What Is Mutual Aid and What Does It Mean for African Americans?

For most African Americans, emancipation was begun without assistance. How did people who had so recently been enslaved managed to pull that off even before the Freedmen's Bureau had arrived? And what role did what might be called mutual aid play in this black organization building amid and following abolition? This is the hardest thing for me to explain to my students. We Americans are so sheltered from what displacement looks like and what it really is.