Against the Odds: Free Blacks in the Slave Societies of the Americas

Once freedom was achieved, persons of African descent developed a wide range of responses to new social, political and economic challenges. Free blacks used their respective legal systems to advance claims to land, pay, inheritance and, in the larger sense, citizenship. Knowing that their positions might change as rapidly as a government they became highly politicized, and many of the essays in this volume explore their political choices and the rationales for them. This collection examines free black communities in Senegal, South Carolina, Louisiana, Florida, Cuba, Saint-Dominique, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Suriname to compare the genesis of a free black class within Senegalese, British, French, Spanish and Dutch slave systems.