Black Boston

Book excerpt: Between the Revolution and the Civil War, non-slave black Americans existed in the no-man’s land between slavery and freedom. The two generations defined by these two titanic struggles for national survival saw black Bostonians struggle to make real the quintessential values of individual freedom and equality promised by the Revolution. Levesque’s richly detailed study fills a significant void in our understanding of the formative years of black life in urban America. Black culture Levesque argues was both more and less than separation and integration. Poised between an occasionally benevolent, sometimes hostile, frequently indifferent white world and their own community, black Americans were, in effect, suspended between two cultures.