- Feb 28, 2009
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Long-buried story of black America
BARRY, Ill. –– The three archeologists moved deliberately across a soggy Illinois farm field, marking boundaries for a vanished town where blacks determined their destiny on the American frontier well before the Civil War.
The town, New Philadelphia, turned out to be bigger than they thought.
So, too, scholars believe, is the long-buried story of black Americans during this period.
With fresh scholarship, new grants and high technology, university archeologists are renewing and expanding efforts to explore the Midwestern towns where African-Americans lived in the 1800s. In the last few years they have pried back the earth in Nicodemus, Kan., reconsidered the lessons of places like Buxton, Iowa, and returned this spring to the hilltop site of New Philadelphia, where digging began in 2002.
Tantalizing recoveries from the sites, along with yellowed documents and oral history, have fueled a surge of interest in black towns during the last several years, building hopes that the interest would help rewrite a neglected chapter in American history books. Scholars of African-American history are familiar with the idea of blacks as land speculators and utopian pioneers.
Now archeologists––more recent arrivals to the topic––are adding concrete details.
Every discarded button from a Civil War uniform, shard of china from England or food scrap from trash pits adds to an emerging narrative in which African-Americans faced and surmounted obstacles on the frontier when much of America was consumed with racial turmoil.
"Black people had guns, and they owned the land," University of Illinois scholar Abdul Alkalimat said of New Philadelphia, which was established in 1836. "Whatever the definition of black power is, it certainly existed in New Philadelphia."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-blacktowns_bd08jun08,0,9628.story
BARRY, Ill. –– The three archeologists moved deliberately across a soggy Illinois farm field, marking boundaries for a vanished town where blacks determined their destiny on the American frontier well before the Civil War.
The town, New Philadelphia, turned out to be bigger than they thought.
So, too, scholars believe, is the long-buried story of black Americans during this period.
With fresh scholarship, new grants and high technology, university archeologists are renewing and expanding efforts to explore the Midwestern towns where African-Americans lived in the 1800s. In the last few years they have pried back the earth in Nicodemus, Kan., reconsidered the lessons of places like Buxton, Iowa, and returned this spring to the hilltop site of New Philadelphia, where digging began in 2002.
Tantalizing recoveries from the sites, along with yellowed documents and oral history, have fueled a surge of interest in black towns during the last several years, building hopes that the interest would help rewrite a neglected chapter in American history books. Scholars of African-American history are familiar with the idea of blacks as land speculators and utopian pioneers.
Now archeologists––more recent arrivals to the topic––are adding concrete details.
Every discarded button from a Civil War uniform, shard of china from England or food scrap from trash pits adds to an emerging narrative in which African-Americans faced and surmounted obstacles on the frontier when much of America was consumed with racial turmoil.
"Black people had guns, and they owned the land," University of Illinois scholar Abdul Alkalimat said of New Philadelphia, which was established in 1836. "Whatever the definition of black power is, it certainly existed in New Philadelphia."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-blacktowns_bd08jun08,0,9628.story