Authors Peter Fay and Valerie J. Southern share the little-known story of a Black community in Jamestown, Rhode Island, decades before the Great Migration. Their newly released book, A Peaceful Patch of Earth, traces the lives of the inhabitants during a period of intense racial upheaval in the United States.
Living in sight of Newport—a former center of the American slave trade—the community transformed a landscape of bondage into one of freedom, offering refuge to formerly enslaved people migrating north. Beyond local history, the book links Jamestown to national struggles for freedom and civil rights, from the Underground Railroad to the training of Black Civil War soldiers between 1850 and 1920.