The Care Underground

How African Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries invented mutual aid as we know it—and made the Underground Railroad possible

This book tells the fascinating history of mutual aid organizing before the twentieth century, showing how its origins intersect with abolitionist and anti-carceral movements in the United States. Mutual aid has gone mainstream over the past couple of years, but few people know how far back it reaches. Dramatic and inspiring, the stories told describe people banding together, often against all odds, in the face of disaster, crisis, violence, and repression, to change the forces of history. From anti-slavery vigilance committees working tirelessly on the frontlines to rescue and protect those vulnerable to kidnapping, incarceration, and violence, to subcultural experiments in communal living and healthcare, nineteenth-century abolitionists, free lovers, feminists, queers, fugitives, and workers came up with a number of collective solutions to racial capitalism’s biopolitical imperatives.

Britt Rusert is Professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst. She is the author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU Press, 2017) and co-editor of W.E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018).

• Publisher: Verso
  
• Publish Date: August 24, 2027
  
• Pages: 272
  
• Language: English
  
• Type: Hardcover
  
• EAN/UPC: 9781836740230
  
• Dimensions: 9.2 X 6.0 X 0.0 inches | 1.3 pounds
  
• BISAC: Social Science / Race & Ethnic Relations
  History / Study & Teaching
  Social Science / Cultural & Ethnic Studies / American Studies / African American & Black Studies