Known for My Work: African American Ethics from Slavery to Freedom by Lynda J. Morgan (review)

In Known for My Work: African American Ethics from Slavery to Freedom, historian Lynda J. Morgan documents how the ethics of enslaved and freed black Americans in the antebellum era informed the ideologies and resistance strategies that later generations employed to challenge white supremacy. Free or "honest labor" formed the basis of their economic ethos, which included freedom and equality in political and social arenas (p. 16). By contending that enslaved black people's formulation of a moral economy "derived from their experiences with and analysis of bondage itself," Morgan makes a contribution to the growing literature that acknowledges the intellectual history of enslaved peoples while providing rich fodder for discussion (p. 1). The author addresses the historical oversight that ignores the influence of blacks on American political ideologies by documenting how slaves and freedpeople "intellectualized their labor experiences, drew political and moral lessons from them, and employed that body of thought to approach the problems and opportunities of the post–Civil War world and beyond" (p. 6).

The book's seven chapters can be broadly divided into a group of four chapters documenting enslaved Americans' understanding of slavery and its ethical consequences and a group of three chapters highlighting slavery's legacy in subsequent black social movements. Chapters 1–4 give a clear assessment of a slave ethos and cover topics such as enslaved people's understanding of labor and the economic foundations of racism, how they distinguished between violence and self-defense, and their opinions on white morality. The use of slave narratives is augmented by published speeches, pamphlets, and other forms of print culture. Morgan challenges ideas that attribute "a poor work ethic, bad family values, and an embrace of dependency and irresponsibility" to slavery's legacy and makes a compelling argument that rather than enslavement contributing to "moral deficiencies," enslaved black Americans fostered support for "redemptive inclusiveness, equal justice," selfreliance, and "respect for labor" that were promulgated by later generations (pp. 11, 79). Morgan's argument can appear to aggrandize the moral superiority of black Americans as opposed to white Americans, slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike, who by their adherence to slavery, economic exploitation, and racism rejected honest work and valued "greed, fraud, and personal gain" (p. 11). Such arguments lend themselves to discussions of enslaved people's and later generations of black people's capacity for forgiveness, the accumulation of personal wealth and reciprocity in black communities, and the impact of slavery on generations of whites.

In the second half of the book, Morgan attempts to show continuity between the ethics of enslaved Americans and the ideologies that their progeny used to resist racial discrimination. The author effectively analyzes ex-slave narratives to document how enslaved and freed blacks rationalized abolition by subscribing to an economic morality that subsequent generations of black Americans later used to defend fair labor practices, develop racial uplift strategies, and challenge segregation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This analysis could benefit from an extended discussion of the importance of landownership in addition to wage labor. Likewise, more attention could be given to how lower-class African Americans comprehended that "the advance of monopoly capitalism was responsible for a counterrevolution against freedpeople and the poor" (p. 71). In her examination of the modern civil rights era, Morgan admits she does not attempt to "provide comprehensive coverage of these multiple and complex ties to the ethical slave past"; still, her evidence of the twentieth-century manifestations of slave intellectualism is somewhat anecdotal and relies most heavily on the narratives of movement leaders (p. 95). The book's final chapter is an excellent survey of the reparations movement from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century—another topic that is sure to incite spirited debate. Overall, the book offers a refreshing interpretation of the intellectual contributions of enslaved and formerly enslaved blacks and...