Taking hold of freedom with both hands

Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All by David Roediger (Verso, $26.95).

David Roediger, a history professor at Kansas University, is an expert on American labor history and the persistence of racism. His latest, Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All, is the second major historical work this year to address the agency exhibited by enslaved people as they struggled to free themselves.

“Self-emancipation”—also covered in David Williams’ I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era—goes a long way toward de-bunking the myth that African Americans waited patiently in chains for white people to decide they should be free.

This offers us a very different view of what it meant to be black in America in the post-Civil War years; Roediger goes farther, to examine how other groups—women seeking suffrage, laborers seeking better working conditions—also worked for their own benefit during this period.

It was an age of self-advocacy. Apparently, no one expected wealthy white men to hand them anything, which is a good thing. Of course, that doesn’t mean it was an easy road, and Roediger also analyzes the institutional barriers to attaining liberty in a capitalist society that takes advantage of racism and sexism to further the aims of the ultra-wealthy.

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com ( )