In her new book, The Rising Generation, Sarah Gronningsater uses the first generation of New Yorkers liberated from slavery to relay the history of emancipation. Born into a precarious state after the Revolution this remarkable group of men and women played an enormous role in the struggle that ultimately brought on the Civil War. And through exhaustive research in New York, which had the largest number of slaves in the North, Gronningsater provides their story in full. In the late 1700s, children born to enslaved mothers lived in a quasi-free state. Technically free, they were nonetheless required to labor as indentured servants until they reached adulthood. Parents, teachers, and mentors of these “children of gradual abolition” found multiple ways to protect and nurture them, establishing schools, forming alliances with lawyers and abolitionists, petitioning local and state officials, and guarding against kidnapping. Gronningsater shows how, as the children of gradual abolition reached adulthood, they took the lessons of their youth into campaigns for legal equality, political inclusion, equitable education, and the expansion of freedom across the United States. The acclaimed historian Leslie Harris writes: “This beautifully written, passionately argued book recovers moving examples of black people’s everyday activism that led to profound change and left impressive legacies not only in New York but throughout the nation. An inspiring, necessary book."

Kellie Carter Jackson, chair of the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College and the author of the award-winning Force & Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence, joins in conversation.