Sharony Green

This book chronicles a University of Alabama historian’s efforts to engage public history over the course of a decade, highlighting personal and educational experiences inside and outside of the classroom.

Each chapter reveals how Sharony Green, her students, and collaborators used various public places and spaces in Alabama, including the University of Alabama and Tuscaloosa, where she teaches, as “labs” to learn more about our shared past. Inspired by her familiar beginnings in a historic community in Miami, Florida, the author, a descendant of people from the American South and the Bahamas, unveils her encounters with built environment, old documents and objects, motion pictures, music, and all kinds of historical actors. The book shares a variety of projects including exhibits and displays, images, videos, songs, and poetry, that serve as manifestations of their encounters with the places around them. Together, these stories uncover an unexpected journey into public history, offering new ways to think about the field and humanities more generally.

Teaching Public History Creatively in Alabama is an enlightening resource to both intentional and unintentional practitioners of public history, including scholars, students, and general readers interested in connecting with the past.

ISBN 978-0-87580-723-2 $24.95 x Paper ISBN 978-0-87580-491-0 $36.00 x ClotheISBN 978-1-60909-181-1
June 2015 6x9 200 pages 21 illus.

REVIEW
"Dr. Green has done a great job combing together crumbs of historical evidence from disparate places and using them to weave together a credible set of narratives. I was impressed by how extensive her research was across time and topic. Remember Me to Miss Louisa promises to challenge the consensus that most relationships between enslaved women and white men were rooted in oppression, inequality, and exploitation."

Nikki M. Taylor, author of Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati's Black Community, 1802-1868 and America's First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark

DESCRIPTION
It is generally recognized that antebellum interracial relationships were "notorious" at the neighborhood level. But we have yet to fully uncover the complexities of such relationships, especially from freedwomen's and children's points of view. While it is known that Cincinnati had the largest per capita population of mixed race people outside the South during the antebellum period, historians have yet to explore how geography played a central role in this outcome. The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers made it possible for Southern white men to ferry women and children of color for whom they had some measure of concern to free soil with relative ease.

Some of the women in question appear to have been "fancy girls," enslaved women sold for use as prostitutes or "mistresses." Green focuses on women who appear to have been the latter, recognizing the problems with the term "mistress," given its shifting meaning even during the antebellum period. Remember Me to Miss Louisa, among other things, moves the life of the fancy girl from New Orleans, where it is typically situated, to the Midwest. The manumission of these women and their children-and other enslaved women never sold under this brand-occurred as America's frontiers pushed westward, and urban life followed in their wake. Indeed, Green's research examines the tensions between the urban Midwest and the rising Cotton Kingdom. It does so by relying on surviving letters, among them those from an ex-slave mistress who sent her "love" to her former master. This relationship forms the crux of the first of three case studies. The other two concern a New Orleans young woman who was the mistress of an aging white man, and ten Alabama children who received from a white planter a $200,000 inheritance (worth roughly $5.1 million in today's currency). In each case, those freed people faced the challenges characteristic of black life in a largely hostile America.

While the frequency with which Southern white men freed enslaved women and their children is now generally known, less is known about these men's financial and emotional investments in them. Before the Civil War, a white Southern man's pending marriage, aging body, or looming death often compelled him to free an African American woman and their children. And as difficult as it may be for the modern mind to comprehend, some kind of connection sometimes existed between these individuals. This study argues that such men-though they hardly stand excused for their ongoing claims to privilege-were hidden actors in freedwomen's and children's attempts to survive the rigors and challenges of life as African Americans in the years surrounding the Civil War. Green examines many facets of this phenomenon in the hope of revealing new insights about the era of slavery.

Historians, students, and general readers of US history, African American studies, black urban history, and antebellum history will find much of interest in this fascinating study.

Sharony Green is assistant professor of American history at the University of Alabama.

As far back as the New Deal era, South Florida's white power brokers wanted African Americans to live in the northwest section of then Dade County and away from the region's lucrative seaside. Even today, however, people of color, many of Bahamian descent, remain in Miami's bayside Coconut Grove community, but they do so amid gentrification. Such ongoing settlement and the eventual migration of people of African descent to the northwest section of the county by the late 1960s fit into a larger narrative of black self-determination in Florida. Relying greatly on oral histories and the historical record, this article explores such settlement and migratory patterns and how they fit into a larger black resistance tradition dating back to the nineteenth century. In 1972, my family moved to the northwest section of then Dade County, about twenty or so miles north of Miami. Sand dunes and empty fields surrounded our often pastel-painted homes. We were in the boondocks. We also lived in a "second ghetto," the idea being that after leaving a segregated neighborhood, we had found ourselves in a similar state owing to recent white flight. But that whites had once lived in this area at all suggests the limits of racial housing politics in South Florida. As far back as the New Deal era, realtors, policy makers, and developers wanted African Americans to live in this section of the county, away from the region's lucrative seaside. It was only decades after power brokers wanted us there that we were in fact moving to this community , then the unincorporated part of the county called Carol City (now the City of Miami Gardens). Our belated move to the northwest section of the county suggest irregular spatial and racial politics across time worth studying.

Using a review of several letters from the papers of Rice C. Ballard, a former Virginia slave trader, this article examines the lives " fancy girls, " a little known group of high-end, enslaved women who were sold for use as concubines or prostitutes during antebellum America. Specifically, this study uses letters from two women to demonstrate how this unique female slave encountered an industrializing America in ways that often differ from the experiences of other female slaves.

This dissertation argues that numerous ex-slave mistresses and the children they produced with white men thoughtfully rebuilt their lives as newly freed people by capitalizing on earlier, sometimes ongoing, ties to white men, but also by relying on themselves and others sharing their circumstances. Some such women appear to have been “fancy girls,” the brand name for enslaved women and girls sold for use as prostitutes and concubines during the slavery era of United States history. Relying greatly on letters from ex-slaves and an ex-slave narrative, this study pays close attention to the ways in which some such women were highly valued in the slave market because of their fair complexion, but shifts attention to their experiences outside the market, specifically to their lives as “favored” ex-slaves. It does so by focusing on the migration of such ex-slaves from the Deep South to Cincinnati, a city that had the highest population of mulattoes outside the South before the Civil War. This migration occurred during the rising surveillance of people of African descent in the South during the 1830s and the concurrent rise of cotton as a premier crop, two factors that figured greatly into elite white men’s unwillingness to have their relations with women of African descent scrutinized at the community level. Ultimately, this dissertation seeks to shed light on black-white intimacies and the ways in which Southern white men were hidden actors in antebellum black urban histories. It also hopes to reveal the degree to which focusing on a select slave expands our understanding of how oppressed bodies fit into both political and social histories because of their ability to draw upon the social capital that accrued from their connections to whites in authoritative positions.