African American Childhoods: Historical Perspectives from Slavery to Civil Rights

Book info: African American Childhoods: Historical Perspectives from Slavery to Civil Rights (Paperback, 239 pages) – Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Language: English.

African American Childhoods seeks to fill a vacuum in the study of African American children. Recovering the voices or experiences of these children, we observe nuances in their lives based on their legal status, class standing, and social development. From the Back Cover In African American Childhoods, historian Wilma King presents a selection of her essays, both unpublished and published, which together provide a much-needed survey of more than three centuries of African American children's experiences. Organized chronologically, the volume uses the Civil War to divide the book into two parts: part one addresses the enslavement of children in Africa and explores how they lived in antebellum America; part two examines the issues affecting black children since the Civil War and into the twenty-first century. Topics include the impact of the social and historical construction of race on their development, the effects of violence, and the heroic efforts of African American children when subjected to racism at its worst during the civil rights movement.

About the Author Wilma King is Strickland Professor of African American History and Culture at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She is the author and editor of several books on African American social history, including the definitive book on slave children in America, Stolen Childhoods: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America.