Introduction; 1. 'A Negro and by consequence an alien': local regulations and the making of race, 1500s–1700s; 2. The 'inconvenience” of black freedom: manumission, 1500s–1700s; 3. 'The natural right of all mankind': claiming freedom in the age of revolution, 1760s–1830; 4. 'Rules … for their expulsion': foreclosing freedom, 1830s–1860; 5. 'Not of the same blood': policing racial boundaries, 1830s–1860; Conclusion: 'Home-born citizens: the significance of free people of color.

'At a moment when 'Send Them Back' has reemerged as a nativist rallying cry, Becoming Free, Becoming Black is a brilliantly lucid guide to the deep history of how race and ethnic origin came to be potent ciphers for civic belonging. … De la Fuente and Gross show that brutality lay not merely in the imposition of slavery, but in the creation of racial regimes ranking black bodies even once freed from bondage. If enslavement is construed as an external political constraint, the project of freedom becomes focused on unshackling bodies from those confines. But if white means free and black means slave, then political status is embodied, innate and inescapable. … To this day, the legacy of free-but-not-full-citizen delimits quietly powerful hierarchies in our varying capacities to travel, vote, mix socially, run a business, hold public office, and intermarry. This indispensable book shows how knowing the past might aid us to intelligently reform our future.' Patricia J. Williams, Columnist, The Nation Magazine