Performing Freedom

"Performing Freedom" examines the attempts by enslaved African Americans living in the nineteenth-century US South to escape slavery by fleeing to towns and cities within the slaveholding states and disguising themselves as free blacks. Going to great lengths to "look" and "act" free-often even acquiring forged free papers-thousands of enslaved people "passed for free" in urban areas with large free black communities. Such strategies of escape underscore the importance of visibility to the successful development of slavery as an institution, and reveal how enslaved people attempted to erase visible markers of enslavement to live in freedom.