Church, neighbors, family, and school were at the heart of many African-Americans. These connections between people were places for personal fulfillment, mutual care, and community. The connections were also means of self-expression. Cherishing and strengthening these kinds of social networks and places of uplift, while making use of their voices to bring forward their own points of view, were crucial methods in which African Americans fought against the racial injustices of the 1880s and 1890s. The ability to marry, worship freely, and raise children without having them subject to others’ control, and to learn to read and write were all freedoms that had been outside most black people’s experience during slavery. This made them much more precious to African Americans in the decades after emancipation. When it had become vividly clear in the post-Reconstruction era that the political rights and protections that had been promised after the end of the Civil War would not be theirs for the keeping, African Americans ventured and began forming their own separate institutions including schools, hospitals, churches, newspapers, and settlement houses. Through this they had forged their own activities with which to prosper. Through religion, education, and family, African Americans built their very own brand of freedom, working as one for the good of all African Americans. In developing separate institutions and systems of self-help, African Americans used the power of words, both those that were written down and those that were spoken aloud and those that were written down. Despite the larger society where blackness had been in the process of being