Showing results for "Struggling with History" in All Categories

By the end of the Civil War, nearly half a million slaves had taken refuge behind Union lines in what became known as "contraband camps". These were crowded, dangerous places, yet some 12 to 15 percent of the Confederacy's slave population took almost unimaginable risks to reach them, and they became the first places Northerners came to know former slaves en masse.

Exchange Place is the story of a school whose mission was to train mostly African American women the skills they needed to integrate the secretarial offices of the Deep South between 1965 and ‘72. Those offices were not just segregated, for the most part they were completely off limits to women of color, and many were fighting to insure the workplace would stay that way for years or decades to come. Over the course of the school’s history, it was shut down multiple times and constantly under duress from forces conspiring to defeat it. But, it survived to became one of the most successful ...