Historic Black Communities and American Freedom

Who We Are

The Historic Black Communities and American Freedom Digital Humanities Project aims to educate the public about the history of African American communities in Maryland and other regions of the United States.

Our Mission

The goal of the Historic Black Communities and American Freedom Project is to document the experience of African Americans as they engaged in building new communities in freedom.  We aim to ensure that the efforts of African Americans to gain freedom, education, and the rights of citizenship are remembered and preserved. We hope that this website is generative and leads to a fuller recounting of the history of Black communities and the role of Black women in building and sustaining Black communities.

Let me not forget again that I came not here for friendly sympathy or for anything else but to work, and to work hard. Let me do that faithfully and well.

-Charlotte Forten Grimké, Anti-Slavery Activist

Staff

Founder of the Historic Black Communities and American Freedom Digital Humanities Project

Dr. Karen Cook-Bell

Dr. Cook Bell is the Wilson H. Elkins Endowed Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History and Government at Bowie State University. She is the author of Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia (University of South Carolina Press, 2018); Running From Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and editor of Southern Black Women’s Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction, (Cambridge University Press, 2023). She currently serves as general editor of the Cambridge History of Black Women in the United States and editor of the Cambridge Studies on Black Women in US History.

Project Contributors

Dr. Felicia Jamison

Dr. Felicia Jamison is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Louisville. Her research focuses on the lives and experiences of nineteenth and twentieth-century African Americans who lived in the rural South. She is currently working on a monograph that analyzes the strategies Southern Black women used to accumulate property during slavery and purchase land during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Jamison received her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Maryland College Park History Department.