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Unveiled Voices, Unvarnished Memories: The Cromwell Family in Slavery and Segregation, 1692-1972. By Adelaide M. Cromwell. Introduction by Anthony Cromwell Hill. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, c. 2007. Pp. [xviii], 348. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8262-1676-2.)
This chronologically ambitious study traces the elite, black Cromwell family from enslavement in the seventeenth century through the twentieth-century experiences of the volume's author, Adelaide M. Cromwell. Cromwell is a sociologist by training, but Unveiled Voices, Unvarnished Memories: The Cromwell Family in Slavery and Segregation, 1692-1972 is not a scholarly treatise in the strictest sense. Although the author employs the academic apparatus of the footnote liberally, generic peculiarities abound. She acknowledges that this book is as much a "memoir" as anything else (p. 320).
The account is centered on the life of the author's grandfather, John Wesley Cromwell Sr. (1849-1927), an extraordinary man born to slave parents who managed to purchase freedom for themselves and their children. After coming from such humble-albeit remarkable-origins, John Wesley...