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  • Blacks in the Adirondacks: A History by Sally E. Svenson
  • Kishi Animashaun Ducre (bio)
Blacks in the Adirondacks: A History
By Sally E. Svenson. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017. New York State and Regional Studies. 376 pages, 30 halftones, 1 map, 6” x 9.” $65.00 cloth, $34.95 paper, $34.95 e-book.

Sally E. Svenson’s Black in the Adirondacks: A History is a meticulous historical account of the Black experience in upstate New York. While the population in the region is not large, her scholarship demonstrates there has always been a Black presence. It is through the small details lost to time, memory and history that Svenson attempts to cull together a variety of sources to write in this missing history of Black life in the Adirondacks. Real estate records, military service records, residents’ memoirs, as well as church records and cemetery markers are presented in an admirable attempt to reimagine the lives of Black folk.

There are nineteen chapters in the book: Chapters One through Four detail Black migration to the region from slavery to Reconstruction. Chapters Five through Eleven chronicle the various means by which African Americans were employed in the region, largely through domestic service and as itinerant entertainers at sport clubs when the region became known as a summer resort and refuge for tuberculosis patients. Chapters Thirteen through Nineteen cover Black life in the twentieth century and the establishment of Black civil society and organizations.

Gerrit Smith’s goal in 1846 was to create Black independent “colonies” in the Adirondack region by donating 120,000 acres to African Americans. This act served as a catalyst for Black migration. From this moment, Svenson establishes a genealogy of the area’s founding Black families like the Appos, Epps, Hazzards, and Morehouses. Her careful accounting of land records of the colonies also intersect with the white radical abolitionist John Brown who supported Smith’s mission to enable Black independence through farming in the Adirondacks. Brown not only settled among Black farmers in North Elba, he also selected this area as his final resting place after his execution for treason following the Harper’s Ferry raid. This area’s connection to Brown’s legacy continues into the twentieth century with the annual pilgrimages of the John Brown Memorial Association, and even later with John Brown Lives, a human rights organization introduced in the afterword of the book.

Despite these connections, she neglects to contextualize the significance of the Gerrit Smith colonies. Smith’s land transfer was not only about Black independence through land ownership; it is also speaks to Black suffrage: “Land ownership would, by Smith’s reckoning, be an important step in securing grantees’ eventual qualification to vote, a right [End Page 314] diminished for them with ratification of the [New York] state’s second (1821) constitution. . . . This legislation achieved virtually complete disenfranchisement of African American citizens” (19). Consequently, this event should have the most heft in the articulation of Black life in the Adirondacks, not simply sequestered in Chapter Two. Further analysis of this major historical moment could have been extended by discussing the naming of those colonies, particularly the ideological significance in naming colonies like Blacksville (today’s Loon Lake) and Timbuctoo/Timbuktu within North Elba. The author chooses to focus on the ultimate failure of these enterprises and creating a recurring theme of Black transience rather than linking these ventures to a larger narrative about Black utopias and liberation.

There is also a missed opportunity to fully convey the experiences of African Americans in the Adirondacks with an overreliance upon the accounts by whites, whether through their personal recollections, newspaper accounts written by white reporters in white newspapers, or official government records in the form of Census data recorded by white Census takers (which results in a shifting of racial classifications of particular individuals over time). This problem becomes most apparent in Chapter Five, “Making a Living.” Some of the descriptions of individuals feed into pernicious stereotypes of Mammy and Uncle Tom: enduring servants who identified strongly with their white employers as family (rather than employers) and their willingness to risk their lives to save white folks. For example, she...

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