A Nation Under Our Feet Summary

A Nation Under Our Feet is about the black political struggles in the rural south from the final decades of slavery to the Great Migration. The purpose of this book is to show how African Americans from their earliest days in the South attempted to assert control over their own lives, shape and protect their communities, and gain political power. The first part of this book looks into African American political activity during the pre-Civil War and Civil War periods. He uses this part of the book to show that blacks, even while in slavery, used their position to gain rights from their slaveholders. These rights included the right to farm their own plots, sale of their produce, and to visit neighboring plantations. This was also the period

Hahn discusses both the well-known struggle against white supremacy and the less examined conflicts within the black community. He tells of the remarkable rise of Southern blacks to local and state power and the white campaign to restore their version of racial order, disenfranchise blacks, and exclude them from politics. Blacks built many political and social structures to pursue their political goals, including organizations such as Union Leagues, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, chapters of the Republican Party, and emigration organizations. Hahn used this part of the book to successfully recover the importance of black political action shaping their own history. The final part of A Nation Under Our Feet covers the years following the end of Reconstruction. Even with the end of Reconstruction, African Americans made effort to empower themselves by forging alliances to gain leverage and power for the black community. Hahn’s most important point is his idea that a large number of black activists put forth multi-racial and democratic vision of the nation in which birth and loyalty determined rights and citizenship rather than race. Because African Americans put forth this remarkably modern view of America, it brings up the question of who built and defined this great