New Book: “The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier”
Amy Godine has written a captivating history of African Americans in the Adirondack Mountains.
Amy Godine, an Adirondack author, has written a new book that recounts the history of Black pioneers in the northern wilderness of upstate New York. In "The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier" (Cornell, November 2023), Godine documents the migration of African Americans to the Adirondacks from the late 1840s to the 1860s.
They came to build farms and to gain the right to vote. By owning and working the land, they could sustain themselves and their families and meet the $250 property requirement imposed on Black voters by New York's constitution in 1821. No other group—poor landless whites, non-English-speaking immigrants—faced this kind of restriction.
Gerrit Smith, the richest man in New York State in the mid-19th century and one of the wealthiest in the country, was committed to political reform and, above all, to the elimination of slavery. Smith gifted 120,000 acres of Adirondack land to 3,000 Black New Yorkers. Smith's plan to seek suffrage was endorsed by Frederick Douglass and most leading Black abolitionists. John Brown, the antislavery reformer, was such a proponent that he moved his family to Timbuctoo, a new Black Adirondack settlement in the woods, in 1849.
Smith's plan was ahead of its time, anticipating Black suffrage reform, affirmative action, environmental distributive justice, and community-based racial equity more than a century before these were points of public policy.
“The Black Woods is a beautifully written, painstakingly researched, and uncommonly nuanced story, heretofore a footnote in the ongoing saga of race in America. But here is a real story, liberated from the chains of arrogant historiography and willing to look into dark corners of our national narrative and climb to summits that offer a panoramic ‘us.’”
However, when the response to Smith's offer fell short of his high hopes, his zeal cooled. Timbuctoo, Freemen's Home, Blacksville, and other settlements were forgotten. For 150 years, this Black community was marginalized by history.
Amy Godine's book, "The Black Woods," sheds light on the forgotten history of Black pioneers who established their families and fought for their civil rights in the wilderness. The book provides a vivid narrative that brings Black pioneers and their descendants back to the story's center.
Through accounts of racial justice and the heroic actions of individuals, "The Black Woods" highlights the unique significance of the Adirondacks in American history and imagination.
