Duke University, 2026: Historian Justin Leroy’s latest book, The Lowest Freedom, offers a radical rethinking of Black freedom and racial capitalism in the nineteenth-century United States, urging us to question whether there can be genuine freedom under racial capitalism – a nineteenth-century question with twenty-first century implications.

The Lowest Freedom reintroduces us to influential nineteenth-century Black thinkers, such as Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Maria Stewart, and David Walker, not only as the activists they are known to be, but crucially as the rigorous thinkers of economic life they were. These Black intellectuals warned that freedom without access to land, labor rights, and economic security could become a degraded form of liberty — what David Walker famously described as freedom “of the very lowest kind.”

The story of emancipation is often told as a clear turning point in American history: slavery ended, and freedom began. But what if many of the people who fought slavery believed the story was far more complicated? Leroy argues that these Black thinkers saw concentrated wealth and wealth inequality, especially when combined with racial exclusion, as a direct threat to Black freedom. 

The Lowest Freedom arrives at a time when the effects of racial capitalism remain as urgent as ever. In the United States the racial wealth gap continues to increase, and 2026 marks the emergence of the world’s first trillionaire – an unprecedented concentration of wealth. Leroy’s work offers a deeper and timely historical perspective on questions that remain unresolved.

Justin Leroy says, “We tend to remember figures like Walker, Stewart, Douglass, Fortune, and Wells as moral critics of slavery. But they were also rigorous thinkers of economic life, arguing that freedom required economic independence. These nineteenth-century Black thinkers developed sophisticated analyses of the economic landscape that remain relevant today. By naming the material limits of emancipation, they left us precious knowledge for how we can organize against the effects of racial capitalism in the present.”

Key Themes in The Lowest Freedom

• Why many abolitionists believed emancipation without economic power was incomplete
• How Black intellectuals developed early critiques of racial capitalism
• The economic ideas of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and other Black thinkers
• What nineteenth-century debates about freedom reveal about inequality today

About the author, Justin Leroy

Justin Leroy is assistant professor of history at Duke University. He is coeditor of Histories of Racial Capitalism (Columbia, 2021). His work explores the intersections of race, capitalism, and political thought in the United States, with a special focus on Black intellectual history and the economic ideas that shaped the struggle for freedom in the nineteenth century.

The Lowest Freedom: Racial Capitalism and Black Thought in the Nineteenth Century
Columbia University Press | April 21, 2026 | Hardcover | 272 pages