Bibliography Note: “The Road to Jim Crow: The African American Struggle on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, 1860 – 1915” [1]

The Road to Jim Crow: The African American Struggle on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, 1860 – 1915 was first recommended to us by Dr. Edward Papenfuse, Maryland State Archivist (retired).

Authored by attorney C. Christopher Brown and published in 2016 by the Maryland Historical Society we have found the book to be comprehensive, revealing and groundbreaking within the modern field of Delmarva Studies.

In future posts we will be featuring excerpts of the book which deal with several subjects, persons, places and events of our scholastic investigation.

As previously noted, the closure of local Eastern Shore publishers within recent decades has surely changed the conditions and dynamics for local historians of the Delmarva.

It is duly noted and recognized the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore published Brown’s important work of local scholarship in 2016, as well as Stealing Freedom Along the Mason-Dixon Line: Thomas McCreary, the Notorious Slave Catcher from Maryland by Milt Diggins.

We applaud all who body forth new scholarship and more complete history.

JM

Bibliography Note: “A History of African Americans of Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore” (1997)

A History of African Americans of Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore (1997) Edited by Carole C. Marks.

In our review of the existing Delmarva bibliography we have noticed within the past two decades there has been a shift, of sorts, which nonetheless has not yet told the proper history of Dr. Douglass on the Shore.

With the 2009 closure of Tidewater Publishers, which produced several invaluable titles, and the seeming disappearance of the Queen Anne Press, which published titles from Dickson J. Preston, it would appear book publishing on the Eastern Shore has seen better days.

Within the past two decades Dr. Carole C. Marks, formerly director of the “Black American Studies Program” at the University of Delaware, has published and edited, Lift Every Voice: Echoes from the Black Community on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1999 and A History of African Americans of Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1997.

When we read sentences, such as the one below, we understand why and how the history of Dr. Douglass on the Shore has been lost.

A second Eastern Shore slave of significance was Frederick Augustus Bailey Douglass. Born in Tuckahoe, Maryland, in Dorchester County, he experienced forced separation from family members and the horrors of slavery at an early age.

A History of African Americans of Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore, p. 57. [PDF]

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TOC: A History of African Americans of Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore