Around 1785, a woman was taken from her home in Senegambia and sent to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean. Those who enslaved her there named her Rosalie. Her later efforts to escape slavery were the beginning of a family's quest, across five generations and three continents, for lives of dignity and equality. Freedom Papers sets the saga of Rosalie and her descendants against the background of three great antiracist struggles of the nineteenth century: the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States. Freed during the Haitian Revolution, Rosalie and her daughter Elisabeth fled to Cuba in 1803. A few years later, Elisabeth departed for New Orleans, where she married a carpenter, Jacques Tinchant. In the 1830s, with tension rising against free persons of color, they left for France. Subsequent generations of Tinchants fought in the Union Army, argued for equal rights at Louisiana's state constitutional convention, and created a transatlantic tobacco network that turned their Creole past into a commercial asset. Yet the fragility of freedom and security became clear when, a century later, Rosalie's great-great-granddaughter Marie-José was arrested by Nazi forces occupying Belgium. Freedom Papers follows the Tinchants as each generation tries to use the power and legitimacy of documents to help secure freedom and respect. The strategies they used to overcome the constraints of slavery, war, and colonialism suggest the contours of the lives of people of color across the Atlantic world during this turbulent epoch.

On June 28, 1839, the Spanish slave schooner Amistad set sail from Havana on a routine delivery of human cargo. On a moonless night, after four days at sea, the captive Africans rose up, killed the captain, and seized control of the ship. They attempted to sail to a safe port, but were captured by the U.S. Navy and thrown into jail in Connecticut. Their legal battle for freedom eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, where their cause was argued by former president John Quincy Adams. In a landmark ruling, they were freed and eventually returned to Africa. The rebellion became one of the best-known events in the history of American slavery, celebrated as a triumph of the legal system in films and books, all reflecting the elite perspective of the judges, politicians, and abolitionists involved in the case. In this powerful and highly original account, Marcus Rediker reclaims the rebellion for its true proponents: the African rebels who risked death to stake a claim for freedom. Using newly discovered evidence, Rediker reframes the story to show how a small group of courageous men fought and won an epic battle against Spanish and American slaveholders and their governments. He reaches back to Africa to find the rebels’ roots, narrates their cataclysmic transatlantic journey, and unfolds a prison story of great drama and emotion. Featuring vividly drawn portraits of the Africans, their captors, and their abolitionist allies, he shows how the rebels captured the popular imagination and helped to inspire and build a movement that was part of a grand global struggle between slavery and freedom. The actions aboard the Amistad that July night and in the days and months that followed were pivotal events in American and Atlantic history, but not for the reasons we have always thought. The successful Amistad rebellion changed the very nature of the struggle against slavery. As a handful of self-emancipated Africans steered their own course to freedom, they opened a way for millions to follow. This stunning book honors their achievement.

In October 1941 a young boy and his father disembarked at Durban harbour from a large liner commissioned into emergency service by the Allies. They were Greek refugees from their German-occupied motherland. They spoke no English. They had little money and no prospects. They were heroes, but no one knew that. Some months earlier, father and son, together with two other Greek men and seven New Zealand soldiers, had set off in an open boat in an attempt to escape the German invaders. For two days and nights, sailing by instinct and the stars, battered by fierce winds, their food stocks running low, their water bottles almost empty, they ploughed across the Mediterranean towards Crete, little knowing that the island was soon to capitulate to the Germans. Fortunately the escapees sailed into an Allied fleet while it was still light and were rescued. Had they encountered the fleet in darkness their fate might have been dire, as, sometimes, in the horrors of war no prisoners were taken – a reality the young boy discovered not many nights later. The boy who stood on the Durban docks, appalled at the sight of Zulu men doing the work of animals by pulling rickshaws, would become one of the leading human-rights lawyers in the country that his father had chosen because the pavements were allegedly paved with gold. The boy was George Bizos. Today George Bizos is a legendary name, renowned throughout the legal profession and beyond. More than that, he is a figure recognised in townships across South Africa. For as an advocate, Bizos is associated with the Treason Trial of the late 1950s; the subsequent Rivonia Trial where his colleague, client and friend Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment; the trial of Bram Fischer; that of the Namibian Toivo ja Toivo; a host of major human-rights trials through the 1970s and 1980s right up to the amnesty hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; and, in 2004, with the treason trial of the Zimbabwean opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, in that country. A consummate lawyer, a self-styled street fighter with a quiet tone of voice and a beguiling smile who, in cross examination, would slice through the evidence of security police and apartheid apologists alike, Bizos haunted the courtrooms of the apartheid regime. For four decades he exposed State lies and hypocrisy, State brutality and murder. In response the State badgered and threatened him, bugged his phone, obstructed his hearings. But the advocate was not to be intimidated. In this compelling and long-awaited autobiography, George Bizos reveals the drama, the heartache and the moments of triumph, the fears and the frustrations of his long career as an advocate. He writes, moreover, about himself and his family, and the domestic moments that made bearable the brutal years. He revels in his return to his beloved Greece, his joy at the Athens Olympic Games and his love of modern Greek poetry. Above all, his is a warm and compassionate account, related by a raconteur of note. It is history told from the inside.

In 1984, John Thompson was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a prominent white man in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was sent to Angola Prison and confined to his cell for twenty-three hours a day. However, Thompson adamantly proclaimed his innocence and just needed lawyers who believed that his trial had been mishandled and would step up to the plate against the powerful DA’s office. But who would fight for Thompson’s innocence when he didn’t have an alibi for the night of the murder and there were two key witnesses to confirm his guilt? Killing Time is about the eighteen-year quest for Thompson’s freedom from a wrongful murder conviction. After Philadelphia lawyers Michael Banks and Gordon Cooney take on his case, they struggle to find areas of misconduct in his previous trials while grappling with their questions about Thompson’s innocence. John Hollway and Ronald M. Gauthier have interviewed Thompson and the lawyers, and paint a realistic and compelling portrait of life on death row and the corruption in the Louisiana police and DA’s office. When it is found that evidence was mishandled in a previous trial that led to his death sentence in the murder case, Thompson is finally on his road to freedom—a journey that continues with his suit against Harry Connick, Sr. and the New Orleans DA’s office to this day.