Podcast: Black Americans and Covered Wagons

From enslavement in Mississippi to beloved figure in Los Angeles: Biddy Mason. Image: Public Domain, Wikipedia

Podcast: 27 Minutes.

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Thanks to old movie and TV Westerns, mid-19th century westward migration is completely misunderstood. And one of those misunderstandings is that everyone who went west with a wagon was white. Historian Shirley Ann Wilson Moore’s book Sweet Freedoms Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails, 1841-1869 not only tells the fascinating stories of Black migrants, but helps shift the entire story of the West from flat caricature to a living, breathing past that just makes more sense than those Hollywood cliches.

This is the podcast version of Annette’s original post, her retelling of just two of those stories from Dr. Moore’s book. You can read it here:

Black Americans and Covered Wagons

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