Mixed Race Studies

Frederick Douglass, A Life in American History

Bloomsbury
2025-02-06
320 pages
235 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9798216170464
Ebook (PDF) ISBN: 9798216170471
Ebook (ePub & Mobi) ISBN: 9798216170488

Mark Christian, Professor, Urban Education, Africana Studies
Lehman College, City University of New York

Meet one of the most influential men in the United States’ history of emancipation and Black rights.

Chronicling Frederick Douglass’s life in an accessible way, this biography engages with history and wrestles with biases, falsehoods, and unknown facts in order to tell Douglass’s story as accurately as possible. Taking a comprehensive look at Douglass’s life from birth to death, the book delves into Douglass’s time as an enslaved African American, his escape, his experiences as a prominent orator and champion of Black rights, his writings and publications, and the influence he had on shaping society of the time. A detailed timeline allows students to quickly reference and recall major points in Douglass’s history, and the book is further augmented by the inclusion of primary documents, which include samples of Douglass’s own copious works, as well as words written about Douglass by his contemporaries. Readers will walk away with not only a better understanding of American history but an appreciation for Frederick Douglass’s impact in his own time and his lasting relevance for all those who continue to fight for a more equal society today.

Table of Contents

• Series Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Historical Context
• 2. Born in Bondage with Dreams of Liberty
• 3. Finding Freedom and the Abolitionist Cause
• 4. No More Master and Mastering Self-Determination Abroad
• 5. A Man of Independence in Public and Private Life
• 6. The Erudite Douglass in Letters, Speech, and Prose
• 7. Why Frederick Douglass Matters
• Timeline
• Primary Documents
• Bibliography
• Index

Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica

University of Pennsylvania Press
June 2017
328 Pages
6.00 x 9.00 in, 10 illus.
Hardcover ISBN: 9780812249187
Paperback ISBN: 9780812224603
eBook ISBN:

Sasha Turner, Associate Professor of History
The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves’ reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women’s labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves’ interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted their owners’ medicine and benevolence. Turner contends that the social bonds and cultural practices created around reproductive health care and childbirth challenged the economic purposes slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children.

Through powerful stories that place the reader on the ground in plantation-era Jamaica, Contested Bodies reveals enslaved women’s contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children, which put them at odds not only with their owners but sometimes with abolitionists and enslaved men. Turner argues that, as the source of new labor, these women created rituals, customs, and relationships around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that enabled them at times to dictate the nature and pace of their work as well as their value. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including plantation records, abolitionist treatises, legislative documents, slave narratives, runaway advertisements, proslavery literature, and planter correspondence—Contested Bodies yields a fresh account of how the end of the slave trade changed the bodily experiences of those still enslaved in Jamaica.

Contents

• Introduction. Transforming Bodies
• Chapter 1. Conceiving Moral and Industrious Subjects: Women, Children, and Abolition
• Chapter 2. “The Best Ones Who Are Fit to Breed”: The Quest for Biological Reproduction
• Chapter 3. When Workers Become Mothers, Who Works? Motherhood, Labor, and Punishment
• Chapter 4. “Buckra Doctor No Do You No Good”: Struggles over Maternal Health Care
• Chapter 5. “Dead Before the Ninth Day”: Struggles over Neonatal Care
• Chapter 6. Mothers Know Best? Maternal Authority and Children’s Survival
• Chapter 7. Raising Hardworking Adults: Labor, Punishment, and Slave Childhood
• Conclusion. Transforming Slavery
• Notes
• Sources
• Index
• Acknowledgments

‘Moral electricity’: Melvil-Bloncourt and the trans-Atlantic struggle for abolition and equal rights

Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies
Volume 40, 2019 – Issue 3
pages 543-562
DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2018.1539459

Bryan LaPointe, Ph.D. Candidate in History
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Little known to historians, the Guadeloupean-born antislavery and equal rights activist Sainte-Suzanne Melvil-Bloncourt exemplified the complex trans-Atlantic networks forged for the abolitionist cause across the nineteenth century. As a contributing journalist for a Parisian political and literary publication, Melvil-Bloncourt produced numerous pieces on the history and politics of slavery and emancipation around the Atlantic world. The American Civil War especially galvanized Melvil-Bloncourt into more fervent antislavery action, prompting him not only to connect with activists based in New Orleans and the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass, but also to raise money in France for former American slaves. This project explores the depth of Melvil-Bloncourt’s emancipationist sensibilities and activism, guided by what he deemed ‘moral electricity,’ highlighting the influence of the otherwise overlooked Francophone world in the age of emancipation.

Read or purchase the article here.

Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

Simon & Schuster
2023-01-17
416 pages
Hardcover ISBN 13: 9781501191053

Ilyon Woo

The remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled White man and William posing as “his” slave.

In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.

Along the way, they dodged slave traders, military officers, and even friends of their enslavers, who might have revealed their true identities. The tale of their adventure soon made them celebrities, and generated headlines around the country. Americans could not get enough of this charismatic young couple, who traveled another 1,000 miles criss-crossing New England, drawing thunderous applause as they spoke alongside some of the greatest abolitionist luminaries of the day—among them Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.

But even then, they were not out of danger. With the passage of an infamous new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, all Americans became accountable for returning refugees like the Crafts to slavery. Then yet another adventure began, as slave hunters came up from Georgia, forcing the Crafts to flee once again—this time from the United States, their lives and thousands more on the line and the stakes never higher.

With three epic journeys compressed into one monumental bid for freedom, Master Slave Husband Wife is an American love story—one that would challenge the nation’s core precepts of life, liberty, and justice for all—one that challenges us even now.

What Passes as Love: A Novel (Review)

Washington Independent Review of Books
2021-08-31

Gisèle Lewis

Thomas, Trisha R., What Passes as Love: A Novel (Seattle: Lake Union Publishing, 2021)

An escaped slave navigates the white world in a suspenseful bid for freedom.

Trisha R. Thomas, best known for her successful Nappily Ever After series, offers now an historical novel about a Black woman passing as white in 1850s Virginia. In What Passes as Love, Dahlia is the light-skinned daughter of Lewis Holt, a wealthy white plantation owner. She is also his slave, one of nearly a dozen he has fathered with his Black laborers.

Thanks to her beauty, Dahlia is brought by Holt into the mansion to live and serve as a ladies’ maid for her spoiled white half-sisters. Caught between guilt over the preferential treatment she receives and petty jealousy from her masters, Dahlia yearns for a better existence. Suddenly, the chance for one appears.

During an outing to town on her 16th birthday, she is mistaken for white by a young man. When he abruptly proposes marriage that very afternoon, she embraces the opportunity to escape slavery without questioning his motives. But once installed as lady of the manor — under the name Lily Dove — at her new husband’s plantation, maintaining the lie about her parentage becomes a matter of life and death. Dahlia’s new mother-in-law analyzes her every move, her rogue brother-in-law wants her for himself, and the slaves who suspect her runaway status use her secret as blackmail…

Read the entire review here.

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family

Liveright (an imprint of W. W. Norton)
2022-11-08
432 pages
6.3 x 9.4 in
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-324-09084-7

Kerri K. Greenidge, Mellon Assistant Professor
Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

A stunning counternarrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that finally reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family.

Sarah and Angelina Grimke—the Grimke sisters—are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives. In The Grimkes, award-winning historian Kerri Greenidge presents a parallel narrative, indeed a long-overdue corrective, shifting the focus from the white abolitionist sisters to the Black Grimkes and deepening our understanding of the long struggle for racial and gender equality.

That the Grimke sisters had Black relatives in the first place was a consequence of slavery’s most horrific reality. Sarah and Angelina’s older brother, Henry, was notoriously violent and sadistic, and one of the women he owned, Nancy Weston, bore him three sons: Archibald, Francis, and John. While Greenidge follows the brothers’ trials and exploits in the North, where Archibald and Francis became prominent members of the post–Civil War Black elite, her narrative centers on the Black women of the family, from Weston to Francis’s wife, the brilliant intellectual and reformer Charlotte Forten, to Archibald’s daughter, Angelina Weld Grimke, who channeled the family’s past into pathbreaking modernist literature during the Harlem Renaissance.

In a grand saga that spans the eighteenth century to the twentieth and stretches from Charleston to Philadelphia, Boston, and beyond, Greenidge reclaims the Black Grimkes as complex, often conflicted individuals shadowed by their origins. Most strikingly, she indicts the white Grimke sisters for their racial paternalism. They could envision the end of slavery, but they could not imagine Black equality: when their Black nephews did not adhere to the image of the kneeling and eternally grateful slave, they were cruel and relentlessly judgmental—an emblem of the limits of progressive white racial politics.

A landmark biography of the most important multiracial American family of the nineteenth century, The Grimkes suggests that just as the Hemingses and Jeffersons personified the racial myths of the founding generation, the Grimkes embodied the legacy—both traumatic and generative—of those myths, which reverberate to this day.

‘Just a little more free’

Harvard Law Today
2022-11-22

Jeff Neal, Senior Director of Communications and Media Relations
Harvard Law School

At the inaugural Belinda Sutton Distinguished Lecture, Johns Hopkins Professor Martha Jones chronicles her journey into her family’s ties to slavery and to Harvard

At the inaugural Belinda Sutton Distinguished Lecture, Johns Hopkins University Professor Martha S. Jones recounted her family’s historic and ongoing connections both to the institution of slavery and to several academic institutions, including Harvard. Jones, whose work examines how Black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy, leads her university’s Hard Histories at Hopkins Project, which works to uncover the role that racism and discrimination have played at the Baltimore-based institution.

The event at which Jones spoke honors Belinda Sutton, a woman who had been enslaved by Isaac Royall Jr., whose 1781 bequest to Harvard College funded a professorship that helped to establish Harvard Law in 1817. The annual lecture and conference series was established earlier this year at Harvard Law School and is organized by Guy-Uriel E. Charles, the Charles J. Ogletree Jr. Professor of Law and faculty director of the Charles Hamilton Institute for Race and Justice…

Read the entire article here.

Understanding Juneteenth’s History

NBC 4
New York, New York
2022-06-19

Here to help us understand Juneteenth’s history is Zebulon Miletsky, an Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History at Stony Brook University.

A Fable of Agency

The New York Review of Books
2022-05-26

Brenda Wineapple

The Devil’s Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South’s Most Notorious Slave Jail by Kristen Green. Seal, 332 pp., $30.00

Kristen Green’s The Devil’s Half Acre recounts the story of a fugitive slave jail, and the enslaved woman, Mary Lumpkin, who came to own it.

In The Allure of the Archives (1989), a gem of a book, the French historian Arlette Farge talks about unearthing, insofar as it’s possible, a past that’s not quite past—particularly in relation to the lives of women, whose histories have often been hidden, forgotten, or written over, women spoken about but whom we seldom hear speaking. Combing through the judicial archives at the Préfecture of Paris, Farge reads the sullen or angry answers that ordinary eighteenth-century Parisian women, some of the city’s poorest and most vulnerable, give to the police who have arrested them. And she knows that to understand what they say, or don’t say, we need to care and not to care: to distance ourselves with empathy while we set aside expectations and assumptions. Deciphering what’s left in the archives, Farge writes, “entails a roaming voyage through the words of others, and a search for a language that can rescue their relevance.”

Piecing together stories about women who managed the uncertainties and privations of their situations is even more difficult when the women in question have been enslaved and thus forbidden even the basic rights that an eighteenth-century Parisian laundress enjoyed. That is Kristen Green’s task in her impassioned The Devil’s Half Acre, which she calls “the untold story of how one woman liberated the South’s most notorious slave jail.”

Green is a journalist and also the author of Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County (2015), a personal account of how that Virginia county defied Brown v. Board of Education and shut down its schools for almost five years rather than integrate them. In The Devil’s Half Acre, she recovers the life of Mary Lumpkin, an enslaved woman of mixed race born in 1832 who, likely by 1840, was held in bondage at Lumpkin’s Jail, a chamber of horrors located between Franklin and Broad Streets in Shockoe Bottom, the central slave-trading quarter in Richmond, Virginia…

Read the entire review here.

Reclamation: Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant’s Search for Her Family’s Lasting Legacy

Amistad (an imprint of HarperCollins)
2021-11-16
288 pages
6x9in
Hardcover ISBN: 9780063028654
E-book ISBN: 9780063028678
Paperback ISBN: 9780063028661
Digital Audio, MP3 ISBN: 9780063028685

Gayle Jessup White

A Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings’ family explores America’s racial reckoning through the prism of her ancestors—both the enslaver and the enslaved.

Gayle Jessup White had long heard the stories passed down from her father’s family, that they were direct descendants of Thomas Jefferson—lore she firmly believed, though others did not. For four decades the acclaimed journalist and genealogy enthusiast researched her connection to Thomas Jefferson, to confirm its truth once and for all.

After she was named a Jefferson Studies Fellow, Jessup White discovered her family lore was correct. Poring through photos and documents and pursuing DNA evidence, she learned that not only was she a descendant of Jefferson on his father’s side; she was also the great-great-great-granddaughter of Peter Hemings, Sally Hemings’s brother.

In Reclamation she chronicles her remarkable journey to definitively understand her heritage and reclaim it, and offers a compelling portrait of what it means to be a black woman in America, to pursue the American dream, to reconcile the legacy of racism, and to ensure the nation lives up to the ideals advocated by her legendary ancestor.