The African-American Experience in Nineteenth-Century Connecticut : Benevolence and Bitterness

This study examines and analyzes the African-American experience in Connecticut as it was portrayed through primary sources. In this book we can hear, sometimes for the first time, the voices of African Americans and others commenting on the complicated and explosive racial issues of their time.

The African-American Experience in Nineteenth-Century Connecticut examines and analyzes the African-American experience in Connecticut as it was through primary sources. Theresa Vara-Dannen analyzes the language of real nineteenth-century Americans expressing the complexity of their thoughts and feelings about the racial issues of their times in a small state with very small communities of people of color. This book highlights the attitudes of ordinary people whose voices emerged, sometimes heroically, through their daily newspapers. The meshing of these voices regarding their race-related experiences provides a nuanced account of a long-gone past, but also gives us an understanding of twenty-first-century Connecticut, which leads the nation in the educational and economic gap between urban and nonurban citizens and has one of the most segregated school systems and residential patterns in the nation.