ABHM Book Club: I’ve Been Here All the While by Alaina E. Roberts
We are pleased to announce ABHM’s August Book of the Month: I’ve Been Here All The While: Black Freedom on Native Land by Alaina E. Roberts. We invite you to join us for a virtual discussion on Zoom.
About the Book
Few symbols in African American history carry more weight than the unfulfilled promise of “40 acres and a mule.” In I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land, historian Alaina E. Roberts uncovers the overlooked stories of Black people who did receive land, the white settlers who sought it, and the Native communities from whom much of it was taken.
Set in nineteenth-century Indian Territory—present-day Oklahoma—the book traces a history where African American and Native American struggles for freedom and sovereignty were deeply intertwined. The region became a contested landscape as Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations, along with their enslaved Africans, newly freed Black people, and white migrants from the East, all battled—militarily and politically—over ownership, rights, and belonging on lands already marked by dispossession.
Drawing on extensive archival sources and her own family’s history, Roberts reframes the narrative of Reconstruction. She demonstrates how conflicts over Black freedom and Native citizenship were inseparable from the broader push of U.S. expansion onto Native homelands. In the process, she shows how shifting ideas of race, nationhood, and identity were forged in this western borderland. For a generation, Indian Territory offered one of the last spaces where African Americans could acquire land and participate in political life outside the strictures of Jim Crow—until Oklahoma statehood closed that chapter in 1907.
About the Author
Alaina E. Roberts, Ph.D., is a historian and Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. She earned her doctorate from Indiana University and her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the intersections of African American and Native American history, particularly in the eras of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. With ancestral ties to the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations and to enslaved people within them, Roberts approaches her work with both scholarly rigor and personal insight.
Her debut book, I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (2021), has received significant acclaim, winning the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize and being named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History. In addition to her academic scholarship, Roberts writes for wider audiences in outlets such as TIME, The Washington Post, and High Country News, where she continues to connect the past to contemporary conversations about race, land, and belonging.