By 1861, there were 250,000 free people of color living in the American South. They were signs of contradiction amidst a slave society built upon the concept of white supremacy in a racial hierarchy. Laws curtailed and denied their rights seemingly in every conceivable way, from prohibiting their legal testimony against whites to barring them from the ballot box. Whites attempted to control them through classification, variously and contradictorily terming them "negroes," "mulattoes," "mustees," "Indians," "mixed--bloods," or simply "free people of color". The last of these was the only one which these people seemed to accept for themselves, and make their own.

But while these free people of color faced every conceivable attempt to deny them of power and personhood, they succeeded in raising families, building communities, establishing businesses and organizations, and enabling them to flourish. Some even rose to economic prominence in their own communities, even gaining the respect of their white neighbors. And often both groups interacted: in business, in churches, and even in families.

My guest Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr., has written three books about free people of color: Hertford County, North Carolina’s Free People of Color; North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715-1885; and Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South. As you can see from the tiles, they have moved from investigating a North Carolina county, to gradually encompassing the entire American South. This is therefore a very comprehensive and purposeful project; as you'll find out in our conversation, it's also a deeply personal one.

Warren Milteer is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

For Further Investigation

This is the third and final podcast of the month focusing on the experience of Black Americans in both slavery and freedom. In Episode 266, I had a conversation with Isabela Morales about the incredible story of the Townsend family; and in Episode 267, David Hackett Fischer described some of the regional cultures of Blacks in early America.
Melvin Patrick Ely,  Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Luther P. Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia, 1830–1860. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1942.
 Patricia Phillips Marshall and Jo Ramsay Leimenstoll. Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,2010.
 A. B.Wilkinson, Blurring the Lines of Race and Freedom: Mulattoes and Mixed Bloods in English Colonial America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.