George Rawick was a member of CLR James's Facing Reality group in the 1960s. From Sundown to Sunup relies on slaves telling their own stories of self-activity with Rawick's analysis of slave society and European and American racism.
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George Rawick was a member of CLR James's Facing Reality group in the 1960s. Rawick's work focused on documenting first-hand accounts of slavery, slave self-activity, and analysis of racism, slavery, and the making of American and European society.
Rawick was best known for his editorship of a 41-volume set of oral histories of former slaves, titled The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography.
From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community is the first volume of the series. It relies on first-hand accounts of former slaves to study the society of slavery in the United States, and European/American racism. It has been translated into 12 languages, and was one of the first books to take American slaves seriously as actors in their own history.
This collection began publication in 1972. The interviews which this set contains were taken under the auspices of the Works Projects Administration (WPA), a New Deal program. They remained in typescript until Rawick took on the task of supervising their preparation for publication.
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