Racial Uplift Research Articles

Played Out: The Race Man in Twenty-First-Century Satire

Played Out: The Race Man in Twenty-First-Century Satire

Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Tara Green’s in-depth literary biography, Love and Activism: The Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, examines the life and works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, first-generation freeborn, post-emancipation Black woman activist and creative artist. Green’s work follows in the line of literary biographies such as Miriam Decosta-Willis’ Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells (1995); Vivian May’s Anna Julia Cooper: Visionary Black Feminist (2007); Hanna Wallinger’s Pauline Hopkins: A Literary Biography (2012); and Valerie Boyd’s Wrapped in Rainbows (2003). As with these works, Green demonstrates the wellspring of unexamined histories that await us through archival work focusing in Black studies. Tracing the personal and career trajectory of Dunbar-Nelson, Green shows that African American art and advocacy are products of a long arc across the history of Blacks in the United States. It is the post-emancipation New Orleans and its legacy of enslavement that informed the social world into which Dunbar-Nelson was born. Green captures the significance of Dunbar-Nelson’s biracial heritage—its importance as biological and cultural DNA that shaped the personal, psychic, and social visions of Black identity across enslaved populations and their posterity. Green reveals Dunbar-Nelson’s key place in African American literary tradition and women’s advocacy, a legacy that spans fiction, nonfiction, periodicals, and playwriting. The biography underscores Dunbar-Nelson’s impact in what might be called the emergence into a twentieth-century Black women’s modernist ethos. This case is made through the biography’s demonstration of Dunbar Nelson’s work and life that clearly anticipated the boldness of Black women artists of the Harlem Renaissance and their groundbreaking work.The biography is a chronological structure organized by key eras and movements in America and in Dunbar-Nelson’s life. A key thread running throughout the biography is the matter of respectability politics in the lives of post-emancipation African Americans. Green masterfully balances the use of archives, historical and critical scholarship, and Dunbar-Nelson’s own writings to convincingly establish the importance of this biography. The book is organized into twelve chapters that begin in chapter 1 with historical and biographical overview of the New Orleans and southern milieu into which Dunbar-Nelson was born. Tracing Dunbar-Nelson’s life and career from her New Orleans birthplace, the biography concludes with coverage of the final months of her life and her death at age sixty in Philadelphia. Here Green circles back to the work’s central focus—respectability—and how Dunbar-Nelson’s life may have been articulated by her contemporaries through the prism of respectability, the archives underscore what was arguably a radical life.Between the first and final chapter are ten chapters that trace and detail the life and works of Dunbar-Nelson. Chapter 2 establishes her importance as an early and key voice in the turn of the century New Negro Women’s movement which rejected conventional nineteenth-century notions that “women must be pious, submissive, pure, and domestic” (30). Chapters 3 and 4 cover the years of Alice’s marriage to Paul L. Dunbar. Green provides an insightful look at how the tensions between the Dunbars and their desire for middle-class respectability were informed by the shadows of slavery that had dictated their family lives as young children. Chapter 5 looks at Alice’s life and literary production in the early period after Paul’s death. Green’s look at her work among the circle of Black women peers, Hurston, Fausett, and Larsen offers an important lens into the era of Black women’s writing that Dunbar-Nelson operates.Chapters 6 and 11 are separated by four chapters but work as bookends to the focus on Dunbar-Nelson’s navigation of same-sex and heterosexual relationships, revealing her independence of thought and manners when it came to her sexuality. Chapter 7 introduces the phase of Dunbar-Nelson’s third marriage—a period of almost twenty years in which she was an active speaker and campaigner for women’s suffrage and racial uplift. These chapters underscore Dunbar-Nelson’s deep-seated role in Black activism and her determination and work in circles where Black women were not always respected as equals.Tara Green’s biography stands not only as a major contribution in African American literary studies but is also important for its connections of literature and culture. Most poignant is the book’s critical look at the life and works of Dunbar-Nelson that captures the ongoing precarious impact of racism and sexism on Black health and mortality, safety, and financial stability undergirding Black life across socioeconomic levels. Educated, professional, middle- and upper-class Blacks of Dunbar-Nelson’s era were no less immune to racism and sexism than in the twenty-first century.

Degrees of Equality: Abolitionist Colleges and the Politics of Race by John Frederick Bell

Bell’s remarkable book examines racial politics at three “abolitionist colleges” that offered interracial education in the nineteenth century—Oberlin College, Berea College, and the short-lived New York Central College (1848–1860), which was the most radical of the group. These schools were among the institutions in the United States most committed to multiracial democracy. According to Bell, although the schools were run largely by white men, the Black students were the ones continually pushing the colleges to honor their commitment to universal human equality. These colleges emerged when racist violence and prejudice were spreading and hardening in both the North and South. Black students also faced challenges on these supposedly enlightened campuses. The most progressive white allies were not immune to fears of amalgamation—interracial mixing—which clearly showed limits in white egalitarian thinking. As in the abolitionist movement generally, white paternalism and its emphasis on racial uplift also worked against the universalist equality that Black men and women advanced. Even white college leaders’ particular understanding of equality, as about opportunity and individual liberty, “could make whites oblivious to the continued significance of race” at these colleges (89). Ultimately, as Bell puts it, whites in these college “communities were more comfortable reforming specific racial injustices than reimagining race itself” (10).This shortsightedness had profound effects on the schools’ trajectories following the Civil War. Bell documents in incredible detail how practices of interracial sociability and exchange broke down at Berea and Oberlin. College officials no longer enforced social equality on campus. Students could choose to associate closely with students of other races—or not. Prior historians explain this declension as part and parcel of the emergent Jim Crow regime. Bell offers a more satisfying explanation. The pre-existing limitations of white collegians and college leaders’ egalitarian thinking, coupled with the feeling that they had won the big struggle—abolishing slavery—produced indifference to their institutions’ historic missions. Many whites at abolitionist colleges came to accept contemporary Darwinian ideas of social evolutionism, namely that humans developed in stages and that Black people were simply at an earlier stage. This notion deviated dramatically from the ideal of equality that Black students championed.Degrees of Equality is a mode of social and cultural history based on impeccable archival research. Bell mined student writings, institutional sources, public accounts of the colleges, and records of extracurricular groups to great effect, all of it allowing Bell to ground his arguments in evocative descriptions of students’ lived experience. Better still, Bell situates his case studies not only in the histories of race and higher education in the nineteenth century but also in sociological debates about how to foster egalitarian communities. Bell explicitly addresses how his study speaks to “contact theory,” which examines how intergroup interactions can challenge prejudice and produce shared feeling. He lends support to sociological critiques of color-blindness, which often sustain prejudice and inequality, as Bell shows that it did in the postbellum years. Chapter 3 draws especially well from sociological theory. By reading the experiences of four Oberlin alumnae in light of Black feminist scholarship, Bell uncovers the many subtle ways in which the college and abolitionists continued to indulge prejudice, and why radical challenges to these practices were so necessary.Bell ends by suggesting that this history offers much to modern university administrators, as they try to create racially egalitarian spaces on campuses. Degrees of Equality shows how deep and careful historical research can speak to larger interdisciplinary conversations within the present moment. This book demands the attention of historians of American education, abolition, and race in the nineteenth century.

"For Women Only!": A Radical Message of the Black Middle Class in Kansas City

"For Women Only!"A Radical Message of the Black Middle Class in Kansas City Elyssa Ford (bio) The Kansas City [Missouri] Call, published from 1919 to the present, has been one of the largest and most successful Black newspapers in the country. This article examines the depiction of Black women in the Call in the 1950s, a decade of significant change in Kansas City. As a midwestern crossroads, Kansas City had seen its Black population grow substantially in the previous decade as rural African Americans arrived seeking new urban opportunities. Some of these new Kansas City residents came from the Missouri countryside or from surrounding midwestern states. Others were part of the Great Migration out of the South and either planned to make Kansas City their permanent home or saw it as simply a temporary stop before moving northward to Chicago or Detroit. Regardless of their origins, the increased Black population of 1950s Kansas City read the Call at a key time in the publication's history. The civil rights movement was ramping up, and the newspaper was changing editors for the first time. Under these circumstances, the paper's depiction of Black women relied significantly on the politics of respectability.1 While the Call sometimes presented women as activists, it more frequently paralleled White newspapers in its presentation of women in more traditional roles. Stories discussed women as college students, often as beauty contest winners; featured female musicians and actresses in the entertainment section; and included women in the society and wedding pages. While these articles did not differ significantly from those in White newspapers, to present Black women as models of success and beauty was inherently radical. The Call also included the weekly feature "For Women Only!," which focused on women as wives and mothers and included recipes and cleaning tips. This corresponded with the prescribed 1950s model of womanhood and mirrored the presentation [End Page 77] of ideal womanhood that also appeared in White newspapers. Yet to present Black women and Black families as middle class challenged popular conceptions of Blackness in the era. By depicting the typical Black woman as the counterpart to a White middle-class woman, the Kansas City Call aligned with an activist agenda of civil rights and social change based on racial uplift and made a gender- and socioeconomic-based argument that was revolutionary. In the 1950s, reformers' depictions of Black women as middle class, respectable wives, mothers, and daughters was nothing new. Booker T. Washington had promoted the idea of racial uplift in the late nineteenth century. For him, a focus by African Americans on thrift, industry, hard work, and education would raise up the race and eventually lead to an expansion of their civil rights.2 Though men were often the focus of these efforts, Black women soon became leaders of the racial uplift movement, and they formed their own organizations to support this race work. Black women founded the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896, and the organization focused primarily on the uplift of the Black race. After seeing Black men fail to achieve racial equality and because the voices of Black men were more limited by Jim Crow-era violence, Black women believed that it was up to them to improve the stature of all African Americans. As historian Deborah Gray White has explained, "To build the black home was to build the black nation. At the center of it all was the woman." The association believed that Black women were responsible for uplifting the race through "intellectual development and cultural refinement." By the 1940s, club women began to adjust their focus from using the moral purity of Black women to uplift the race to helping uplift the race to improve their rights as women.3 Despite this evolution, the Missouri branch of the NACW still followed the earlier tenets of the national motto, "Lifting as We Climb," by continuing to emphasize intellectual development. In 1954 the Missouri group promoted three main goals: the integration of Missouri public schools, strengthening and improving family life, and building a student aid and scholarship fund.4 Founded in 1919 by Chester A. Franklin, the Kansas City Call had likewise...

An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North

Zoë Burkholder, professor of educational foundations and director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education Project at Montclair State University, has written an essential account of the complex and often troubling history of America's implementation of meaningful school integration strategies. In particular, the author focuses upon the northern United States and its frequently uncomfortable legacy, as reflected in failed educational integration in its many diverse school districts, both urban and suburban. As Burkholder states, “the North is an imagined landscape as much as a physical one; a place that has long been associated with freedom and opportunity for African Americans. This study focuses specifically on communities north of the Mason Dixon line and east of the Mississippi River where the largest Black communities developed over the course of the first and second Great Migrations” (p. 5). As a social history, An African American Dilemma also explores, as is referenced on several occasions, the same racial divides and challenges that Gunnar Myrdal confronted in his classic An American Dilemma (1944). As Burkholder declares, her book “emphasizes white racism as the cause of the African American dilemma, or the question of whether school integration or separation provides the best route to equality and justice” (p. 8). The analysis follows a chronological format beginning with the common school movement in 1840. Organizationally, the chapters unfold in the following manner: introduction; chapter 1, “Caste Abolished: Integration for Freedom, 1840–1900”; chapter 2, “The Education That Is Their Due: Separation for Racial Uplift, 1900–1940”; chapter 3, “A Powerful Weapon: Integration for Equality, 1940–1965”; chapter 4, “Conflict in the Community: Separation for Black Power, 1966–1974”; chapter 5, “An Armageddon of Righteousness: Integration for Justice, 1975–Present”; and conclusion. The chapter titles reflect a broader intellectual focus than simply defining the integration debate through the prism of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which falsely suggests that integration is a solved southern educational problem.

Performing Racial Uplift: E. Azalia Hackley and African American Activism in the Postbellum to Pre-Harlem Era

Performing Racial Uplift: E. Azalia Hackley and African American Activism in the Postbellum to Pre-Harlem Era

Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship

Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship

Summer of Soul

Summer of Soul

Spitting at Jim Crow

Spitting at Jim Crow

Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, by Kira Thurman

<i>Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms</i>, by Kira Thurman

Fantasies of Valentina

AbstractThis article analyzes a RuPaul's Drag Race contestant, Valentina, and the ways her trans/queer of color and Latinx performance strategies obfuscate neoliberal, colonial-capitalist logics. Drawing on trans of color theory, television studies, and Latinx studies, this article argues that Valentina's queer nonbinary racialized televisual persona—which includes, for instance, her iconic lip-synch, mask-wearing faux pas, or campy telenovela moments—enacts aesthetic and performative tactics that defy demands for capitalist productivity, minoritized respectability and professionalism, and racial uplift. The article examines how a trans/queer Mexican American drag queen like Valentina, herself a televisual spectacle, defies discourses structured around debating good versus bad representation, a binary that hamstrings much of the scholarship on Latinx people on television by remixing Latinx stereotypes such as the Latina spitfire with trans/queer possibilities. This torquing of stereotypes centers trans/queer racialized Latinx joy, pleasure, and humor, activating worlds hospitable to trans/queer of color living and thriving.

Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement

Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement

The Debate on The Vision of Manhood between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois

This article explores the ways in which black intellectuals Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois develop models of black masculinity that serve the purposes and needs of their respective historical moments. By navigating the trajectory of the competing yet overlapping visions of masculinity Washington and Du Bois constructed, I argue that these black intellectuals sought to rebut the primitive, “unmanly” images projected onto blacks to become part of the dominant (white) society. For both, establishing the terms of leadership for racial uplift was intimately connected with the definition of black manhood. Therefore, Washington and Du Bois actively strove to defy the stereotype of the black rapist by demonstrating the extent to which they are civilized. Simultaneously, Du Bois and Washington’s insistence on civilization runs the “risk” of effeminizing them and African American men in general, when both figures urgently seek to construct their masculine identity as a representative African American leader.

A comparison of professional identity experiences among minoritized medical professionals

ObjectiveProfessional identity formation (PIF) is considered a fundamental process in the development of healthcare providers. In medical education, the PIF literature has historically centered on medicine's socialization practices involving white male physicians. However, recently researchers have begun to reveal how larger socio-historical contexts influence PIF in minoritized physicians. To better understand what influences Black/African American physicians’ PIF, this study compares their PIF experiences to a group of minoritized physician assistants (PAs). In comparing Black physicians’ experiences to another provider, this study explored what PIF experiences may be attributed to participants’ minoritized status and what might be attributed to the culture of medicine. MethodsIn this cross-case analysis, 45 minoritized PA students and practicing PAs were recruited from several Southeastern universities. The PA participants included 23 Black/African Americans, 12 Latinx, 4 Indigenous/Native, and 6 of mixed races/ethnicities. Interview data were then compared to previously collected data from 41 Black/African American medical trainees and physicians. Using constant comparative method, similarities and differences in PIF were explored. ResultsSimilarities between the two groups included the importance of participants’ racial/ethnic identity to patient care, experiences on-going microaggressions from patients and peers, and a desire to engage in racial uplift. However, one marked difference was found, namely that PAs felt they could bring their entire selves to the profession, whereas physicians described feeling splintered early in their training. ConclusionsSeveral possibilities that might explain why Black physicians and minoritized PAs have this one marked difference in their PIF experience, including identity threat, internalization of different discourses, and length of training for physicians. While this study was not designed to answer this question, it is clear that there is something in the culture of medicine and the training of physicians that signals to Black physicians that they cannot bring their whole selves to the profession.

“Electrical Nutrition and Glandular Control”: Eugenics, Progressive Science, and George Schuyler’s Black No More

In 1931, African American journalist George Schuyler imagined a medical treatment that could turn Black people white and American politics upside down. Schuyler’s novel, Black No More, uses this fictional race-altering technology to mount a satirical critique of progressive era investment in eugenic science as a tool of social reform. The novel draws on popular scientific theories of human perfection—electric medicine, hygienic nutrition, and glandular theory—to envision a mode of technological reproduction that troubles eugenic theories of biological inheritance and parodies the progressive marriage of politics and science. In reading Schuyler’s contrarian engagement with American race science through the novel’s use of medical technology, the essay extends critical discourse on the relationship between eugenics, progressive politics, and racial uplift in the early twentieth century. Bringing the politics of the past to bear on the present, it advances a critique of the persistent cultural legacy of progressive era scientific thought.

Joy or Vexation: Respectable Motherhood and the Trope of Childhood in Nella Larsen's Passing

Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) illustrates that Irene's experience and perception of joy and pleasure are intertwined with her understanding of Black motherhood and childhood. During the early twentieth century, racial uplift leaders urged Black girls and women to embody the ideals of respectable motherhood as a means of both combating the infantilization of Black people and reclaiming the motherhood that slaveholders had denied to Black women. However, racial uplift leaders' insistence on the sacrificial and moral responsibilities of Black motherhood was often co-opted by a middle-class ideology, limiting Black women's ability to envision Black joy through their various forms of intimacy with Black children as well as their own childhoods. This essay contends such conservative aspects of respectable motherhood are exemplified by Irene, whose desire to maintain her family's middle-class status leads her to avoid complex questions about Black happiness. In addition to critiquing Irene's limitations, Larsen further explores Black women's erotic power by describing Irene's conflicted feelings about her childhood friend Clare's willful pursuit of pleasure. Informed by Audre Lorde's attentiveness to the Black inner girl child as a source of erotic power and Saidiya Hartman's Black feminist reading of love of pleasure, this essay argues that the manner in which Irene constructs her memory of Clare's girlhood and the ways the trope of childhood is deployed in the novel reveal Irene's fascination with Clare's yearning for a freer life and her willful refusal of self-abnegation.

Duty beyond the Battlefield: African American Soldiers Fight for Racial Uplift, Citizenship, and Manhood, 1870–1920

Duty beyond the Battlefield: African American Soldiers Fight for Racial Uplift, Citizenship, and Manhood, 1870–1920

Not New to This: A Genealogical Approach to Black Girls’ Media Production

Abstract During the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries, the Black press served as a cornerstone of Black social and political life in the United States. For Black Americans, newspapers and magazines functioned as both informational resources and philosophical spaces that engaged conversations of racial uplift, which often centered Black girlhood as an especially important site for assessing racial progress. Despite the evolving nature of media platforms themselves, the relationship between media and Black Americans continues to be a tool by which to measure the pulse of Black life; the role of digital media in the lives of twenty-first-century Black Americans mirrors that of Black magazines and newspapers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of particular note is the way that Black youth, especially Black girls, use digital media spaces to make themselves (and their experiences) visible and generate social discourse through the content they post on social media. In this article, I look at historical Black titles—the Woman's Era and the Brownies’ Book—as well as contemporary Black girls’ social media content to show how Black girls have historically developed a discourse of Black girlhood alongside their adult counterparts who were concerned with racial uplift and continue to author and theorize their lives through digital media.

Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman by Sheena Harris

Reviewed by: Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman by Sheena Harris Leigh Soares Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman. By Sheena Harris. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 210. $55.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-619-3.) Building on literature that has shed new light on the lives and leadership of Black women traditionally overshadowed by the renowned "race men" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Sheena Harris has written the first scholarly biography of Margaret Murray Washington. Born enslaved in Macon, Mississippi, Washington is known most for her marriage to Booker T. Washington as he arrived at the height of his power, but here readers see how she became a prominent educator and race leader in her own right. She developed a robust curriculum for Black girls at Tuskegee Institute, promoted Black history education in Black schools across the South, and organized Black women to lead racial uplift movements in their own communities. With this biography of Margaret Washington, Harris "not only restores her to the history of HBCU administrators and club women, but also illuminates the interconnections among movements that stood against racial and gender oppression" (p. 10). [End Page 403] Drawing on a wide range of personal correspondence, public writings, and institutional records, Harris traces the life and career of Washington from her birth in 1861 to her death in 1925. The first three chapters recount Washington's childhood, her education at Fisk University, her marriage to Booker, and her pedagogical commitments as Lady Principal of Tuskegee Institute. Harris emphasizes how Washington's early experiences in the rural, impoverished South helped shape the vision of Black education she brought with her to Tuskegee—one that emphasized respectability, the professionalization of domestic labor, and the uplift of the home. Washington's commitment to industrial education, Harris explains, "was not an accommodationist view, as many critics of her husband asserted, but rather a survivalist strategy" (p. 55). The last three chapters follow Washington's club work on three scales: local (the Tuskegee Women's Club), national (including the National Association of Colored Women and the Southern Federation of Women's Clubs), and international (the International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World). Washington certainly benefited from her husband's fame and influence, but she carved out a respected leadership role for herself through increasingly ambitious organizing, all in service of advancing the study of Black life, uplifting Black women and children, and fighting the spread of white supremacy. Although Harris clearly admires Washington, she does not pull punches when examining the leader's emergent elitism. "While [Washington] espoused views of cohesive [cross-class] collaborations, she herself remained exclusively separate," and most of the Black women Washington sought to uplift were excluded from membership in the numerous organizations she led (p. 144). One of the benefits of biography is the way individual experiences can provide insight into the people behind movements. In several effective passages, Harris explores the physical and emotional toll on Washington as she struggled to find a balance among her work commitments, her responsibilities as a wife and mother, and her personal well-being, highlighting the unique challenges Black women faced as they pursued public leadership. Although the narrative is at times ambivalent about the relationship between her work and the so-called Tuskegee Machine, it is clearer about Washington's connection to a wide network of Black race women rooted in the South. Harris shows Washington collaborating with other understudied reformers in the region, including Josephine Bruce, Lugenia Burns Hope, and Cornelia Bowen. Readers interested in Black women's history and educational history will appreciate this recovery of the life and career of Margaret Murray Washington. Leigh Soares Mississippi State University Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. by Tamika Y. Nunley

Reviewed by: At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. by Tamika Y. Nunley Elizabeth Wood At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. By Tamika Y. Nunley. The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 254. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6222-0; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-6221-3.) Scholars studying African American women before the Civil War have long documented their resistance to slavery and racism but have found it more difficult to elucidate their intimate and interior worlds. In this first study of African American women living in Washington, D.C., from the city's founding through the Civil War, Tamika Y. Nunley draws on a rich body of evidence to reveal clues about how they envisioned their lives beyond slavery and circumscribed freedom. Nunley uses the concept of self-making to examine ways these individuals sought to "define and preserve a sense of self in a society that supported a narrow definition of what it meant to be a black woman" (p. 2). [End Page 378] She argues that navigation was critical to processes of self-making, as women made calculated as well as improvised choices to traverse the sometimes vast physical and ideological distances between their circumstances and their imagined selves. African American women did not achieve equality, even after emancipation, but Nunley demonstrates how their ceaseless claims to liberty in the nation's capital challenge what we know about enslaved women's resistance and laid the foundations for continued self-fashioning and activism after the Civil War. Nunley uncovers an impressive array of women's experiences as she carefully examines federal and municipal records, financial transactions, newspaper articles and advertisements, diaries and private correspondence, and even the words of Black schoolgirls. Though the city was founded to govern a nation shaped by the highest ideals of liberty, African American women's labor was crucial to Washington's early growth; and the nature of urban slavery there, along with a burgeoning slave market, created immense unpredictability through kidnapping, sale, and hiring practices. Nevertheless, enslaved women made the District of Columbia contested terrain as they "carved out pathways of escape" and asserted their identities through practices such as self-naming (p. 42). Other women turned to the courts to pursue their visions of freedom, demonstrating their understandings of kin and community, even as navigating the courts became increasingly complicated. Free African American communities emphasized educating girls to understand moral virtue as a weapon against stereotypes assigned to Black women and as an "expression of racial progress" (p. 106). Outside the middling classes, women turned to economic self-making in the street by more openly engaging in prostitution and leisure culture during the chaos of the Civil War—a practice both lucrative and perilous. Throughout, Nunley reminds readers that claiming liberty was no easy feat, even as emancipation laws were passed, but that Black women articulated their understanding of rights as they transitioned from enslavement to citizenship. Nunley provides nuance and correction to existing scholarship on antebellum Black women and girls. She carefully outlines the parameters of enslavement in the district and cautions us not to overstate the flexibility of urban slavery, since Black women's work as domestics placed them in the intimate spaces of white control. Nunley challenges the understanding that kin obligations prevented enslaved women from taking flight by showing how networks of relatives and friends inspired and facilitated running away. Her chapter on education for African American girls in a slaveholding city adds to a growing body of work on antebellum Black childhood and demonstrates an early community commitment to racial uplift that both shaped girls' self-understandings and prepared them for white hostility to their achievement. Finally, Nunley emphasizes that just as restrictive laws could have limited scope, so could beneficial ones. In the face of enormous obstacles, African American women claimed citizenship and challenged "the notion that liberty stopped at legal emancipation" by growing their institutions and building new ones dedicated to the expansion of freedom (p. 187). At the Threshold...