Life in a Black Community: Striving for Equal Citizenship in Annapolis, Maryland, 1902-1952

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Life in a Black Community: Striving for Equal Citizenship in Annapolis, Maryland, 1902-1952 tells the story of a struggle over what it meant to be a citizen of a democracy. For blacks, membership in a democracy meant full and equal participation in the life of the town. For most whites, it meant the full participation of only its white citizens, based on the presumption that their black neighbors were less than equal citizens and had to be kept down. All the dramas of the Jim Crow eralynching, the KKK, and disenfranchisement, but also black boycotts, petitioning for redress of grievances, lawsuits, and political activismoccurred in Annapolis. As they were challenging white prejudice and discrimination, tenacious black citizens advanced themselves and enriched their own world of churches, shops, clubs, and bars. It took grit for black families to survive. As they pressed on, life slowly improvedfor some. Life in a Black Community recounts the tactics blacks used to gain equal rights, details the methods whites employed to deny or curtail their rights, and explores a range of survival and advancement strategies used by black families.

Reviews

We made room for ourselves (p. xii). This one sentence captures the essence of Hannah Joplings Life in a Black Community, a historical ethnography that examines how black residents interacted with the white community in the borderstate town of Annapolis, Maryland, from 1902 to 1952, negotiating and demanding their rights as citizens through various individual and collective efforts. [T]he book overall is a valuable contribution to research focused on the relationship between citizenship and race. What is striking about Life in a Black Community is the various ways it can be used in classes and for research on education, race, racism, citizenship, class, community organizing, Jim Crow, and resistance. Many of the examples of striving for equal citizenship that Jopling uses to support her argument can still be seen today, making this historical ethnography soberingly timely and a sad reminder about the ways history reproduces itself when lessons are not learned and enacted. * American Anthropologist *
Here, in Life in a Black Community, is the invisible third of Annapolis. Here is the African America that made the city. It is never seen by historians or preservationists because it is not in official records or great buildings, but is in the ordinary: newspapers and in the ground as archaeology. This is the third that has been regarded as disposable along with the ground where it is buried and in the newspapers printed to be discarded. -- Mark P. Leone, University of Maryland, College Park

Author Bio

Hannah Jopling teaches anthropology at Fordham University and Hunter College.