GLC News and EventsThe GLC's Black and Latinx History and Culture group visits New York City
Our thanks to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Hunter East Harlem Gallery, and the Center for Puerto Rican Studies for hosting our
LEAP, Inc. summer program for New Haven middle schoolers on Black and Latinx History and Culture. What an wonderful outing!
GLC Brown Bag Lecture: Technologies of Labor Coercion in the 17th and 18th Century ChesapeakeLorena S. Walsh, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation historian (retired)
230 Prospect Street, Room 101
Wednesday, September 4, 2019 • 12:00 pm
The talk explores links between agricultural technologies (hoe or plow culture), staple crops (tobacco or grains), and changing technologies of labor coercion across three generations of elite Chesapeake planters. Other factors were the transformation of the enslaved population from African to native born, the rise of metropolitan anti-slavery and an Anglican missionary ideology of “Christian Slavery,” and new forms of slave resistance in response to the American Revolution. What did not change was slave holders’ continuing reliance on violence as the quintessential method of labor coercion and control.
THIS EVENT IS PART OF THE GLC BROWN BAG LECTURE SERIES.
BRING YOUR LUNCH AND WE’LL PROVIDE DESSERT.
400 Years: Africans in America, 1619-2019September 12, 2019, 5:30—6:30pm
Center Church on the Green
250 Temple Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Commemorating the 50th anniversary of African American Studies at Yale University
Co-sponsored by Department of African American Studies; the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; the Afro-American Cultural Center; and the Department of History
Introductions: David W. Blight (Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University)
Moderator: Ed Rugemer (Associate Professor of African American Studies and History, Yale University)
Panelists:
Jim Horn (President of Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation and COO of Historic Jamestowne)
Stephanie Smallwood (Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Washington)
Brenda Stevenson (Professor and Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in History, UCLA)
The purchase of 20 Africans at Jamestown, Virginia during 1619 occurred weeks before the first meeting of the Virginia House of Assembly. The 400th anniversary of the simultaneous beginnings of slavery and democracy in British North America, and the continuing dilemma of democracy and race, provide a context to discuss the experiences of Africans brought here to labor under a brutal system of slavery. This panel examines the history and nature of this first landing of Africans in America, as well as legacies down to our own time. What was the meaning of liberty and community for 17th Century Americans? What does it mean to be American for their descendants and fellow minorities? What resonance do these issues have as the United States faces a Presidential election threatening to become the most racist appeal to voters in living memory?
Other Events
Slavery, Captivity and Further Forms of Asymmetrical Dependencies in Early Modern RussiaConference, September 26-27, 2019
Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies
University of Bonn
Recent research has demonstrated that early modern slavery was much more widespread than the traditional concentration on plantation slavery in the context of European colonial expansion would suggest.
To broaden the academic perspective, this workshop focuses on changing concepts of dependency and coercion in early modern Russia and adjacent areas. In order to grasp the ‘continuum of asymmetric dependency’, the workshop will consider textual articulations of dependencies and their historical semantics as well as institutional norms and local practices; it will also focus on representations facilitating bondage, captivity, banishment and imprisonment; on imperial legislation and local practices; the role of asymmetric dependency in cultural transfer and entanglement.
If you are interested in participating, please contact Elena Smolarz (esmolarz@uni-bonn.de) by September 15, 2019.
further information
Round About Midnight: Slavery and Freedom in the Land of LincolnScott Heerman, Assistant Professor of History, University of Miami
Newberry Library
60 West Walton Street, Chicago, Illinois
Towner Fellows’ Lounge
Wednesday, August 7, 2019 • 4:00 pm
When did Illinois become a free state? Spanning a century and a half, M. Scott Heerman will trace the making, remaking, and eventual unmaking of slavery in Illinois. Drawing from his new book, The Alchemy of Slavery, he shows that over its long history Illinois went from Indian Country to European Empire, from a border south region to bulwark of the free north. Each moment of transition over Illinois’s long history reveals new elements of the black freedom struggle and the making of a free society.
In the News
Ensuring the Chicago Race Riot Is Not Forgotten, With Inspiration from Germany's Holocaust MemorialsMadeline Fitzgerald, July 27, 2019,
Time
It was a stifling summer day in Chicago on July 27, 1919, with temperatures rising to 96°F — and tensions rising across the nation.
In the summer following the end of World War I, the American population was rapidly shifting. White immigrants from Europe were entering the country, leaving their impoverished homelands. Meanwhile, African Americans were fleeing the racism and poverty of the South for new opportunities in northern cities. For many, that meant Chicago. According to the Chicago Tribune, the city’s black population swelled from 44,000 in 1910 to 110,000 in 1920.
Those changes were the backdrop for “the largest outbreak of racial violence and domestic unrest” in the United States between the end of Reconstructionand the Civil Rights Era, says Peter Cole, a historian at Western Illinois University who is closely involved with new efforts to memorialize that period. Between April and November of 1919, white people in cities and towns across the country instigated race riots, attacking and often killing their black neighbors. The period would come to be known as Red Summer.
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The Nuns Who Bought and Sold Human BeingsRachel L. Swarns, August 2, 2019,
The New York TimesGeorgetown Visitation Preparatory School, one of the oldest Roman Catholic girls’ schools in the nation, has long celebrated the vision and generosity of its founders: a determined band of Catholic nuns who championed free education for the poor in the early 1800s.
The sisters, who established an elite academy in Washington, D.C., also ran “a Saturday school, free to any young girl who wished to learn — including slaves, at a time when public schools were almost nonexistent and teaching slaves to read was illegal,” according to an official history posted for several years on the school’s website.
But when a newly hired school archivist and historian started digging in the convent’s records a few years ago, she found no evidence that the nuns had taught enslaved children to read or write. Instead, she found records that documented a darker side of the order’s history.
The Georgetown Visitation sisters owned at least 107 enslaved men, women and children, the records show. And they sold dozens of those people to pay debts and to help finance the expansion of their school and the construction of a new chapel.
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A Memorial Project Is Rediscovering Stories of Slavery in ConnecticutErik Ofgang, July 24, 2019,
Connecticut Magazine
Shortly before the Revolutionary War, an enslaved Connecticut man named Jeffrey Brace was beaten unconscious by his new owner, John Burwell of Milford. Burwell struck Brace with his fists, legs and a chair. In a written account years later, Brace recalled that one blow to his head during the beating was so hard it “pealed [sic] up a piece of my scalp about as big as my three fingers.” After waking up, Brace was subjected to two rounds of whipping and made to walk a quarter-mile barefoot in the winter.
Brace’s visceral, difficult-to-read account of the horrors of slavery in Connecticut is the type of story we don’t often hear about Northeastern states, says Dennis Culliton, a recently retired teacher at Adams Middle School in Guilford. In Connecticut, we’re good at “pointing our fingers south and saying how awful those people were,” he says. But when it comes to confronting our own past, we have more trouble.
Culliton is a co-founder of the Witness Stones Project, which remembers enslaved Connecticut individuals by placing stone memorials in their honor. It’s an attempt to come to terms with Connecticut’s past in regards to slavery, a history that is often glossed over, if not outright forgotten. One textbook Culliton has long used says something like “slavery was ended in New England soon after the American Revolution.” It’s technically true but it’s an oversimplification akin to saying that a few years after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Allies won the war.
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Retracing a slave route in Ghana, 400 years onSiphiwe Sibeko, Francis Korokoro, August 1, 2019,
Reuters
His uncle was called Kwame Badu, a name that has been passed on through the family in remembrance of an ancestor with that name who was captured and sold into slavery long, long ago.
“Growing up, I was told the story of two of my great-great-grand-uncles Kwame Badu and Kofi Aboagye who were captured and sold into slavery,” says Assenso, 68, the chief of Adidwan, a village in Ghana’s interior. He followed the family tradition and named his youngest son Kwame Badu.
This month marks 400 years since the first recorded African slaves arrived in North America to work plantations in English colonies. In the centuries after, European slave traders shipped millions of African men, women and children across the Atlantic Ocean. Many died in horrific conditions on the slave boats, while survivors endured a life of misery and backbreaking farm work.
For some of them, the terrible journey began here, deep inside Ghana. Captured by slavers, they were marched along dirt tracks for 200 kilometers (125 miles) to slave castles perched on the Atlantic Coast, where they boarded ships for North America. They never saw their homeland again.
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