In this talk, Sealey reads Black mothering, in the context of Atlantic slavery and its long afterlife, as central to the terrain of Black oppositional struggle that is theorized under the Black Radical Tradition. By the second half of the seventeenth century, Partus sequitur ventrem (“that which is born follows the womb”) legally codified the transfer of chattel slave status from enslaved Black women to their offspring. Out of this legalized property relation to plantation masters, Partus enacted the social death necessary for the ‘person to chattel’ transformation at the heart of Atlantic slavery. If (as Sealey shows, using the work of scholars like Jennifer Morgan and Orlando Patterson) the core violation of Atlantic slavery is not primarily the theft of freedom, but rather this more foundational social death (via Partus), then it follows that the struggle/resistance against social death is similarly foundational to a complete archive of Black oppositional struggle. This places Black mothering practices – of stealing back the kinship and care connections stolen by Partus and its property claims – on the front lines of Black Atlantic world-making against slavery’s final condemnations.