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From the Publisher
"This is a fascinating book that provides wonderful nuggets mined from African American history and the history of our national capital."—Paul Finkelman, President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law, Albany Law School, and coeditor of In the Shadow of Freedom: The Politics of Slavery in the National Capital"In A Free Man of Color and His Hotel, Carol Gelderman frames the life of the successful Washington, D.C., African American hotelier James Wormley around the tumultuous post–Civil War era, most notably the dismantling of the federal protection of the freed people's civil rights guaranteed by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Presenting both a portrait of Wormley's entrepreneurship and an incisive history of the controversial presidential election of 1876, Gelderman charts the irony of white southerners and their northern friends reversing many of the hard-fought results of Union victory in the Civil War. Fast-paced, elegantly written, and factually accurate, Gelderman's book narrates the reactionary triumph of states’ rights ideology over federalism that ushered in eight decades of Jim Crow."—John David Smith, Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
"Many people know that the terms of the so-called Compromise of 1877 were hammered out at the Wormley Hotel in Washington, D. C.; fewer know that its proprietor, James Wormley, was African American. That is only one of the surprises awaiting readers of Carol Gelderman’s new book, which sheds much-needed light on the experiences of the national capital’s black population during the nineteenth century."—Brooks D. Simpson, ASU Foundation Professor of History, Arizona State University, and author of The Reconstruction Presidents
Overview
Born in Washington, D.C., James Wormley worked as a hacker in his father’s livery stable there and as a steward on Mississippi River steamboats before establishing his own catering and boardinghouse businesses. During a period of limited opportunity ...