Special History Study of Rural African Americans for National Capital Region

Description

This project will produce a Special History Study of rural African Americans in the National Capital Region. The study will provide an overview of the experiences of rural African Americans in the region from 1865 to 1940, and use as case studies the experiences of African Americans on and near lands that became Manassas National Battlefield Park (VA), and Antietam National Battlefield (MD). Much work has been done on the lives of urban African Americans in this time period, with relatively little focus on rural African Americans. Faced with the disillusionment of the Reconstruction years, the segregation and hostilities of the Jim Crow era, and the hardships of the Depression, rural African Americans turned to family, church, and community to survive. Several African American families lived on or near the battlefields of Antietam and Manassas after the Civil War. Many African Americans found employment as laborers on neighboring farms, some turned to sharecropping, and a very few owned land. Others held jobs in the towns and industries of the region, and as servants in white households. Both Antietam and Manassas Battlefield Parks have resources to tell the story of rural African Americans from 1865 to 1940. The stories range from Hillary Watson in Sharpsburg who remained a farm laborer his entire life, to James Robinson, of Manassas, who owned land and had a relatively prosperous farm, and to Jennie Dean, who attended a Freedmen’s Bureau school in Manassas and later established the Manassas Industrial School. Structures such as Tolson’s Chapel in Sharpsburg, established in 1866 and used as both a house of worship and a Freedmen’s Bureau school, show how rural African Americans valued both religion and education.

Agency Contact

More from National Park Service