Saidiya Hartman’s new book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, is a radical, genre-defying examination of the lives of “ordinary” young Black women in this period - women who escaped to Northern cities, living on the great expectations of the Great Migration. It created a paradox: a period defined by dynamic change and possibility, but also the ever-present threat of white terrorism. This era, from the 1890s through the 1920s, became known as the “nadir” of African-American history. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that sanctioned segregation sutured the entire geography of the United States together, sewing racial hatred into a national creed. These harsh conditions were buttressed by the mania of white supremacy and its violent outbursts of lynching and rape - brutality hardly bound by an imaginary Mason-Dixon line. It was a period before the presumption that the state was obligated to protect the public’s welfare. These perilous conditions not only existed in workplaces, but also in neighborhoods, which were also sites of financial extraction: deadly conditions in tenements and other makeshift dwellings used by the urban poor posed a constant threat.

The reckless and unrestrained pursuit of profit created brutal working conditions and invited premature death among those who labored for a living. The anticipation of possibility created within this unfolding social transformation was tempered by the unbridled greed and brutality of “robber barons” that underwrote the economic largesse of this new era of capitalist expansion. The processes of industrialization and the mass migration of people from agrarian spaces into combustible cities signified the emergence of epochal change. THE CRISSCROSSING CURRENTS unleashed by the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era created the modern United States.

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