Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861-1890

In this age of affirmative action and increasing complexity in black-white relations, this pioneering study of Hampton, Virginia, tells the story of what race relations in postbellum America might have been. Here, if only for a time, the promises of Emancipation and Reconstruction were fulfilled. Why was the American Dream realized by blacks in Hampton and not elsewhere? Engs follows a community of freedmen over a thirty-year period to answer this compelling question.