A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration

From the cotton hamlets of Mississippi to the pine-thick backroads of Georgia, Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet explodes with the thunder of freed families who, in the six stormy decades after Emancipation, turned porch-step whispers into a grassroots republic-in-waiting. Hahn tracks kin networks that smuggled news along railroad cuts, Reconstruction meetings where rifle-bearing farmers debated ballot boxes, and Great Migration trains that rattled with hopes of self-governance—each scene a live wire of Racial Justice and Political Justice crackling against plantation bosses and night-rider terror. He spotlights unnamed rural strategists, shows how Garveyism’s red-black-green banner sprouted from earlier creek-bank councils, and reveals biracial voting pacts that flared like fireflies before Jim Crow’s fist slammed down. Labor hymns become campaign slogans, church pews double as war rooms, and every mile of dirt road feels charged with the dream of a “black nation” daring the Union to honor its creed. Hahn argues that these field-hand legislators seeded the modern Civil Rights struggle long before buses rolled through Montgomery. One urgent question blazes brighter than a Delta sunrise: what new freedom map will today’s readers draw from their example? Tap the blue ➕ to Save to List for later inspiration, or hit the bold arrow to Learn More and connect your classroom, youth group, or congregation to this epic testament of people power.