Jones, Martha S.
Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America
Cambridge University Press (New York)
2018
OUR SYNOPSIS: Martha S. Jones pieces together how Black Americans negotiated, created, and experienced their relationship to the laws of the antebellum United States. Through captivating vignettes, she illuminates stories of asserting belonging and seizing rights of citizenship in Baltimore.
BIG QUESTIONS:
How can the law be made into “an instrument of change”? (3)
What role does a courthouse play in a community?
How can we differentiate between legal/political freedom and lived freedom in the past?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“Not slaves nor aliens nor the equals of free white men, who were former slaves and their descendants before the law? None were more interested in this question than black Americans themselves, and Birthright Citizens takes up their point of view to tell the history of race and rights in the antebellum United States.” (1)
“Birthright Citizens confronts high court opinions and legislative edicts with the ideas of former slaves and their descendants. They too were students of law, though of a less orthodox sort, gleaning ideas from the world around them.” (9-10)
PRIMARY SOURCES:
“African American print culture extended the legal education of black Baltimoreans like Charles Hackett. In his role as an agent for the nation’s first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, Charles was responsible for connecting his city to an emerging network of free black communities.” (18) – Pull stories from the online archive for this newspaper: https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS4415.
BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:
“Set in Baltimore, a place between North, South, and the Atlantic world, this book traces the scenes and the debates through which black Americans developed ideas about citizenship and claims to the rights that citizens enjoyed.” (1)
