Women In Tera W. Hunter's To Joy My Freedom

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The major role played by African American women in the reconstruction era is revised and illustrated in Tera W. Hunter’s To Joy my Freedom and Elsa Barkley Brown’s article Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom. Both documents analyze the participation and involvement of black women in social and political activities inside of their communities.
To Joy my freedom, written by Tera W. Hunter provides an inner look into the lives and strives of African American women – mainly working class – living in Atlanta between the eighteenth and nineteenth century, in the middle of one of the most belligerent environments created in the era of Reconstruction.
On the other side, Elsa Barkley Brown presents the story and development of African American women’s political involvement in a more specific sphere, focusing on their participation inside the churches in Richmond, Virginia. …show more content…

As Hunter mentions, “By the end of the (19th) century, African Americans had deployed a multitude of strategies in the workplace, in their neighborhoods, and in the political arena to protect their personal dignity and the integrity of their families and communities”.
In order to address these topics, she recurs to newspaper articles, personal testimonies, historical documents, and photographs, among others; in order to compile a series of life experiences that give proof about the complex situations that African American communities faced and their relation to the organizing process of African American