Book Reviewed: River of Blood: American Slavery from the People Who Lived It by Richard Cahan

Amazing Grace: Words and wisdom of American slaves The book is about the formerly enslaved people who lived to tell the story of their bondage and freedom. This is a human account of what it meant to assert a place in this country, as Black people and as Americans. The words and the photographs are profound, and they offer vivid reality of how tough it was for African Americans to have basic dignity in everyday life. There are intimate details provided by the last survivors of slavery, and the violence perpetrated by the KKK . This is a well-researched book on the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history. In 1936, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP), a branch of the Works Progress Administration, a government agency was set up to provide work to the one-quarter of Americans during Great Depression. Notable projects of the FWP included the Slave Narrative Collection, a set of interviews that culminated in over 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and five hundred black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives are available online from the above-named collection at the Library of Congress website. More than seventy years after the Civil War, the people interviewed for this project were in their seventies, eighties, and nineties. Notable pictures are of Sarah Gudger born into slavery in 1816 in North Carolina and believed to be one of the oldest people when she died at the age of 122. Betty Boomer, born into slavery in Texas, and she was one of the African Americans terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan. Donaville Broussard born into slavery in 1850 in Lafayette, Louisiana. but like so many others he lived in the ominous shadow of the Ku Klux Klan and white hostility. Many formerly enslaved recall torture, dislocation, extreme overwork, severe abuse, inadequate nutrition, constant stress, and a multitude of other trauma produced serious psychological and physical scars. The book also highlights the cabin of former slave in Putnam County, Georgia, slave quarters in Cecil County, Maryland; Caruthersville, Missouri; and St. Charles Parish, Louisiana; and an African American cemetery in Person County, North Carolina. The book is a tremendous illustration of formerly enslaved people and I recommend this to anyone interested African American history.