historians beginning well before the Civil War and continuing into the recent past.' As has been demonstrated elsewhere, the local Afro-American community has generally been either ignored or briefly surveyed in these local histories — despite the fact that South Central Pennsylvania was an important and

Black Eldorado on the Susquehanna: The Emergence of Black Columbia, 1726-1861 By Dr. Leroy T. Hopkins in November 1985 Lancaster Countians witnessed a truly historic event. For the first time in the County's long history a Black politician was elected mayor of one of its municipalities. As chance

useful and productive element in Lancaster. Mrs. Ball's history documents the altruism that led many Blacks to interest themselves both in their com- munity and the larger community. The inability of Blacks in Lancaster to break the cycle of poverty which has held them in thralldom since the Civil War is

- vanians. Being Black in eighteenth century Pennsylvania meant having one's civil rights abrogated. Very little differentiation was made between slave and free Blacks. Both were apparently elements that the general society deemed necessary to keep under control. Free Blacks had a limited right of assembly