The Other Frederick Douglass: A Black Freedom Fighter in the Post-Reconstruction South

FAIN: FT-291435-23

Brandi C. Brimmer
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC 27599-1350)

Research and writing leading to a book on the role Black pension claims agents played in the post-emancipation South. 

"The Other Frederick Douglass" analyzes the work of Black pension attorneys and claims agents who represented the petitions of disabled Black veterans and the poor widows of dead Black soldiers to the U.S. Pension Bureau during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Anchored around the life history of the formerly enslaved Frederick Douglass, a self-taught grassroots Black leader who established himself as a successful and influential pension attorney in New Bern, North Carolina, in 1879, this study employs digital tools to better understand Black legal communities in the post-emancipation South. Building on the rich repositories of Black testimonies embedded in Civil War pension files, the project situates the evidence within a broader political culture shaped by working-class Black people and expands the canon of socio-legal history.