I've Been Here All the While

Black Freedom on Native Land

By: Alaina E. Roberts

Narrated by: Caroline Sorunke

Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule" - the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from.

In 19th-century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), a story unfolds that ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and Whites from the Eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land that had been taken from others.

Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land.

©2021 University of Pennsylvania Press (P)2022 Tantor

Great book

Important history well told and discussed with careful nuance. You will learn a lot! I’m glad I listened

Great Book

This book was fantastic. You should have some basic knowledge of the west, Native Americans, and African Americans. It is easy to follow. However, the narrator was just okay.

Fascinating and well told

I learned a great deal from Alaina Roberts' book -- how US capitalism and manifest destiny turned non-white people into colonial settlers in their quest for freedom and success. But alas, the gains for tribes and the Freedpeople they formerly enslaved were short-lived and fleeting. An important, little known part of our nation's racial history that all Americans should learn more about.