Publications
The Demands of Justice
"This brave, important study poses haunting questions about the legal system during slavery. Through detail that is both rich and harrowing, Tamika Nunley uses the capital cases of enslaved Black women and girls to show how their alleged crimes challenged immoral laws and exposed the fictitious nature of justice in America. It will profoundly shape future histories of race, gender, and carceral regimes."—Kali Gross, author of Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso and co-author of A Black Women's History of the United States
At the Threshold of Liberty
"Nunley makes an incredible contribution to the field of the study of African American women in the nineteenth century. She leaves her readers with an irrefutable understanding of the centrality of Black women in the establishment of the capital’s reputation as a site of liberty and justice for all...[An] impressively cohesive study exemplifies the duality of Black women’s and girls’ lived experiences in the capital at a pivotal turning point in the political project of nation-making."—Black Perspectives
“In this excellent book Nunley offers a roadmap for historians to take Black women’s visions of freedom as seriously as their successes.”—Washington History
“Beautifully illustrates how individual desires for self-possession, family, and community, formed before the Civil War, pushed African American women to work toward a world that more closely resembled the ones they imagined.”—Journal of Southern History
“By Stealth or Dispute”
In an essay, “By Stealth or Dispute’: Freedwomen and the Contestations over American Citizenship,” I show that federal emancipation legislation did not account for the numerous obstacles formerly enslaved women faced in their efforts to become free. Thus, black women not only employed the strategies necessary for realizing their liberty, but they articulated the rights entitled to a free person, and therefore initiated a social contract that signaled their transition from bondwomen to American citizen.
Elizabeth Keckly’s Union War
In “Elizabeth Keckly’s Union War,” I argue that the social and political organizing of black women like Elizabeth Keckly, seamstress and confidante to the wives of the political elite during the Civil War, culminated in a strategic campaign designed to link the Union war effort directly to an American commitment to black freedom and equality.