Citizenship is not a spectator sport; it is all about engagement. From Slavery to Citizenship is part of a bigger picture - a development process which will enable us to gain more control over our own lives and to participate in decisions about the future direction of society and the organisations we are involved in. This book is unusual in suggesting that slavery is not a remote historical phenomenon, but a fundamental component of our present. People have been slaves in the past and some people are enslaved today. The subject of slavery is highly charged with emotion. From Slavery to Citizenship seeks to facilitate dialogue and to bridge gaps. This is not easy as people have been speaking different languages and working from diverse sets of assumptions. A first step is to listen and to learn from differences. In this book, a single author's voice brings together contributions from major public figures and respected thinkers. Within a rich tapestry of perspectives, there is no single line of argument, or one overall conclusion. There are contributions from Africa, North and South America, Western and Eastern Europe and Asia, and from discourses in work organisation, occupational health, psychiatry and human rights, as well as education. After reading the book, you are unlikely to conclude that all of the contributors have agreed, but you will find that they give you a starting point from which to reflect and begin discussion, as well as the tools to engage in active citizenship.

The idea of universal rights is often understood as the product of Europe, but as Laurent Dubois demonstrates, it was profoundly shaped by the struggle over slavery and citizenship in the French Caribbean. Dubois examines this Caribbean revolution by focusing on Guadeloupe, where, in the early 1790s, insurgents on the island fought for equality and freedom and formed alliances with besieged Republicans. In 1794, slavery was abolished throughout the French Empire, ushering in a new colonial order in which all people, regardless of race, were entitled to the same rights. But French administrators on the island combined emancipation with new forms of coercion and racial exclusion, even as newly freed slaves struggled for a fuller freedom. In 1802, the experiment in emancipation was reversed and slavery was brutally reestablished, though rebels in Saint-Domingue avoided the same fate by defeating the French and creating an independent Haiti. The political culture of republicanism, Dubois argues, was transformed through this transcultural and transatlantic struggle for liberty and citizenship. The slaves-turned-citizens of the French Caribbean expanded the political possibilities of the Enlightenment by giving new and radical content to the idea of universal rights.

In Sites of Slavery Salamishah Tillet examines how contemporary African American artists and intellectuals—including Annette Gordon-Reed, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Bill T. Jones, Carrie Mae Weems, and Kara Walker—turn to the subject of slavery in order to understand and challenge the ongoing exclusion of African Americans from the founding narratives of the United States.

Collection of essays tracing the historical evolution of African American experiences, from the dawn of Reconstruction onward, through the perspectives of sociology, political science, law, economics, education and psychology. As a whole, the book is a systematic study of the gap between promise and performance of African Americans since 1865. Over the course of thirty-four chapters, contributors present a portrait of the particular hurdles faced by African Americans and the distinctive contributions African Americans have made to the development of U.S. institutions and culture. --From publisher description.

Explains the origins of the Fourteenth Amendment's birthright citizenship provision, as a story of black Americans' pre-Civil War claims to belonging.

In Fighting for Citizenship, Brian Taylor complicates existing interpretations of why black men fought in the Civil War. Civil War–era African Americans recognized the urgency of a core political concern: how best to use the opportunity presented by this conflict over slavery to win abolition and secure enduring black rights, goals that had eluded earlier generations of black veterans. Some, like Frederick Douglass, urged immediate enlistment to support the cause of emancipation, hoping that a Northern victory would bring about the end of slavery. But others counseled patience and negotiation, drawing on a historical memory of unfulfilled promises for black military service in previous American wars and encouraging black men to leverage their position to demand abolition and equal citizenship. In doing this, they also began redefining what it meant to be a black man who fights for the United States. These debates over African Americans' enlistment expose a formative moment in the development of American citizenship: black Northerners' key demand was that military service earn full American citizenship, a term that had no precise definition prior to the Fourteenth Amendment. In articulating this demand, Taylor argues, black Northerners participated in the remaking of American citizenship itself—unquestionably one of the war's most important results.

From the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War, Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians bought, sold, and owned Africans and African Americans as slaves, a fact that persisted after the tribes' removal from the Deep South to Indian Territory. The tribes formulated racial and gender ideologies that justified this practice and marginalized free black people in the Indian nations well after the Civil War and slavery had ended. Through the end of the nineteenth century, ongoing conflicts among Choctaw, Chickasaw, and U.S. lawmakers left untold numbers of former slaves and their descendants in the two Indian nations without citizenship in either the Indian nations or the United States. In this groundbreaking study, Barbara Krauthamer rewrites the history of southern slavery, emancipation, race, and citizenship to reveal the centrality of Native American slaveholders and the black people they enslaved. Krauthamer's examination of slavery and emancipation highlights the ways Indian women's gender roles changed with the arrival of slavery and changed again after emancipation and reveals complex dynamics of race that shaped the lives of black people and Indians both before and after removal.

In this collaborative work, three leading historians explore one of the most significant areas of inquiry in modern historiography--the transition from slavery to freedom and what this transition meant for former slaves, former slaveowners, and the societies in which they lived. Their contributions take us beyond the familiar portrait of emancipation as the end of an evil system to consider the questions and the struggles that emerged in freedom's wake. Thomas Holt focuses on emancipation in Jamaica and the contested meaning of citizenship in defining and redefining the concept of freedom; Rebecca Scott investigates the complex struggles and cross-racial alliances that evolved in southern Louisiana and Cuba after the end of slavery; and Frederick Cooper examines the intersection of emancipation and imperialism in French West Africa. In their introduction, the authors address issues of citizenship, labor, and race, in the post-emancipation period and they point the way toward a fuller understanding of the meanings of freedom.

Focuses on labor and politics to help develop broader interpretive trends in the post-emancipation US South.

Slave & Citizen deals with one of the most intriguing problems presented by the development of the New World: the contrast between the legal and social positions of the Negro in the United States and in Latin America. It is well-known that in Brazil and in the Caribbean area, Negroes do not suffer legal or even major social disabilities on account of color, and that a long history of acceptance and miscegenation has erased the sharp line between white and colored. Professor Tannenbaum, one of our leading authorities on Latin America, asks why there has been such a sharp distinction between the United States and the other parts of the New World into which Negroes were originally brought as slaves. In the legal structure of the United States, the Negro slave became property. There has been little experience with Negro slaves in England, and the ancient and medieval traditions affecting slavery had died out. As property, the slave was without rights to marriage, to children, to the product of his work, or to freedom. In the Iberian peninsula, on the other hand, Negro slaves were common, and the laws affecting them were well developed. Therefore, in the colonies of Spain and Portugal, while the slave was the lowest person in the social order, he was still a human being, with some rights, and some means by which he might achieve freedom. Only the United States made a radical split with the tradition in which all men, even slaves, had certain inalienable rights.