Letters: Many blacks prospered before Civil War

The life of Celia Mann — a freed slave and property owner who “became a member of Columbia’s small but important community of free people of color” before the Civil War — is a story that can be repeated across the antebellum South (“What one family’s adversity and perseverance teach us,” Sept. 12).

Contrary to the popular myth of slavery as an institution that stymied both African personality and culture, many free blacks were able to prosper economically (and even become slave owners). There was a black middle class before the Civil War that became the foundation of Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920, by Willard B. Gatewood.