Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846-1862

Book Review by Warren T. Burns

What is the history of our nation's courtrooms but a canvas upon which human struggle, toil, triumph, and defeat are painted in the measured colors of civility and custom? It is altogether fitting that as we commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court marking the triumph of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's decades-long campaign to quash the tyranny of “separate but equal,” that we pause to consider a new volume by historian Judith Kelleher Schafer entitled Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846-1862. In its pages, Professor Schafer chronicles the early experience of African-Americans in the antebellum courts of New Orleans, Louisiana, as they sought to protect, and in some cases secure, their liberty. The canvas that emerges from Professor Schafer's meticulous research transcends the restrained palette of the courtroom, matching in intensity the hues of the lively city that forms its background. It is a canvas peopled by both the notable and humble, the scoundrels and the saints; yet at its core it conveys the passionate struggle by African-Americans, both slave and free, to utilize the law and the courts in their quest for liberty.


About the Author

Warren T. Burns.

Citation

78 Tul. L. Rev. 2339 (2004)