Black Charlestonians : a social history, 1822-1885 /

Powers (College of Charleston) comprehensively examines the breadth and depth of African American achievement in building a society in postbellum Charleston. He demonstrates the strength and persistence of black drive for self-realization against implacable white resistance, and emphasizes the elements of continuity from antebellum black Charleston that shaped postwar social development. Seeing Charleston's "brown" elite as a buffer class often allied more with whites than blacks, Powers skillfully traces the initial survival of caste differences after 1865, and the slow emergence thereafter of new social and cultural markers around which African American churches, schools, and voluntary associations coalesced. Concluding with an account of the collapse of Reconstruction, Powers underlines the accomplishments of brown and black alike in gaining some, if not all, of the bundle of rights called freedom. Engagingly written and thoroughly researched. Upper-division undergraduates and above. T. S. Whitman; Mount St. Mary's College and Seminary