The most prominent structure of black political organizing after the Civil War became the mass meeting. The community already knows what pond they're swimming in. It's the outsiders who don't know. Women are much more enabled in terms of speaking in public than maybe white women in Victorian America. They had as much at stake when they broke the rules, when they went to secret meetings in the woods. Everybody's life was at stake equally.
Featuring Thulani Davis on The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom, a monumental history of freedpeople organizing amid the Civl War and Reconstruction.
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Check out A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto by China Miéville haymarketbooks.org/books/1990-a-spectre-haunting