In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

xiii Historiographical Notes Katherine J. Harris The African American experience in Connecticut has received cursory attention in surveys of African American history, texts on American history, unpublished micro histories, and published journal essays.1 A historical synthesis of Connecticut’s African American community similar to Graham Russell Hodges’ Root & Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 however, has yet to be published.2 Secondary published works such as William Dillon Piersen’s Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England, published in 1988, have offered a glimpse of Connecticut’s African American political and cultural traditions.3 On the other end of the spectrum, Robert Austin Warner ’s New Haven Negroes, published in 1940, is a useful but very focused study of New Haven’s African American socio-economic history as it evolved through the eighteenth to the first four decades of the twentieth centuries.4 Dr. Lorenzo J. Greene’s 1942 study The Negro in Colonial New England 1620–1790 examined the regional context of Connecticut’s African American history. Greene’s history remains the seminal scholarly treatment of African Americans in Connecticut, though like the Hodges volume, Greene covered a selected chronological period. Born in Ansonia, Connecticut in 1899, Greene lived and researched the Connecticut African American experience. He recognized its historical complexities.5 During the intervening decades since Greene published his study a comprehensive treatise on Connecticut African Americans has not been written. Hence this current exploration of Connecticut African Americans, in many ways, resumes where Greene’s study ended. It is a starting point for a comprehensive history. But this volume based on primary, secondary, and other sources probes the richness and nuances of more than three hundred years of the Connecticut African American experience. Covering the foundational roots of African Americans in Connecticut to the early twenty-first century, this volume welds together topical historical essays and illustrations for the general readership and scholarly audience. xiv Historiographical Notes Notes 1. John Hope Franklin and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, ninth edition (New York: McGraw Hill, 2011 first published in 1947). Clayborne Carson, Emma LapsanskyWerner and Gary Nash, The Struggle for Freedom (New York: Prentice Hall, 2007, 2011) combined volume one, second edition. David Goldfield, Carl Abbott, Virginia De John Anderson, Jo Ann E. Argersinger, William L. Barney, Robert M. Wier, American Journey: A History of the United States (Boston: Pearson, 2004/2011), volumes 1 and 2. 2. Graham Russell Hodges. Root & Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863, (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 3. William Dillon Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an AfroAmerican Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Boston: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). 4. Robert Austin Warner, New Haven Negroes: A Social History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940). 5. Lorenzo J. Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England 1620–1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942). Lorenzo Johnston Greene Papers, A Finding Aid to the Collection in the Library of Congress, prepared by Joseph K. Brooks with the assistance of Patricia K. Craig, Lisa R. Madison, and Sheila R. Day, revised and expanded by Joseph K. Brooks (Washington, D.C.: Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, 2009), 3–4. ...

Share