In Search of Liberty

"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"--