Emancipated, Unfree

Did the Freedmen’s Bureau, established in 1865, help or harm the formerly enslaved? Priya Kandaswamy traces the Bureau’s activities in relation to vagrancy legislation and the placement of Black domestic workers in white people’s homes. Labor discipline and white surveillance, she argues, took precedence over public assistance and meaningful forms of freedom for African Americans.

Priya Kandaswamy, Domestic Contradictions: Race and Gendered Citizenship from Reconstruction to Welfare Reform Duke University Press, 2021

 

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