Making Freedom Pay

The end of slavery left millions of former slaves destitute in a South as unsettled as they were. In Making Freedom Pay , Sharon Ann Holt reconstructs how freed men and women in tobacco-growing central North Carolina worked to secure a place for themselves in this ravaged region and hostile time. Without ignoring the crushing burdens of a system that denied blacks justice and civil rights, Holt shows how many black men and women were able to realize their hopes through determined collective effo