Reveals how disability and disablement have shaped Black social life in AmericaThrough both law and custom the color line has cast Black people as innately disabled and thus unfit for freedom incapable of selfgovernance and contagious within the national body politic. Disabilities of the Color Line maintains that the Black literary tradition historically has inverted this casting by exposing the disablement of racism without disclaiming disability.In place of a triumphalist narrative of overcoming where both disability and disablement alike are shunned Dennis Tyler argues that Black authors and activists have consistently avowed what he calls the disabilities of the color line the historical and ongoing antiBlack systems of division that maim immobilize and stigmatize Black people. In doing so Tyler reveals how Black writers and activists such as David Walker Henry Box Brown William and Ellen Craft Charles Chesnutt James Weldon Johnson and Mamie TillMobley have engaged in a politics and aesthetics of redress modes of resistance that in the pursuit of racial and disability justice acknowledged the disabling violence perpetrated by antiBlack regimes in order to conceive or engender dynamic new worlds that account for people of all abilities.