When Professor of History and Africana Studies Rita Roberts accepts invitations from civic organizations to speak about such pivotal moments in U.S. history as the Civil War, she often reads letters written by African Americans from that era because she has found audiences more readily relate to first-person narratives.
Professor of History and Africana Studies Rita Roberts
While preparing for these talks, professor Roberts reviews letters, journals, and other first-person documents penned by African Americans during the Civil War. She gleans historical insights from these writings.
“The story of African Americans is central to the American experience,” Roberts says. “I decided to write a book exploring the African American experience during the Civil War, as told through letters, public and private, because of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, an event that still influences American social, political, and economic life.
“This book will help everyone develop a fuller, richer understanding of the past and will positively influence our future,” says Roberts, who expects to complete a draft of the book soon before engaging in talks with publishers.
“In one letter, a fugitive slave tells his mother of his safe arrival in Boston after a tortuous escape,” she says. “In another, abolitionist Frederick Douglass publicly exposes a liberal upstate New York private school for girls that admitted his daughter, but then segregated her because of their prejudice against her skin color.”
Several letters are intimate in nature, such as the correspondence between a free African American man who lived in the South and his sons who moved North for their studies, or the exchanges between a Union soldier and his fiancée. In letters exchanged between two schoolteachers, a Washington, D.C.-based educator writes to a friend in New York about efforts to establish schools in Louisiana for newly freed children and adults.
“When I began this project, I expected to find only a few personal letters. To my surprise, I found letters in archives throughout the country, including those in published collections,” Roberts says. “These letters reveal the unique and diverse experiences of African Americans – both slave and free, women and men – of this period.”