“Demonstrates that the ‘emancipation generation’ bequeathed values, ethical frameworks, and identities to multiple ensuing generations, shaping religious, educational, and cultural institutions as well as labor and political organizations.”—Peter Rachleff, editor of Starving Amidst Too Much and Other IWW Writings on the Food Industry
“Shows how far off the mark arguments are that claim that black Americans generally have internalized inferiority and engage in self-defeating behaviors.”—William A. Darity Jr., coeditor ofBoundaries of Clan and Color: Transnational Comparisons of Inter-Group Disparity
Countering the idea that slaves were unprepared for freedom, this groundbreaking study argues that slaves built an ethos of “honest labor” and collective humanism in the face of oppression—an ethos that has been taken up by generations of African Americans as a foundation for citizenship and participation in democracy.
Known for My Work presents an intellectual and social history of slave thought from the late antebellum era through Reconstruction, labor organizing in the 1930s and 1940s, the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the reparations movement of the twenty-first century. Arguing that enslaved laborers thought for themselves, imagined themselves, and made themselves, and that their descendants have shared this moral legacy, Lynda Morgan offers an unprecedented view of African America.
