Examines the lifestyles and entrepreneurial skills of Karen Theresa Curtis as a businesswoman managing her own huskers. While the free colored men were protesting their lack of civil rights, the women engaged in commerce were protected by no rights and were experiencing their own problems in defending their property.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
322 p., When a small group of free men of color gathered in 1838 to celebrate the end of apprenticeship in Barbados, they spoke of emancipation as the moment of freedom for all colored people, not just the former slaves. The fact that many of these men had owned slaves themselves gives a hollow ring to their lofty pronouncements. Newton demonstrates that simply dismissing these men as hypocrites ignores the complexity of their relationship to slavery. Exploring the role of free blacks in Barbados from 1790 to 1860, Newton argues that the emancipation process transformed social relations between Afro-Barbadians and slaves and ex-slaves.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
316 p., She was an 18th century black Suriname woman with millions of dollars. But she sought the forbidden: to marry a white man. Why, when she already had so much? Elisabeth Samson's immense wealth puzzled many early historians who concluded that it could only have been the result of an inheritance from a master with whom she had lived and by whom she had been set free.
