Dr. Kirt von Daacke, assistant professor of history, has received a $2,000 Mednick Fellowship to work on his forthcoming book, Freedom Has a Face: Race, Community, and Identity in Jefferson's Albemarle, 1780-1865 (University of Virginia Press).
Von Daacke will use the funds for two week-long research trips to Richmond this summer to visit archives at the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Historical Society. He will look at civil court cases, criminal presentments, petitions to the General Assembly, Auditor of Public Accounts records, tax and fiscal records, family papers, and personal memoirs.
His book focuses on free blacks, race relations, identity, and community social hierarchy in rural antebellum Virginia. Freedom Has a Face exposes the often wide gap between state legal prescriptions on free black freedom and actual local practice concerning people of color.
"This project breaks new ground by suggesting that rural areas may actually have been more permissive environments (than urban areas) for the free blacks who lived there, because those free blacks were well known and because many developed respectable reputations," von Daacke wrote in his Mednick proposal. "This project does not, however, argue for a blissful racial utopia in Albemarle - the free blacks whose life stories are revealed here worked hard to carve out a comfortable space for existence, and they were denied full freedom."