Dream Dancers • Vol Two • 2018

Journey to the Promised Land tracks three generations of a black Georgia family through slavery, emancipation, black Reconstruction, the restoration of white supremacy, and the rise of Jim Crow in the “New South.” After the Civil War, the United States Congress set in motion an ambitious Southern Reconstruction plan for black advancement toward political and economic equality. However, the South still harbored an illusory vision called “The Lost Cause” of a happy pre-War society made prosperous by black slave labor. In Georgia, a majority of white citizens in 1872 used their control of the voting process and constant guerrilla terror campaigns against the new black citizens to achieve sweeping state political victories. The newly emancipated black population aided by white Southerners derisively called “scalawags” battled determinedly back. Journey to the Promised Land tells this story.