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.
Author(s): Ronald Angelo Johnson; Ousmane K. Power-Greene
Series: Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900
Edition: ebook
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 326
City: Athens, Georgia
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Prologue
Introduction
PART 1. North America
ONE On the Edge of Freedom: The Reenslavement of Elizabeth Watson in Nova Scotia
TWO A Scheme to Desert: The Louisiana Purchase and Freedom Seekers in the Louisiana-Texas Borderlands, 1804–1806
THREE Looking for Freedom in the Borderlands: U.S. Black Refugees from Slavery in Early Independent Mexico, 1821–1836
PART 2. Africa
FOUR The International Migration of South Carolinian Free People of Color, 1780–1865
FIVE Liberia as a Theater: Performance, Race-Making, and the Liberian Nationality
SIX The Making of a Pan-Africanist: George Henry Jackson and the Lukunga Mission in the Congo Free State
PART 3. Caribbean
SEVEN The British Emigration Scheme and the African American Emigration Movement to the Caribbean
EIGHT A Reinterpretation of African Americans and Haitian Emigration
NINE Frederick Douglass and Debates over the Annexation of the Dominican Republic
PART 4. Europe
TEN African American Women in Europe
ELEVEN Black Abolitionists in Ireland and the Challenge of Universal Reform
Epilogue
Contributors
