Author, The Souciant

Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana radically reorients our perspective on Blackness and slavery in the Americas. As an extension of Martha Jones’s Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, this work is the product of prodigious research in the court records of Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana by two accomplished scholars who each bring to their analyses a multi-perspectival take on race and slavery. The focus of this study is the ways in which enslaved and free people of color used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones.