Freedom's Children
   Velma Maia Thomas
  2000 Crown Publishers, Inc. NY
   ISBN: 0609604813


An interactive book featuring historical photographs & removable documents charting the course The Passage from Emancipation to the Great Migration of the people of American slavery after the Civil War.

This is a solemn book written & composed by Velma Maia Thomas, an ordained minister & creator of the Black Holocaust Exhibit in Atlanta. In it she refers to slaves & freedpeople as “my people” [which I must surround by quotation marks because I am not, to my knowledge, one of her people].

Freedom's Children is filled with all things domestic, religious & political concerning African Americans, once the chattel slaves of the Southern States. Every black man, woman & child was now free to leave the plantations & homes where they had labored without recompense & lived under emotional, spiritual & literal oppression, to find their diaspored relatives & make a life of their own.

Reconstruction of the defeated Confederate States started with President Johnson in a telling way: having promised to deal harshly with wealthy slaveholders who had supported secession from the Union, he duly pardoned them & encouraged them to ascend to political power.

“What good was our emancipation?” Cries an angry Frederick Douglass, “When you turned us loose, you gave us no acres. You turned us loose to the sky, to the storm, to the whirlwind, and worst of all, you turned us loose to the wrath of our infuriated master.”

In time Congress took back Reconstruction, extending the charter of The Freedmen's Bureau which helped the newly freed & refugees navigate freedom; passed legislation dividing the South into districts of military control & passed the Fourteenth Amendment granting freedpeople citizenship & equal benefits under the law. Later would come the Fifteenth Amendment against denying any male citizen the right to vote based on race, color or previous servitude.

In the chaos after peace was restored, “my people” built schools & churches, held political office & voted. Most of all they learnt to read & write, a sure way to freedom of the mind, if not the body.

Chapter Titles include: Getting to Know Freedom a mother's prayer answered; Living Faith when husbands & wives could at last be legally married & where, at last, “my people” could worship in their own joyous way; The Promised Land for which every American yearns; Saving Money, Losing Trust after a devastating failure of The Freedmen's Savings & Trust Company & the economic depression after the war; Restoring White Supremacy in which we learn the price of a man's life & the destruction of a woman's life; Advancing our Cause in the United States Supreme Court & finding that equal does not mean the same; Lifting as We Climb the voice of the women; Fighting for Democracy during World War I.

Freedom's Children has envelopes, slots & pouches out of which the reader can withdraw facsimiles of railroad tickets to Colorado, newspaper clippings about Black Senators & pages from letters & speeches. Other pages are illustrated by sepia tinted photographs of wilderness pioneers, personal advertisements requesting the whereabouts of loved ones & a miniature copy of The Freedman's Third Reader. Open the flaps to find special sections on college education, historical photographs & more information on such luminaries as Booker T. Washington or Ida B. Well or W.E.B. Du Bois or the black cowboys' way of life.

A beautifully profound book, worthy of repeated readings for its many fascinating details, its enduring determination for peace & equality & its dignified & idiosyncratic presentation & language.

This author may be reached at: vmaiathomas@hotmail.com

More from Velma Maia Thomas: Lest We Forget
(05/27/01)

Rebecca