In Search of Liberty - (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900) by Ronald Johnson & Ousmane K Power-Greene (Paperback)

About the Book

"In Search of Liberty engages ways in which African Americans, since the founding of the United States, have understood their struggle for freedom and liberty as a feature of changes within the Atlantic world. The essays in this volume capture how African Americans grappled with those questions, as the struggle for liberty in the United States continued through the end of the nineteenth century, when new regimes of power implemented systems of racial oppression that truncated what the historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries calls "Freedom Rights" for freedmen and women after the passing of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. This book charts the diverse ways in which African Americans utilized the Atlantic world in search of the ideals of liberty that they were denied at home. Black internationalism included emigration abroad, lecture tours in Europe denouncing slavery, and missionary activity in King Leopold's Congo, illustrating an international consciousness among black Americans. In Search of Liberty is the only edited collection on Black Internationalism during the nineteenth century. The contributors represented in this volume come from diverse localities, scholarly interest and backgrounds. By breaking from the imposition of traditional periodization, this book shows how black freedom struggles in the US are rooted in a Pan-African identity prior to the movements of the 20th century"--

Book Synopsis

In Search of Liberty explores how African Americans, since the founding of the United States, have understood their struggles for freedom as part of the larger Atlantic world. The essays in this volume capture the pursuits of equality and justice by African Americans across the Atlantic World through the end of the nineteenth century, as their fights for emancipation and enfranchisement in the United States continued. This book illuminates stories of individual Black people striving to escape slavery in places like Nova Scotia, Louisiana, and Mexico and connects their eff orts to emigration movements from the United States to Africa and the Caribbean, as well as to Black abolitionist campaigns in Europe.

By placing these diverse stories in conversation, editors Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene have curated a larger story that is only beginning to be told. By focusing on Black internationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, In Search of Liberty reveals that Black freedom struggles in the United States were rooted in transnational networks much earlier than the better-known movements of the twentieth century.

Review Quotes

The interdisciplinary approach of In Search of Liberty is an important example for students in African American and African Diaspora studies programs, as the comparison of history, literature, and theater in some of the essays is compelling and an important intervention in studies of Black internationalism, which are often focused on a single discipline.--Stephanie J. Richmond "The Journal of the Civil War Era"

In Search of Liberty extends our understanding of African American internationalism during the nineteenth century, just as it illuminates the experiences of those Black individuals who sought refuge across the larger Atlantic world. Scholarly and accessible, it sets an important marker that will shape future work in this area.--J.R. Oldfield "The Journal of American History"