My dissertation, “‘Gratuitous Distribution’: Distributing African American Antislavery Texts, 1773-1850,” rediscovers the people and practices that developed alternative black distribution networks integral to abolition. Denied full access to the era’s communication innovations, the women and men who circulated African American antislavery texts developed their own distribution strategies and creatively utilized existing methods. Diverse actions–individual and communal, formal and informal, legal and illegal–moved texts and the participants in these exchanges developed social networks for black empowerment. Religious organizations and civic institutions moved various print media. Pastors subscribed to and served as agents for antislavery newspapers that informed their preaching and activism. Readers copied printed texts into handwritten letters or journals they shared among family and friends. Texts were smuggled, mailed in violation of censorship laws, or read aloud to people lacking or prohibited from literacy.

In contrast to popular memory and existing scholarship that emphasizes the heroic actions of individual black leaders, my examination of collaborative efforts argues that a wider range of more simple subversive exchanges of a diverse collective contributed powerfully to the cause of racial equality and abolition. This history presents an instructive example to various present-day efforts for inclusion, equality, and social justice, that might subvert mainstream cultural paradigms and social structures. The church and society of the present digital age might find lessons from this historical period of profound transformations in print technology, that reveal how the power of small-scale information exchange, subversive communication, and resilient networks comprised a collective witness for social change.