Quote by Saidiya Hartman: “Freedom is a practice, not a destination.”

We tend to think of freedom as something you achieve and then have. But this idea suggests it's something you have to actively do, every day — in your choices, your relationships, your resistance. It's never finished. That's less comforting than a finish line, but it's more honest.

Hartman published Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments in 2019, recovering the radical lives of young Black women in early twentieth-century Philadelphia and New York. The book arrived as conversations about reparations, mass incarceration, and what genuine freedom might look like in America were gaining new urgency.

American scholar and author whose work on slavery, freedom, and Black life has reshaped literary studies and critical theory. Her books Lose Your Mother and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments are celebrated for their lyrical and rigorous examination of Black women's history.