more important to recognize than it was before. In honor of Black History Month, I plan to read as many of the books currently in my TBR piles that are related to the topic as I can. As always, I’ll bring you along for the ride.

The Saturday before the Martin Luther King holiday felt like the right time to start. And To Walk About in Freedom turned out to be the perfect first book for the project.

I will admit, I deliberately put off reading To Walk About in Freedom: The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner by Carole Emberton. When it came out in 2022, I was deep into Nazis. I just couldn’t face adding America’s history of slavery and what I learned from Joyner to call the “long emancipation” to the mix in my head. Now I have no excuse. In fact, I feel that it is important at this moment in time to bear witness to a part of our history that we have tried to whitewash from the day of the Emancipation Proclamation onward.

During the Depression, a WPA program called the Federal Writers’ Project sent unemployed journalists, writers and teachers to interview formerly enslaved people as part of a larger program intended to document the lives of ordinary Americans. Priscilla Joyner was the subject of one of those interviews.

Emberton uses Joyner’s story as a structure to explore the collective experience of what she names the “charter generation of freedom,” people who experienced life on both sides of emancipation. She fills out the gaps in Joyner’s interview with information from other oral histories of the charter generation, census data, marriage licenses, and any other relevant document she could find. The result is both a powerful history of the “long emancipation” as it unfolded from the Civil War through the Great Depression and a vivid individual biography. Emberton specifically chose Priscilla Joyner as a subject because much of Joyner’s story was unusual, reminding the reader that Joyner was not simply an exemplar of a generation. In fact, Emberton urges us to remember that the individual stories collected by the Federal Writers’ Project “are not valuable solely because they represent some greater historical truth. Their stories are valuable because they were theirs, and because they chose to tell them, imperfectly, to an unlikely army of public historians thrown together in the midst of a global economic crisis by a government that had shown very little concern for the fate of ex-slaves since Reconstruction.”

In her final chapter, titled “The Book,” Emberton traces the use and abuse of the WPA interviews of formerly enslaved people by white historians who were determined to present a positive image of the treatment of enslaved people by their owners. It is a salutary reminder that history is written by people, and some of whom are willing to twist sources to support their own agendas. (And none of us are entirely objective.)

I strongly recommend To Walk About in Freedom. I found it to be an engaging read and a master class in re-examining sources to support a broader story.

My Black History Month reading is off to a good start!