The Freedom Movement's Lost Legacy: Black Abolitionism Since Emancipation by Keith P. Griffler (review)

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• The Freedom Movement’s Lost Legacy: Black Abolitionism Since Emancipation by Keith P. Griffler
• Augustus Wood

The Freedom Movement’s Lost Legacy: Black Abolitionism Since Emancipation. By Keith P. Griffler. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2023. Pp. x, 292. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-9728-9.)

For much of his career, historian Keith P. Griffler has challenged scholarship on the antislavery movement by showcasing often underrepresented Black voices in the struggle for emancipation. After decades of writing on the antebellum period, Griffler shifts his focus to the postemancipation era, when European powers sought new markets, new laws, and new forms of coerced labor to exploit after the fall of chattel slavery. In The Freedom Movement’s Lost Legacy: Black Abolitionism Since Emancipation, Griffler crafts an intellectual history that “traces the contested and evolving definition of slavery in the twentieth century” through the voices of Black intellectuals and prominent Black activists (p. 13). After European colonists carved up the African continent in the 1880s, colonial officials, in partnership with nineteenth-century abolitionists—who had abandoned their positions on the immorality of coerced labor in favor of new labor policies in Africa—devised a new articulation of antislavery that entrenched race into international labor law. [End Page 637]

Griffler recounts how Black leaders like Alice Victoria Kinloch, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. Du Bois campaigned against this betrayal of Black workers, as so-called antislavery leaders like Frederick Lugard developed ambiguously named strategies like “the policy of ‘permissive freedom’” to trap African slaves into debt peonage for the remainder of their lives and concretize racial exploitation into the global political economy for the foreseeable future (p. 84). Because Griffler recognizes Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York, 2008) as the defining narrative on the American episode of “new slavery,” Griffler chooses to focus much of his analysis on the international struggle of abolitionism against African colonialism (p. viii). This focus is a unique challenge for Griffler, who follows the work of mostly U.S.-based Black intellectuals despite dedicating a significant portion of the book to new slavery in Africa. Notable African revolutionaries and scholars like Steve Biko and Amílcar Cabral are absent from the narrative, while Kwame Nkrumah is mentioned in passing. All three, who wrote extensively or played vital roles in the fight against racial exploitation in African nations, would add a much more dynamic dimension to the so-called guerrilla intellectuals that scholars such as Walter Rodney emphasize. Indeed, intellectual histories like The Freedom Movement’s Lost Legacy are valuable, but they can wield greater force with more attention to how debates, policies, and literature impacted or elicited resistance by those most affected.

Griffler’s most refreshing contribution, however, is his challenge to the broad association in the intellectual and public sphere of antislavery with combating rather than abetting racial oppression. Griffler successfully demonstrates that profit ravages morality on the global hegemonic scale. Antislavery leaders of yesteryear quickly assumed roles as the biggest champions of racializing coerced labor in hopes of sustaining a free labor population in Africa and in the American carceral state. Colonialism and its successor, neocolonialism, are slavery in everything other than name, and they operate as free and legal paradigms thanks to the work of so-called antislavery advocates.

Griffler frames this analysis in the context of glaring omissions he recognizes in the twenty-first-century abolitionist movement. Two problems arise here. First, although he is correct in the lack of intellectual and historical connection within the current abolitionist struggle, he does not consider the role of capitalism and therefore of neoliberalism in the expansion of internal neo-colonial racialized labor today. Like the issues with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, 2010), Griffler does not consider mass incarceration as the political solution to the problem of new social structures of accumulation—the underlying cause of the shift between colonialism and neocolonialism. Nevertheless, The Freedom Movement’s Lost Legacy effectively complicates the generally homogeneous take on so-called antislavery by exposing its...