This paper re-examines the relationship between civil rights activists and the system of cash bail in the 1960s. Historians have largely considered cash bail as a legal hassle, an obstacle that naturally arose as a consequence of civil disobedience. Aside from the “jail, no bail” practice of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), little attention has been paid to the questions of how activists critiqued and organized around bail. Yet, as this paper shows, SNCC innovated a range of strategies and understood bail as a very specific mechanism of racialized state repression.

This chapter from Aston Gonzalez's book manuscript examines black geniuses recognized in mathematics and the natural sciences in the decades after the American Revolution. Gonzalez analyzes how domestic and transatlantic print culture authored by African Americans and British abolitionists contributed to the conceptual development of “black genius.” Journalists, medical professionals, and antislavery activists turned a public spotlight onto three Black men – the mental calculator Thomas Fuller, doctor James Derham, and astronomer Benjamin Banneker – whose skills, they argued, directly contradicted widespread assertions that people of African descent possessed innately and unchangeably inferior intellectual faculties.

When Chicago-based textile artist Robert Earl Paige designed the Dakkabar fabric set for Sears it marked both a turning point in Paige’s career and an illumination of the global political economy reshaping African American cultural production in the age of decolonization. An active member of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement and inspired by travel to newly-independent Senegal, Paige sold Dakkabar as a piece of Africa for the American home. Yet the fabrics also record Paige’s craft of creative (mis)translation. Reading Dakkabar as a conduit between the American and Senegalese consumer textile markets, this paper reframes the commerce of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement within the postcolonial Atlantic World.

This paper explores the context within which Black indentured children indentured labored, lived, and thought. Contracts and asylum records offer glimpses into the voices, hopes, and expectations of children living in the liminal space between childhood and adulthood, freedom and dependence. Their experiences demonstrate how the ‘in-between-ness’ of childhood was also classed. The (theoretically) moral, spiritual, and educational responsibilities of those who signed indenture contracts reached beyond employment to pseudo-adoption and the partial integration into family units. The work identifies the choices and behaviors of Black children as means of survival, self-preservation, and self-protection, but also as resistance, protest, and assertions of selfhood.

This paper examines cases in which formerly enslaved women demanded child support for the children they had with their former enslavers while they had been enslaved. Drawing on sixteen cases from across the South between 1865 and 1868, this paper contends that freedwomen made these claims not only to provide a modicum of economic aid for themselves and their families, but to affirm their rights as women and as mothers--rights that had previously been denied to them while enslaved. Using the Freedmen’s Bureau, these women challenged the power of the former slaveholding class at the most intimate level of sexual access. They sought, if necessary, to publicly expose the injustices done to them while enslaved. Ultimately, their cases reveal that these women believed a successful life in freedom required a reckoning with the evils of slavery.

Say Burgin's work re-examines the relationship between civil rights activists and the system of cash bail in the 1960s. Historians have largely considered cash bail as a legal hassle, an obstacle that naturally arose as a consequence of civil disobedience. Aside from the “jail, no bail” practice of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), little attention has been paid to the questions of how activists critiqued and organized around bail. Yet, as Burgin's paper shows, SNCC innovated a range of strategies and understood bail as a very specific mechanism of racialized state repression.

In 1924, a racially ambiguous woman named Sarah Simmons escaped from an Alabama prison and later eluded police who searched for her in Chicago at the behest of their southern counterparts. Simmons’ confrontations with and evasion from the state bring attention to the evolving relationship between prisons and slavery and specifically to the ways that the southern carceral regime imported a specific technology from slavery: the runaway slave advertisement. This paper analyzes Simmons' attempts to vanish as part of a longer genealogy of Black women whose freedom was contingent on their ability to thwart the supposedly knowable categories of Blackness.

Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters celebrates the 250th anniversary of Phillis Wheatley Peters’ historic and transformative Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). The new anthology gathers the voices of 20 Black female poets to reimagine the work of this iconic literary ancestor for a new generation. Join editors Danielle Legros Georges and Artress Bethany White, and contributors Florence Ladd and Janice Lowe, as they consider Phillis Wheatley Peters’ impact and share selections from their new book.