“This book establishes Roberts as a powerful new voice in the field of African American and Native American history. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, for a short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma Statehood in 1907. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion on to Native land. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. In I’ve Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from. Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of “40 acres and a mule”-the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. Winner of the 2021 Phillis Wheatley Book Award Winner of the 2022 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prizeįinalist for the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prizeįinalist for the 2022 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
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