Winner, Friends of the Dallas Public Library Award, 2006
Best Book on East Texas, East Texas Historical Association, 2007

In the decades following the Civil War, nearly a quarter of African Americans achieved a remarkable victory--they got their own land. While other ex-slaves and many poor whites became trapped in the exploitative sharecropping system, these independence-seeking individuals settled on pockets of unclaimed land that had been deemed too poor for farming and turned them into successful family farms. In these self-sufficient rural communities, often known as...