African American Women's Fight for Freedom and Ideals of Liberty

***NOTE*** Cite the source. Find the readings referenced below in the Declaration of Independence lesson
After reading the excerpt from " Love of Freedom...," what is the significance, and paradox, of African-American women fighting for their freedom prior to, during, and after the American Revolution by using the same "ideals of liberty" that Jefferson uses in the Declaration of Independence?
Excerpt from Love of Freedom:
All told, fourteen black women brought civil lawsuits to win their freedom beginning in 1716 and ending in 1783. Not content with negotiating better terms in slavery, black women took their case to court because they wanted self-ownership. As in all other aspects of black history, the record is scanty and uneven. Local historians and genealogists have not combed through the documents of every county. That one suit came to be known because of references to it in a subsequent one and another from lawyer’s notes suggests that court records do not reveal the full extent of litigation.3 The life stories of six of these women will be recounted here (three prior to the Stamp Act Crisis, three after that) to prove that black woman’s desire for freedom preceded by many decades the revolutionary sentiments of white colonists. The Stamp Act Crisis forms a chronological dividing line because as a result of revolutionary fervor that began then more slaves felt emboldened to sue for their freedom in the courts of New England.
Women’s freedom suits were brought on the basis of one of three technicalities in the law: that there had been a fraudulent sale, perhaps because the owner had no legal title to his slave; that the plaintiff was not black (by virtue of having a white or Indian mother); or that the owner had entered into a manumission agreement but the document had disappeared . These lawsuits represented a retail rather than wholesale approach to ending slavery, a bid for freedom one person at a time. Nonetheless, a woman testifying in a courtroom crowded with her neighbors was letting them know that she wanted her freedom, even if she and her lawyer did not utter an impassioned appeal against the institution of slavery. Still, by the time of the American Revolution black women plaintiffs did refer to Liberty in their lawsuits and were making more explicit political connections between their pleas for freedom and the American ideal of liberty.
Work Cited
Adams, Catherine, and Elizabeth H. Pleck. Love of Freedom : Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary
New England, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2010, pp. 127-28. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral(dot)proquest(dot)com/lib/uma-ebooks/detail.action?docID=716656.