Overview

How did Africans become blacks in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders' efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery. Looking closely at three slave societies--Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana--Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross demonstrate that the law of freedom--not slavery--established the meaning of blackness in law. Contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims to citizenship would be tied to racial identity. Laws regulating the lives and institutions of free people of color created the boundaries between black and white, the rights reserved to white people, and the degradations imposed only on black people.

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Ariela J. Gross is the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History and the codirector of the Center for Law, History, and Culture at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. She is the author of What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America and Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom. Alejandro de la Fuente is the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics, professor of African and African American studies, and the director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University, Massachusetts. He is the author of Diago: The Pasts of this Afro-Cuban Present, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century, and A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba. Gary Tiedemann is a Florida and New York-based narrator, but learned how to act in Chicago's improv, sketch-comedy, and theater scene. He came to audiobook narration after voicing countless commercials and videos over a twenty-year voice-over career. Gary has also appeared in hundreds of improv and sketch performances at Chicago's Annoyance Theatre, iO, The Second City, and in dozens of theater roles as a cofounder of The New Colony Theatre. When Gary is not in a booth, he is probably outside wondering if there is time to go camping.

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