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Facing Freedom: An African American Community in Virginia from Reconstruction to Jim Crow by Daniel B. Thorpe

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This is exactly the kind of book that hopefully will be written to explore the African-American experience in Appalachia in many communities during many times. As the sub-title makes clear, it focuses on the time from the late 1800s into the 1900s in Montgomery County, where the author teaches history and serves as a dean at Virginia Tech. “Facing Freedom provides glimpses of the complex ways freed people inhabited, defined, and shaped freedom." - Catherine Jones. “Facing Freedom offers a detailed look at the lives of Montgomery County’s African Americans as they voted, fought for schools, built churches, bought land, and experienced the heartbreak of the arrival of Jim Crow. Rejecting or expanding upon a host of existing scholarly conclusions based on scattered sources, Daniel Thorp draws on rich local archives, which offer an unbroken record of fifty years of tumultuous interracial politics and black community-building. A lucid and moving contribution to the history of Virginia and southern Appalachia.” - Jane Dailey. “Daniel Thorp’s portrait of the African American experience in one place has much to tell us about race relations elsewhere in the region and well beyond.” - John C. Inscoe.

Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, a 2019 first paperback edition of a 2017 release. 294 pages with an Index, Bibliography, Notes, maps and photos. Trade paperback.