Praise for Haunted by Slavery
What a refreshing book! Gwendolyn Midlo Halls spunky, riveting chronicle of a life of political activism and groundbreaking historical scholarship reminds us of the lefts crucial role in the Black struggle against white supremacy and of her own revolutionary use of digital technology in the remaking of American history. NELL IRVIN PAINTER, author of The History of White People and Southern History Across the Color Line
Gwen Midlo Hall is a peoples historian in the best sense of that term. Her scholarship, informed by a deep commitment to the struggle for freedom, maps the lives and struggles of oppressed and enslaved people over time and place. In her newest work, she traces her own freedom journey and offers insight into the making of a white radical antiracist historian, whose life and work as a scholar, left-wing organizer, daughter, wife, and mother reveal the breadth of her humanity and remarkable accomplishments. BARBARA RANSBY, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
In Haunted by Slavery, renowned scholar and activist Gwendolyn Midlo Hall tells her remarkable life story with the same passion, conviction, depth, and beauty that has guided her work for decades. Drawing on her personal experiences and extensive knowledge of history and politics, Midlo Halls memoir lays bare the intricacies of race, gender, class, and power. KEISHA N. BLAIN, author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom
Haunted by Slavery gives us a rare, up-close look at the Black freedom struggle across the twentieth century and the massive repression of Black and white radicals encountered by a white freedom fighter-scholar who throughout her life refused to be a good girl. JEANNE THEOHARIS, distinguished professor of political science, Brooklyn College, author of A More Beautiful and Terrible History
Haunted by Slavery is a magnificent account of the revolutionary life of a southern Jewish woman who fought racial inequalities during one of the most dreadful times in US history. When womens fate was to be confined to the domestic space, Gwen became a militant who challenged gender norms, escaped anti-Communist persecution, married a prominent African American activist, and raised her children across several states and countries. This memoir is an inspiring testament written by one of the most esteemed historians of slavery in the United States, who dedicated her entire life to fighting for social justice, a striving that persists today. ANA LUCIA ARAUJO, professor of history, Howard University
In the overwhelmingly male-dominated, historically conservative field of southern history, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall has been a trailblazer. From an inspiration to countless women historians as well as scholar-activists, Midlo Halls Haunted by Slavery is an intensely intimateand at times disarmingly honestmemoir. It offers a glimpse into the life of a white Jewish woman in the Deep South, complicating our prejudices about both the region and its people. Haunted by Slavery is a must-read for anyone interested in questions of race, gender, class, and power in America. Midlo Hall is a national treasure. KERI LEIGH MERRITT, author of Masterless Men
Like Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, this book is bold and engaging. As this white woman from the South recounts her life, we learn how she shaped history as an unrelenting civil rights activist and rewrote history as a pathbreaking scholar of slavery in the Americas. All along, Dr. Midlo Hall urges us to fight for justice, seek education, and teach others. There can be no doubt that the world would be a better place if we followed her lead. WALTER HAWTHORNE, professor of African history, Michigan State University
Dr. Halls memoir offers a thorough and necessary exploration of the misinformation, violence, and fear that create the circumstances for white southerners white southern women and girls, in particularto participate in segregation and enclosure even when it is against their own interests. Luckily, Hall also provides a recipe for fighting that: grit, truth, and the defiance to face down the family you are born into in order to form a more inclusive family of your own creation. Halls book charts a path for understanding southern white identity, but also a reminder that the most toxic parts of that world can be excised and new lines of relation with Black, immigrant, poor, and other dispossessed people can by drawnif youve the courage to try! JESSICA MARIE JOHNSON, author of Wicked Flesh
Haunted By Slavery is a beautifully written memoir. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall offers an inspiring life story, detailing her lifelong commitment to upending racism and white supremacy, sexism, labor exploitation, and global oppression. Midlo Halls fascinating and engrossing personal histories illuminate the makings of a revolutionary internationalist, radical, intellectual, and activist-historian. It provides a firsthand and fresh perspective on some of the most important political and social justice movements of the mid- to late twentieth century. A wide-ranging political autobiography, this remarkable narrative is an intimate account of an activists interior life. LASHAWN HARRIS, author of Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Running
In this gripping memoir of a radical American life, the pathbreaking historian Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall draws on almost a century of living memory to tell a story that races from New Orleans to Paris, New York, Mexico, Detroit, North Carolina, New Jersey, Mississippi, and more. Its all here: her presence at W. E. B. Du Boiss Behold the Land speech in 1946; her arrest at an interracial party in 1949; a frank account of her thirty-year marriage to the brilliant and troubled Black revolutionary Harry Haywood; her friendship with Mabel and Robert Williams, her struggle to survive and grow as a professional historian in a bluntly sexist society; her years-long harassment by the FBI; her painstaking archival and pioneering database work to restore the historical identities of enslaved Africans and Black Americans. Its not a story youve heard before, and its one you wont forget. NED SUBLETTE, coauthor of The American Slave Coast
Dr. Midlo Halls memoirs tell an intriguing story of survival. It is a love story about heartbreak, courage, and scholarship. As an awarded professor with over seventy years of study in courthouses and archives, Dr. Midlo Hall has helped countless students and scholars understand the history of Africans in Louisiana through her slave database. For the first time, readers will learn the secrets behind the life of this scholar, who as a teenager started her work as a civil rights activist and freedom fighter while working in her fathers law office in New Orleans. KATHE HAMBRICK, founder, River Road African American Museum and director of interpretation, West Baton Rouge Museum
The Alles Gwendolyn Midlo Hall is a memorial built at the Whitney Plantation Museum of Slavery near New Orleans and dedicated to remembering and honoring all the people who were enslaved in Louisiana. This book allows everybody to understand why the name of its author was chosen in the naming of the said memorial. DR. IBRAHIMA SECK, director of research, Whitney Plantation Museum of Slavery
Those who know historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall from her pathbreaking research on the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants might be surprised to learn of all the activist trailblazing she did as a young womanbuilding interracial coalitions against segregation in her hometown of New Orleans in the 1940s and organizing for workers rights through the Communist Party, all the while struggling against the sexism that kept women from positions of leadership and careers of their own. But as her fascinating memoir
