Adele Logan Alexander. Princess of the Hither Isles: A Black Suffragist’s Story from the Jim Crow South.

Abstract

In Princess of the Hither Isles: A Black Suffragist’s Story from the Jim Crow South, Adele Alexander has written a beautiful and challenging “memoir” of her grandmother Adella Hunt Logan. Although the book is deeply researched and includes archival sources and oral histories, Alexander chose to weave these sources together with her literary imagination, creating dialogue and composite characters in order to tell the story of several generations of her family. As such, the book inspires readers to meditate on story, truth, the archives, and the historian. Princess of the Hither Isles reveals the myriad ways Logan and members of the family fought injustice, racism, and sexism. Set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primarily in Georgia and Alabama, with scenes in New York, Michigan, and Massachusetts, Logan and her family and friends experienced violence and segregation. Her nearly white physical appearance provided safe passage occasionally, when she chose to pass as white for travel or to attend segregated events or institutions.