The Care Underground: The Black Roots of Mutual Aid

How African Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries invented mutual aid as we know it—and made the Underground Railroad possible

This book tells the fascinating history of mutual aid organizing before the twentieth century, showing how its origins intersect with abolitionist and anti-carceral movements in the United States. Mutual aid has gone mainstream over the past couple of years, but few people know how far back it reaches. Dramatic and inspiring, the stories told describe people banding together, often against all odds, in the face of disaster, crisis, violence, and repression, to change the forces of history. From anti-slavery vigilance committees working tirelessly on the frontlines to rescue and protect those vulnerable to kidnapping, incarceration, and violence, to subcultural experiments in communal living and healthcare, nineteenth-century abolitionists, free lovers, feminists, queers, fugitives, and workers came up with a number of collective solutions to racial capitalism’s biopolitical imperatives.