![]() ![]() Over 130,000 Black southerners braved enormous peril in the U.S. The heroic strain of remembrance became increasingly prominent in scholarship amid the civil rights movement. Black southerners celebrated their ancestors’ grit to counter these derisive accounts, which asserted that enslaved men and women did little to claim liberty. ![]() Stories of Black southerners’ wartime gumption reflected an important strain of African American memory, a strain juxtaposed against Dunningite histories. They supplied an antidote to prevailing theories of emancipation. “Militantly resentful of slavery,” Wright penned in 1923, Grandpa “joined the Union Army to kill southern whites he waded in icy streams slept in mud suffered, fought.” Such stories served as more than fireside entertainment. ![]() “Granny’s conversations…Grandpa’s life,” gave the novelist further details of the difficulties his maternal ancestor Richard Wilson endured during the Civil War. Grandpa “darkly boasted of having killed ‘mo’n mah fair share of them damn rebels’ while en route to enlist in the Union Army,” Richard Wright recalled. Richard Wright, Negro Poet,” Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USW3-030283-D ![]()
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