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The Freedom Colony
Heyday Books
October 2008
On Sale: October 1, 2008
Featuring: Alice Royal
160 pages
ISBN: 1597140910
EAN: 9781597140911
Paperback
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Non-Fiction Memoir
The untold story of California's only African American
town Imagine you were a young black man, the son of slaves,
living in a Northern city around 1910, struggling to build
a better life for your family. Or maybe you lived in the
South and were still at work in the fields that your
parents worked as slaves. You might have been surprised to
hear of a new town in California founded by former slaves
and their descendants, led by a retired 10th Cavalry
officer, Colonel Allen Allensworth. Would you hesitate to
move to this place? Some three hundred families did
relocate to California's Central Valley between 1908 and
1918 to establish Allensworth a town African Americans
could call their own. Challenged by a variety of
circumstances and doomed when a water company failed to
come through on its promises, the town nonetheless still
stands, now as Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park. More than twenty buildings in the downtown area have been
or are being restored to resemble the town as it was from
1908 to 1918. Allensworth, the Freedom Colony tells the
story of this town from its beginnings from Colonel
Allensworth's vision to the financing of the land purchase
to the establishment of the community to the inspired
creation of the park and current concerns about its future.
Alice C. Royal, one of the last people to be born in the
utopia, narrates Allensworth, using contemporary and
archival photographs plus material drawn from volunteers
and the park s collection of oral histories.
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