Washington, D.C., the capital city of a nation founded on the premise of liberty, became an entrepôt of urban slavery and the target of abolitionist ferment. The growing slave trade and the enactment of black codes placed black women within the rigid confines of a social hierarchy ordered by race and gender. At the Threshold of Liberty reveals how African American women—enslaved, fugitive, and free—imagined new identities and lives beyond the oppressive restrictions intended to prevent them from ever experiencing liberty, self-respect, and power.

Consulting nineteenth-century newspapers, government documents, letters, abolitionist records, legislation, and memoirs, Tamika Nunley traces how black women navigated social and legal proscriptions to develop their own ideas about liberty as they escaped from slavery, initiated freedom suits, created entrepreneurial economies, pursued education, and participated in political work. In telling these stories, Nunley places black women at the vanguard of the history of Washington D.C., and illuminates how they contributed to the momentous transformations of nineteenth-century America.