Prologue Looking Out From Slavery Summary

Hahn writes that his book is about extraordinary people who did extraordinary things in difficult circumstances. Focusing on the rural South, the book is about how African Americans engaged in a political struggle. It is about how the distinctive, African American politics were created in the nineteenth century.

Hahn's own interest in the topic began when he came across an account of African American labor resistance in 1868. He discovered that there were more examples of resistance and political struggle across the South in the wake of emancipation. Solidarities were created by the political mobilizations. Hahn seeks a broad understanding of politics in this book and sees this as encompassing collective struggles for social and meaningful power. The time period of the book is a time when African American men won and lost the right to...