Countering the idea that slaves were unprepared for freedom, this groundbreaking study argues that slaves built an ethos of “honest labor” and collective humanism in the face of oppression—an ethos that has been taken up by generations of African Americans as a foundation for citizenship and participation in democracy.

Known for My Work presents an intellectual and social history of slave thought from the late antebellum era through Reconstruction, labor organizing in the 1930s and 1940s, the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the reparations movement of the twentyfirst century. Arguing that enslaved laborers thought for themselves, imagined themselves, and made themselves, and that their descendants have shared this moral legacy, Lynda Morgan offers an unprecedented view of African America.