Freedom Road
Gideon Jackson, a strong, honest ex-slave, is chosen by his black neighbors to represent them in the new state government -- once they have learned that a vote is not something you eat. One of 74 blacks among the 124 members of the South Carolina Constitutional Convention assembled in Charleston in 1868, Gideon shakes off the despair bred of ignorance and illiteracy and matures intellectually in a short time. The sulking white gentry and mocking press soon realize the capabilities of determined blacks but they decide to bide their time until they can strike back with force. Returned home, Gideon persuades the poor blacks and whites on the abandoned 22,000-acre Carwell plantation to buy the land jointly and divide it equitably. The miniature agrarian democracy prospers, builds its own integrated school and lives in harmony. A kindly white northerner helps Gideon's oldest son, Jeff, through medical school in Scotland and Jeff returns to doctor to the small community and marry his blind sweetheart. Still under protection of Federal troops, the people build homes and mills; they prosper and they send their beloved Gideon to Congress.
The, with the Tilden-Hayes compromise of 1876, Federal troops are withdrawn and the planter-aristocrat Stephen Holm unleashes the Ku Klux Klan to bring about reaction ("Gentlemen, the nigger will be a slave again, as he has been and as he is destined to be"). Gideon tries to persuade the outgoing President Grant to maintain the army of occupation for another decade but fails. Gideon's army makes its own heroic stand against the KKK, but in the end he, his followers and their miraculous experiment are "expunged."
Frank Campenni in his 1971 dissertation, Citizen Howard Fast
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