Newsletter for February 5, 2018
GLC News and Events
Friday, February 16, 2018 • 4:30pm Linsly-Chittenden Hall 102, 63 High Street, Yale University  Frederick Douglass is one of the greatest nineteenth century American thinkers, writers, and orators. Join this discussion of that literary and political legacy through the story of Douglass’s sometimes turbulent personal life. Frederick Douglass is one of the greatest nineteenth century American thinkers, writers, and orators. Join this discussion of that literary and political legacy through the story of Douglass’s sometimes turbulent personal life. The panel will include a reading by M. Nzadi Keita of a selection of poems imagining the life of Anna Murray Douglass.
Moderator:
Jacqueline Goldsby, Yale University
Panelists:
David W. Blight, Yale University
Sarah Meer, Fellow of Selwyn College, University of Cambridge
Leigh Fought, Associate Professor of History at Lemoyne College
M. Nzadi Keita, Associate Professor of English, Ursinus College
Hannah Rose Murray, University of Nottingham, UK
GLC Brown Bag: "It is Time for the Slaves to Speak": Transatlantic Abolitionism and African American Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Hannah-Rose Murray, PhD, American Studies and History, University of Nottingham, UK
Monday, February 19, 2018 • 12:00pm
230 Prospect Street, Room 101
2018-2019 Gilder Lehrman Center Fellowships
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University invites applications for its 2018-2019 Fellowship Program. The Center seeks to promote a better understanding of all aspects of the institution of slavery from the earliest times to the present. We especially welcome proposals that will utilize the special collections of the Yale University Libraries or other research collections of the New England area, and explicitly engage issues of slavery, resistance, abolition, and their legacies. Scholars from all disciplines are encouraged to apply.
The Gilder Lehrman Center will award several one-month fellowships between October 2018 and May 2019. The Center also will award two four-month fellowships, one in the fall semester (from September through December 2018), and one in the spring semester (from either January through April 2019 or February through May 2019). To apply for our One-Month and Four-Month Fellowships, visit http://apply.interfolio.com/47865.
The deadline for applications is March 1, 2018.
Slavery and Its Legacies: Kerry Sinanan on Representations of Women, Motherhood and Breastfeeding in British Slavery
 Kerry Sinanan, Research Fellow at the Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway, joins Thomas Thurston on this episode of Slavery and Its Legacies to discuss representations of women, motherhood and breastfeeding in paintings depicting British slavery. Find video of this episode on Yale YouTube
20th Annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize: Request for SubmissionsThe Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History are pleased to announce the twentieth annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, an annual award for the most outstanding non-fiction book in English copyrighted in the year 2017 on the subject of slavery, resistance, and/or abolition. Beginning on January 2, 2018, we invite you to submit books that meet these criteria. Please do not begin sending books prior to this date. The submission deadline is March 31, 2018.Please note that works related to the Civil War are acceptable only if their primary focus relates to slavery or emancipation. Only books copyrighted in 2017 will be considered. For detailed submission information, please contact the Gilder Lehrman Center at: gilder.lehrman.center@yale.edu
Other Events
CSSJ Lunch Talks for February, 2018Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice, Brown University The Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice at Brown University has a full schedule of speakers lined up for the month of February. Visit https://www.brown.edu/initiatives/slavery-and-justice/our-events to see what’s on the calendar.
Highways, Byways, and Railways: Mapping Frederick Douglass' Journey in Britain
Hannah-Rose Murray, PhD, University of Nottingham and current GLC Fellow
Digital Humanities Lab
Bass Library, Yale University
Wednesday, February 7, 2018 • 2:30 pm
African American abolitionists made an indelible mark on nineteenth-century Britain. Their lectures were held in famous meeting halls, taverns, the houses of wealthy patrons, theatres, and churches across the country. Britons inevitably and unknowably walk past sites with a rich history of black activism every day. In this talk, Hannah-Rose Murray will discuss what digital humanities methods offer social historians, particularly when it comes to making activist histories more visible.
Anti-Slavery Manuscripts at the Boston Public LibraryThe Boston Public Library is asking for volunteers to help transcribe their extensive collection of handwritten correspondence between anti-slavery activists in the 19th century into texts that can be more easily read and researched by students, teachers, historians, and big data applications.
Get involved right now at www.antislaverymanuscripts.org!
The Jesuits, the Souls of Slaves, and the Struggle for Haiti
Malick W. Ghachem, MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Henry R. Luce Hall, Rm 203, 34 Hillhouse Avenue
Monday, February 5 • 11:30 am
Film Screening: I Am Not Your Negro
NHFPL, Wilson Library
303 Washington Ave., New Haven, CT
Saturday, February 3, 2018 • 2:00 to 3:30 pm
Frederick Douglass: New Haven to Great Britain
Wednesday, February 21st 5:30 PM
New Haven Museum
114 Whitney Ave.
New Haven, CT 06510
The well-known abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke several times in New Haven and gave speeches during his quest to end slavery in the United States, but did you know Douglass traveled abroad to encourage the abolitionist movement? Join us for a talk with Hannah-Rose Murray, Ph.D. to learn more about the differences between public and press regarding abolition here and in Great Britain.
Murray received a Ph.D. from the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham and is a visiting Fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University.
Film Screening: Gina’s Journey: The Search for William Grimes
Monday, Feb 5, 2018 • 5:30 to 7:30 pm
New Haven Museum
114 Whitney Ave.
New Haven, CT 06510
Narrated by veteran actor and voice artist Keith David, Gina’s Journey: The Search for William Grimes follows the quest of one woman, Regina Mason, in tracing the steps of her ancestor, who traveled along the Underground Railroad to freedom and authored the first fugitive slave narrative in US history.
February 14, 2018 • 12:00 to 3:00 pm
To celebrate the 200th birthday of Frederick Douglass, we are gathering communities across the US and abroad to transcribe the Freedmen’s Bureau Records. This Douglass Day “transcribe-a-thon” is presented by the Colored Conventions Project, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Smithsonian Transcription Center.
Everyone who visits the Smithsonian Transcription Center’s website at https://transcription.si.edu will have the chance to help transcribe documents from the Freedmen's Bureau, the bureau established by Congress after the Civil War to help formerly enslaved people transition to freedom. We will livestream the entire transcribe-a-thon, featuring brief talks from historians and curators, along with a dramatic reading of a speech by Frederick Douglass.
To view more info, please visit the event page: http://coloredconventions.org/hbd. We have a guide to help you organize a group for Douglass Day: http://coloredconventions.org/douglass-kit. If you have any questions about how this can work, please reach out to us.
In the News
Story by Rhonda Colvin, Video by Osman Malik, Ashleigh Joplin, Jorge Ribas, Malcolm Cook and Victoria M. Walker
January 26, 2018, The Washington Post
Her mom always smiled — except when the family made its annual summer drive to visit the grandparents in Magnolia, Ark. “The smiles were gone while we were traveling,” said Gloria Gardner, 77.
It was the 1940s, and traveling to her parents’ home town was not approached lightly after the family moved to Muskegon, Mich., during the Great Migration. Stopping for food or bathroom breaks was mostly out of the question. For black families, preparing for a road trip required a well-tested battle plan in which nothing could be left to chance.
There were meals to cook and pack in ice. Sheets were folded and stacked in the car to use as partitions if they were left with no choice but to take bathroom breaks roadside.
And there was another item that Gardner recalls her parents never forgot to pack: the Negro Motorist Green Book. While her dad drove, her mother leafed through the pages to see whether there were any restaurants, gas stations or restrooms on their route where they wouldn’t be hassled or in danger.
Kay Wright Lewis’s new book, A Curse Upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World (University of Georgia Press, 2017), analyzes the ways Black and white extermination influenced the development of slavery. Lewis draws from newspapers, political tracts, correspondence, and court documents to describe the perseverance of racialized fears from the early seventeenth century through the twentieth. The result is one of the first sustained studies about extermination as a historiographical approach to slavery and African American history.
On the one hand, African Americans feared—for good reason—their extermination by white Europeans, as legal, religious, and economic policies made the transatlantic slave trade a pillar of the Atlantic economy. On the other hand, white Europeans, Lewis observes, lived in fear of slave rebellions. As a result, they instituted ever-more defenses of slavery and restrictions on Black mobility. In fact, Lewis argues white preoccupation with potential slave revolts, Black rebellion, and Black fear of death at the hands of white violence had long-lasting effects that far outlasted slavery. This helped to fuel the Civil War, derailed Reconstruction, shaped Jim Crow, and influenced civil rights strategies.
Lewis begins by locating “the language of extermination” in early European print culture. This language applied initially to Native Americans, and then to Africans as well. Among other white writers, she observes in a 1710 sermon, Cotton Mather’s discussion of “just wars” in the Israelite wars against Ammonites. According to Lewis, Puritans viewed themselves “like the Hebrews” who believed they “fought wars for self-preservation,” but in fact, engaged in “wars of conquest” (24). Encompassing the use of violence beyond conventional notions of war, “just war” was used to justify tactics used to control lands and to secure commerce and jurisdiction in strengthening European power in the Atlantic World. In the treatment of enslaved Africans, this “justifiable” violence could include a combination of the physical and symbolic, such as burying the bodies of lynched African Americans away from their kin. The silencing of African-Americans, too, was a form of extermination.
Fears about extermination pervaded Black-white race relations. English philosopher John Locke predicted that the enslavement of West Africans by Europeans had the potential to become a threat to Europeans. Even slave owners like William Byrd II and Thomas Jefferson observed that the transatlantic system created an environment where “a state of war always existed between master and slave” (23). Slaves of mixed heritage—whether African and Native American, or African and American ancestry—were still, in Jefferson’s view, “an incompatible element of the Republic” (23). Lewis’s analysis continues from the colonial period, through the complexities of the American Revolution, arguing that this language of extermination was ultimately a contributing factor to the policies that resulted in the Civil War, and later Jim Crow.
continue...When Black Women Reclaimed Their Bodies: The fight for sexual justice during Reconstruction Crystal N. Feimster, February 2, 2018, Slate
Adapted from “ ‘What if I Am a Woman?’: Black Women’s Campaigns for Sexual Justice and Citizenship” by Crystal N. Feimster, originally published in The World the Civil War Made, edited by Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur. Published by the University of North Carolina Press.
In a public lecture given in 1833, Maria W. Stewart, a pioneer black abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, invoked black women’s demands for sexual justice by asking, “What if I am a woman?”1 It was a question with profound implications if answered in the affirmative. What would it mean to acknowledge women, especially black women, as full citizens with legal capacity and political consent? If black women were granted not just the rights of life, liberty, and happiness, but also self-sovereignty, then they would also be entitled to the legal protection of those rights. By asking the question, Stewart asserted the essential humanity of black womanhood and called for the inclusion of black women as fully human and autonomous beings, the “owners” of their own bodies with the ability to withhold consent.
Stewart, like many black women, insisted on sexual justice as a natural right. In doing so, black women and their allies influenced the Republican Party’s vision of racial equality over the course of the 1850s through the end of Reconstruction. And their radical campaigns for sexual justice taken together with evolving Republican ideas about legal equality made possible the emergence of a new sexual citizenship.
Maria Stewart called for women’s rights and joined the abolitionist fray in 1831, publishing her first essay in the antislavery newspaper the Liberator. 2 Acknowledging black women’s sexual vulnerability, Stewart opened with a prayer, “O that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night [Jeremiah 9:1], for the transgressions of the daughters of my people.” 3 Stewart knew that in most states, black women—free and enslaved—were excluded from rape laws. 4 In fact, no Southern states made it legally possible for slave women to file rape charges against a white man before 1861. Thus existing outside the legal definition of rape and in the cultural imagination as a prostitute at best and a sexual beast incapable of virtue at worst, a slave woman had few options. continue...
Distorted renderings of movement history took on heightened danger as a new movement gained national attention. Galvanizing around the issues of police brutality, criminal injustice, and mass incarceration, Black Lives Matter came to national prominence after the killing of Trayvon Martin and subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013, and the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. The vision of Black Lives Matter was articulated by three Black queer women: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi; its various local incarnations have encompassed a broad palette of issues affecting Black lives, from enduring school inequality to living-wage struggles, and from police accountability to gender justice. Taking to the streets, blocking traffic, disrupting political events and commerce, and launching die-ins on college campuses, this new leader-full movement, organized predominantly by young Black people but joined by a rainbow of others and Black people of all ages, has forced the nation to grapple with issues of racial injustice in law enforcement and the legal system.
The civil rights movement has lurked everywhere in public discussion of Black Lives Matter. While there have been notable connections and moments of camaraderie—for instance, Harry Belafonte’s Justice League, as well as by many of the former members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—an undertone of concern and fear about the protesters and problems with the movement they are building have come from many corners, the criticism laced with problematic allusions to the civil rights movement. Former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee outrageously stated that Martin Luther King Jr. would be “appalled” by BLM’s strategy and called on protesters to be more like King. King’s niece, Alveda King, referred to BLM’s methods as “inappropriate.” Oprah Winfrey called for “some kind of leadership to come out of this” and cautioned young activists “to take note of the strategic, peaceful intention if you want real change.” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer criticized protests in Baltimore as not being “in the tradition of Martin Luther King.” And Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed invoked the history of King to celebrate Atlanta’s tradition of free speech, but then admonished protesters: “Dr. King would never take a freeway.”
Even some former activists have gone this route. Congressman John Lewis, a former SNCC chair, initially spoke out against people critiquing BLM: “Those people should do something. Make their own movement.” But when BLM protesters disrupted a Hillary Clinton rally with Lewis in attendance, he cautioned: “Most of the things that we did back in the 1960s was good trouble; it was necessary trouble. . . . But we have to respect the right of everybody to be heard. And you do that in a nonviolent, orderly fashion.” Lewis cast these young activists’ protests as being far different from the “necessary good” trouble he and his comrades had made. In July 2016, as protests flared again following police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, Lewis tweeted: “I was beaten bloody by police officers. But I never hated them. I said, ‘Thank you for your service.’” And former SCLC organizer Andrew Young, at a pep talk at a police precinct, went a step further in his criticism of the protesters: “Those are some unlovable little brats out there. . . . They’re showing off. And not even with a clear message.”
Lectureships in Contemporary SlaveryUniversity of Hull - Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE) The Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull is looking to appoint two Lecturers in Contemporary Slavery tenable from 1 September 2018, or earlier if available. The successful candidates will join an award-winning research institute that is recognised internationally for producing innovative research on slavery in all its forms, historical and contemporary.
Closes: 9th February 2018
Frederick Douglass Scholars FellowshipSummer 2018 - May 2019 In keeping with Frederick Douglass’s life of public service and commitment to equity and access, the Frederick Douglass Institutes of Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education are offering teaching opportunities to graduate students who are pursuing careers as university faculty and who are entering the final year of terminal degree and/or doctoral programs. Priority consideration given to completed applications postmarked by February 7, 2018. For more information or to download the application form, visit http://frederickdouglassinstitute.org/teaching-scholars-fellowship/.
Building upon the success of an earlier meeting held in Kampala in May 2017, the University of the Witwatersrand invites applications from early career scholars, activists and practitioners to participate in a four day workshop to take place in Johannesburg on the 25th to 28th of June. This event will provide participants with an opportunity to present their work, to build relationships with others working in similar fields, and to engage with more senior scholars and practitioners.
The closing date for applications is Monday the 19th of February 2018.
For inquiries: wits2018@gmail.com
In preparation for a volume of essays to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the “Denmark Vesey Conspiracy” of 1822, the Carolina Lowcountry in the Atlantic World Program (CLAW) at the College of Charleston will hold a small conference on enslaved and free black anti-slavery, February 8-10, 2019.
To propose a paper, send a CV and a 250 word abstract to James O’Neil Spady ( jspady@soka.edu) by February 28, 2018.
The New York Slavery Records Index is a searchable compilation of records that identify individual enslaved persons and their owners, beginning as early as 1525 and ending during the Civil War.
The data come from census records, slave trade transactions, cemetery records, birth certifications, manumissions, ship inventories, newspaper accounts, private narratives, legal documents and many other sources. The index contains over 35,000 records and will continue to grow as the team of John Jay College professors and students locates and assembles data from additional sources.
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