Daina Ramey Berry, Author of “The Price of Their Pound of Flesh”

An evening with Daina Ramey Berry with her new book “The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation.”

In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death—in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full “life cycle,” historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and… protect their investments. Berry also explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools.

“… Rigorously researched and powerfully told, this book tallies the human price paid for the nation we now live in and restores these unrecognized Americans—their hopes, loves, and disregarded dreams—to their rightful place in history. Searing, revelatory, and vital to understanding our nation’s inequities.” —Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

Daina Ramey Berry is an associate professor of history and African and African diaspora studies, and the George W. Littlefield Fellow in American History, at the University of Texas at Austin. An award-winning historian, she is also a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.

This event is part of “BLACK HISTORY MONTH at Revolution Books in Harlem- “In the Age of Trump-Pence Fascism: Black History… The Fight for Emancipation… and the Future”