The Lowest Freedom - (Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism) by Justin Leroy

About the Book

The Lowest Freedom is an intellectual history of how economic dispossession shaped the meaning of freedom in Black thought from antebellum abolitionism to the rise of Jim Crow.

Book Synopsis

Throughout the nineteenth century, Black thinkers grappled with the material limits of freedom. They insisted that emancipation without economic self-determination would reproduce the inequalities of slavery, arguing that true freedom required not only civil rights and suffrage but also defending the rights of workers and curbing the power of capital. They concluded that free Black life could not flourish in conditions of labor exploitation and economic deprivation.

The Lowest Freedom is an intellectual history of how economic dispossession shaped the meaning of freedom in Black thought from antebellum abolitionism to the rise of Jim Crow. Justin Leroy argues that figures such as Frederick Douglass, T. Thomas Fortune, Maria Stewart, David Walker, and Ida B. Wells developed a critique of racial capitalism that remains underappreciated. Their theories spanned the eras of slavery and freedom, connecting the North and the South, by illuminating the political economy of racial domination and the interwoven relationship between race and capitalism. By situating their work within broader debates about land, labor, and capital, Leroy provides a new framework for understanding how freedom was theorized, contested, and ultimately constrained in the aftermath of slavery. Bridging Black studies, intellectual history, and the history of capitalism, The Lowest Freedom offers a reinterpretation of African American political thought that places the struggle for economic justice at its core.

Review Quotes

Through its unique excavations of the Black radical tradition's critiques of U.S. freedom, The Lowest Freedom provides a radical rethinking of Black freedom and racial capitalism in the nineteenth century United States.--Zach Sell, author of Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital

About the Author

Justin Leroy is assistant professor of history at Duke University. He is coeditor of Histories of Racial Capitalism (Columbia, 2021).