  How the various African-descendant persons and communities resolved these tensions conditioned the formation of new identities, life-agendas, and praxes for living. Fundamental were the recurrent and varied quests to survive and endure. With whatever success there followed other fundamental recurrent and varied endeavors. Among the most compelling were quests to define and secure freedom, quests that were profoundly affected by the absence of any recourse to protections of law and by severe limitations imposed on Black peoples’ participation in what has come to be called “the public sphere.” Participation in this sphere with protection of laws—for example, to articulate one’s case for impartial and fair recognition and respect as a human being, particularly as a woman or man of a despised race—was hardly ever allowed in slave-holding polities, and very infrequently even in locales where slavery had been abolished as invidious discrimination against persons of African descent continued. When speaking out or otherwise expressing oneself on one’s or one’s people’s behalf was prohibited or strenuously circumscribed and could be punished by beatings, imprisonment, or death with no legal protection, the tensions were indeed wretched.