In this age of affirmative action and increasing complexity in black-white relations, this pioneering study of Hampton, Virginia, tells the story of what race relations in postbellum America might have been.Here, if only for a time, the promises of Emancipation and Reconstruction were fulfilled. Why was the American Dream realized by blacks in Hampton and not elsewhere? Engs follows a community of freedmen over a thirty-year period to answer this compelling question. Engs deserves credit for the sophistication and scope of his study and for his attention to the subtle and paradoxical. The...