The Emancipation Circuit

“In this spectacular book Thulani Davis presents a framework for not only rewriting the Civil War and Reconstruction, but for understanding the entire history of the Black freedom movement extending into the twentieth century. As groundbreaking as W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, The Emancipation Circuit is a masterpiece.” - Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression

“In this extraordinary work of scholarship, Thulani Davis gives us something we have not had before—a new and beautifully written deeply researched, account of grassroots organizing by formerly enslaved people in the postbellum South and their ‘capacious sense of the political.’ Filled with brilliant insights, this compelling account of the activist networks and political formations through which black people built the ‘first mass black movement in the U.S.’ deserves a prominent place in every class and every discussion of the work black people did to become free and to claim the rights of citizenship.” - Thavolia Glymph, author of The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation

"The Emancipation Circuit offers a powerful reimagining of the networks that helped to secure Black freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction: It is a history about enslaved people’s efforts to free themselves and about their local struggles to give substance to their legal emancipation, as well as a mapping of the geography that enabled their achievements and the circuits that spread their political goals like pollen in the wind. . . . The Emancipation Circuit reminds today’s activists that any organizing for Black freedom must be multifaceted and must pursue local aims while traveling along preexisting networks to become a broader collective effort." - Elias Rodriques, The Nation

"Thulani Davis’s The Emancipation Circuit is an important contribution to Black social and political thought that helps center Black women and Black resistance of United States history and social movements." - Krystal Batelaan, Ethnic and Racial Studies

"The Emancipation Circuit provides a convincing analysis of the spatial history of emancipation ... a valuable reference for future research." - Keith D. McCall, Journal of Southern History

"By documenting the emergence of Black political, religious, and labor organizations, the development of channels for transmission of ideas and news, and conflicts and tensions, The Emancipation Circuit adds nuance to our understanding of the development of Black political thought and shows how its unique attributes continue to influence Black politics today." - Kevin R. Johnson, Journal of American History

"The Emancipation Circuit is an exciting and important book. Demonstrating an adroit dexterity with the secondary literature, Davis has provided future historians with a roadmap that for far too long has hid in plain sight. Bringing a poet’s eye to the quotidian details of the Civil War–era Black world, Thulani Davis provides an innovative reinterpretation of the world freedpeople and Black northerners made together." - Robert D. Bland, Journal of African American History