What Was Freedom's Price? Edited by David G. Sansing Essays by Willie Lee Rose, Joel Williamson, Richard Sutch & Roger Ransom, George M. Fredrickson, and C. Vann Woodward The political and economic instability of the post-Civil War South prompted Congress to enact legislation that brought sweeping changes to the region. However, the complexities of the new order in combination with the recalcitrance of the southern character produced a postwar society in which emancipated African Americans occupied a status somewhere between slavery and full citizenship. What was freedom like to these Blacks whose dream of equality and civil rights remained in deferral for more than a century? The essays in What Was Freedom's Price?, authored by now-well-known scholars and delivered during the backdrop of America's bicentennial, examine this question and probe the results of economic, social, and racial readjustment in the postbellum South. This book is the opening to a three-part investigation which includes The Age of Segregation: Race Relations in the South, 1890-1945 and concludes with Have We Overcome? Race Relations Since Brown, 1954-1979.
All three are available again in paperback from University Press of Mississippi. David G. Sansing is Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of Mississippi.