Review of To 'Joy My Freedom by Tera W. Hunter

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  In To ‘Joy My Freedom, Tera W. Hunter proves the truth of this old adage as it applied to the black women of post-Civil War Atlanta.  Newly emancipated, black women struggled against attempts by white men and women to maintain a “quasi-slavery” system, designed with the dual goals of preserving white sovereignty and ensuring a docile household workforce.  To thwart these goals, black women developed a myriad of tools, all with the overarching aim of sustaining, and enjoying, the freedom denied them for centuries.  While black women saw periods when their efforts resulted in positive outcomes for themselves and their community, the underlying racial tensions that had existed for centuries in Atlanta maintained certain conditions that would not change in the fifty-five years between the end of the Civil War and the Great Migration during World War I.

Hunter’s interest in the efforts of black women in Atlanta to take control of their own lives and labor began when she explored the Washerwomen’s Strike of 1881.  This event serves as the lynchpin for her exploration of the ways in which women acted collectively to secure their rights as free wage laborers.  Beginning with the final days of the Civil War, black female slaves exercised forms of resistance to the clinging tentacles of slavery, helping in both overt and subtle ways to further the cause of emancipation and the eventual defeat of the Confederacy.  With freedom, however, new challenges emerged as these same women worked to establish their identities as free people.  Confined by tradition and experience to roles in domestic service, black women began to act collectively, through benevolent societies, churches, and personal networks of communication, to exercise a measure of control over the terms of their labor.  With these efforts also came a growing awareness of, and ability to engage in, political activities, sometimes in support of black men and sometimes on their own behalf.  With white Atlanta citizens striving to keep black women in subservient roles, it was up to the black women themselves to define their own citizenship and to educate and protect their own people.

Hunter’s challenge in exploring the diverse efforts of these black women of Atlanta came in identifying not only what changes occurred in the years between the Civil War and the Great Migration but in an exploration of how the behaviors of both black and white Atlanta citizens remained the same over this fifty-five year period.  Black household workers continued traditions of pan-toting, scavenging, and other actions to ensure the survival of their families.  They continued collective actions and agitated against the repression of their civil rights.  White men and women continued to try to control black bodies through efforts to limit black dance halls and other entertainments and through a quasi-scientific explanation of the spread of tuberculosis.  White Atlantans allowed, even encouraged, ongoing brutality by law enforcement and the continued unspoken code that pardoned the sexual assault of white men on black women.  As much as things changed for black domestic workers in the first fifty-five years of freedom, so much more remained the same.

Through a creative identification of source materials, and a careful reading of the same, Tera Hunter uncovers a wealth of information that allows her to explore more fully the efforts of black women in post-Civil War Atlanta to define themselves as citizens and wage laborers.  Writing with a lively and engaging style, Hunter uncovers the lives of women hidden behind decades of racial intolerance.  Their voices, once silenced and overlooked, ring through the pages of To ‘Joy My Freedom.  Readers will find much to admire and learn from the lessons of these long-ago sisters in the fight for equality.