By tracing the story of one family and their experiences, Between Freedom and Equality offers a moving and inspiring look at the challenges that free African Americans have faced in Washington, DC, since before the district’s founding.
Inspired by the discovery of an 1829 letter from George Pointer, which is preserved today in the National Archives, authors Torrey and Green began researching this remarkable man who was a boat captain and supervisory engineer for George Washington’s Potomac Canal Company.
What they discovered about Pointer and his family provides unique insight across two centuries of Washington, DC, history. The Pointer family faced many challenges the fragility of freedom in a slaveholding society, racism, wars, floods, and epidemics. For some of that time, their refuge was a small farm they purchased in what is now the Chevy Chase neighborhood. In the early twentieth century, though the DC government used eminent domain to force the sale of the Pointers’ farm and replace it with an all-white school. Between Freedom and Equality grants Pointer and his descendants their long-overdue place in American history.
This book includes a foreword by historian Maurice Jackson exploring the significance of the Pointer family’s unique history in the capital. In another very personal foreword, James Fisher, an eighth-generation descendant of George Pointer, shares his complex emotions when he learned about his ancestors. Also featured in this important history is a facsimile and transcription of George Pointer’s original letter and a family tree.
Reviews
“Between Freedom and Equality is a moving narrative of Washington, DC told through the lives of one of its founding families. From working with George Washington to fighting in the Civil War, this family’s story reveals the ingenuity, genius and courage of the Black Washingtonians who formed and shaped their city for the better, even as others worked to exclude and destroy them. Between Freedom and Equality is an outstanding example of collaboration between researchers and descendants working to restore a long-denied history. It stands as a powerful reminder that the stories of so many heroes of our past have been buried because they were Black. Between Freedom and Equality works to undo some of that damage, giving us the histories of American heroes who may never have been given monuments, but who can still inspire us today.”
— Anna-Lisa Cox, award-winning author of The Bone and Sinew of the Land
“Barbara Torrey and Clara Myrick Green, with the partnership of Tanya Hardy and James Fisher, have produced a stirring, thorough, and surprisingly optimistic history of Black Washington through the six generations of the George Pointer family. Stirring because it is a dramatic story of freedom amid slavery and its aftermath. Thorough because it is deeply and often serendipitously researched. And optimistic because it documents this family’s ability to isolate itself from racism by owning land in DC until white powers take that land away. It also weaves the fabric of times when segregation was not so rigid and isolating. As American society experiences a renewed need for historical context, Between Freedom and Equality meets the moment.”
— Jane F. Levey, managing editor, Washington History, magazine of the DC History Center
“Torrey and Green’s years of painstaking research are revealed in details large and small that bring the Pointer family to life. . . . The result of their tireless efforts is a rich journey through two centuries of Washington DC—and American—history, as lived by George Pointer and his descendants.”
— Faith Mitchell, fellow, the Urban Institute
“[G]roundbreaking…. [A] worthy contribution to the history of Washington.”
— Hill Rag
“[A] solid contribution to genealogical and historical literature.”
— CHOICE
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