RaveThe Washington PostIn 1857, the chief justice of the United States, Roger Brooke Taney, declared in his infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford opinion that since the nation’s founding, African Americans — whether free or enslaved — \'had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.\' ... In his gripping new book A Question of Freedom [...] historian William G. Thomas III provides a profound and prodigiously researched rebuttal to Taney’s lie ... Thomas shows how families bolstered their claims of freedom through documents, oral histories and accounts of their free ancestors’ arrival in America.Thomas paints rich multigenerational portraits of families who used their histories in the legal process and won freedom in suit after suit.
