Virginia Richards — The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway - with Dr. Frederick Knight

A deeply moving photographic and narrative history of a southern waterway that the enslaved were forced to build for mercantile shipping—but which they used to escape slavery.Some of the earliest canals in colonial America, referred to as the Inner Passage, were constructed by enslaved people living in the Lowcountry of South Carolina in the early 1700s. In a paradox of history, for over a hundred years enslaved Black people used these canals, constructed for white plantation owners, to travel southward to freedom in Spanish Florida.In this book, Virginia McGee Richards documents the lost narrative of the Inner Passage through 60 extraordinary photographs of landscapes altered by slavery and portraits of Lowcountry descendants, along with an essay describing her discovery of this untold history. In an accompanying essay, Imani Perry writes about her own journey on the Inner Passage, putting Black resistance to enslavement and Southern history into an immediate context. James Estrin brings decades of insight about photography and the power of visual storytelling to his affecting foreword. Together, these words and images offer a powerful living map of history.Virginia Richards is an award-winning documentary photographer, historian, and environmental lawyer.Richards is in conversation with Dr. Frederick Knight, an expert on early African American and African Diaspora history. He is the author of Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom (Penn Press, 2024), which argues that elders were central to African American community formation through Reconstruction. His first book Working the Diaspora:  The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850 (NYU Press, 2010) traces how Africans, though carried across the Atlantic against their wills, drew upon knowledge from their homelands to shape the agricultural and material worlds of New World slave labor camps.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780262051712?ic_referral=PgfJiMhP25sfn-lXBTY4w84RkvIkHDIQUCiZdvFjsOAwMxNXhyM9ymjGnmDq57QFHkXt79WZn70hnGXMr2gjpWA3FwMffIwWtfQikoXxXlubBcPRJMb2X7IKOdOLzGk_FTLWeT4