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GLC News and Events
Yale announces 2020 Frederick Douglass Book Prize Winner
December 9, 2020
New Haven, Conn.— Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition announces the winner of the 22nd annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize. The 2020 winner of the prize is Sophie White for Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press). White is Professor of American Studies, Concurrent Professor in the Departments of Africana Studies, History, and Gender Studies, and Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
Our thanks to Professor Daniel Pinkel for his support
 Professor Daniel Pinkel has recently made an extraordinarily generous gift to the Gilder Lehrman Center as support for the future of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and other work at the Center. Daniel is Professor Emeritus in bio-physics at the University of California San Francisco where he had a highly successful career, achieving many patents and research breakthroughs, focusing primarily on cancer genetics and genomics. Since retiring he now lives in New York City, not far from Grant’s tomb and two monuments of Frederick Douglass. At a gathering at the New York Historical Society in 2019, Daniel and David Blight met at a lecture by the GLC Director. Daniel is a very serious reader of history and literature; most recently he has tackled Don Quixote. At a gathering at the New York Historical Society in 2019, Daniel and David Blight met at a lecture by the GLC Director. In making this donation to Yale and the Center, Professor Pinkel commented: "I feel fortunate to be able to support the continuation of the Prize and its encouragement of work that brings to life the reality of slavery, especially now, when the very notion of reality is under such challenge." At the GLC, we as a staff, as well as the countless historians and writers in our network, wish to thank Dan Pinkel for his gift. We will carry on our work because of enlightened minds like Dan. We welcome with a warm heart this distinguished scientist and wonderful citizen of our community of knowledge and teaching.
- David Blight, Director, GLC
Slavery and Its Legacies: J’Nese Williams on “Race, Place, and Expertise: Working in the St. Vincent Botanic Garden 1765-1822”
Dr. Williams is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Stanford Humanities Center and a lecturer in the Department of History. Her book project, "The Texture of Empire: Britain’s Colonial Botanic Gardens, Authority, and the Age of Revolution," explores the creation of authority in both imperial rule and scientific work. "The Texture of Empire" spotlights botanical workers, both enslaved and free, as they navigated changes in governmental and scientific culture.
Online Events and Resources
Until events and other public gatherings resume, we'll be suggesting online events and resources, past and current, that may be of interest to viewers.
Slavery, Race and the Archives in Morocco: The Epistemology of Silence
December 17th, 2020, at 11AM EST
The MELA Social Justice Committee will host a lecture with Dr. Chouki El Hamel as part of the Middle East Librarians Association (MELA) Social Justice Lecture Series 2020-2021 season, Stories and Silences: Research on Race in the Middle East. The lecture will be on December 17th, 2020, at 11AM EST (UTC -5).
Please register for the lecture here: https://bit.ly/MELAElHamel
I’m Buildin’ Me a Home
The Black Church Historical Preservation Project seeks to compile the oral histories of Black Churches in America in efforts to honor their legacy. This exhibition intends to gather the oral histories of African American churches in New Haven. By Tracing the formation of Black churches we hope to efficiently preserve that which is Black and undeniable sacred.
Belonging at Yale Anti-Racism Series: In Conversation with Author Ibram X. Kendi
Please join the Yale Alumni Association and Belonging at Yale for a discussion with Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author, historian, and speaker.
Dr. Kendi and Yale professor Matthew Frye Jacobson discuss Dr. Kendi’s bestselling book “How To Be An Antiracist” and his thoughts about reorienting America on the urgent issues of race, justice, and equality.
In the NewsWho Were America’s Enslaved? A New Database Humanizes the Names Behind the Numbers
Meilan Solly, December 11, 2020, Smithsonianmag.com
The night before Christmas in 1836, an enslaved man named Jim made final preparations for his escape. As his enslavers, the Roberts family of Charlotte County, Virginia, celebrated the holiday, Jim fled west to Kanawha County, where his wife’s enslaver, Joseph Friend, had recently moved. Two years had passed without Jim’s capture when Thomas Roberts published a runaway ad pledging $200 (around $5,600 today) for the 38- to 40-year-old’s return.
“Jim is … six feet or upwards high, tolerably spare made, dark complexion, has rather an unpleasant countenance,” wrote Roberts in the January 5, 1839, issue of the Richmond Enquirer. “[O]ne of his legs is smaller than the other, he limps a little as he walks—he is a good blacksmith, works with his left hand to the hammer.”
In his advertisement, Roberts admits that Jim may have obtained free papers, but beyond that, Jim’s fate, and that of his wife, is lost to history.
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The Elusive Promise of the Underground Railroad
Eric Herschthal, December 7, 2020, The New Republic
For enslaved Black Americans contemplating escape before the Civil War, the North increasingly looked like a bad option. Though Northern states had abolished slavery by the early nineteenth century, free Blacks were denied the right to vote, had limited employment options, and endured legal segregation. Much of the Midwest restricted free Blacks from even entering. There were also two threats that, until recently, have received insufficient attention: the kidnapping of free and fugitive Blacks in numbers that may be equal to those who escaped on the Underground Railroad and the fact that major “free” cities like New York had become bastions of proslavery support. Because Manhattan’s financial sector had become dependent on slave-grown cotton, New York officials ignored or abetted the illegal slave ships leaving its ports and the Black New Yorkers being snatched from the city’s streets. When Alabama’s governor wrote to his New York counterpart, William Marcy, in 1835, asking for help retrieving runaways, Marcy assured him that “the people of New York generally entertain the most friendly sentiments toward their brethren in the South,” adding: “They know their duties to you and will respect them.”
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The founder of Johns Hopkins owned enslaved people. Our university must face a reckoning.
Martha S. Jones, December 9, 2020, The Washington Post
To some, it is an all-too-familiar story and perhaps not a significant one in a year of racial reckoning: Another elite college discovers ties to slavery. But for many of us who work at Johns Hopkins University, the shattered myth of our university founder, long admired as a Quaker and abolitionist, rattles our school community as well.
Johns Hopkins University confirmed Wednesday that its namesake benefactor owned enslaved people. Hopkins, the descendant of Maryland planters, largely derived his wealth from real estate, railroads, banking — and by being party to slavery’s crime against humanity. The historical record makes clear that Hopkins claimed four men as his property on the 1850 Census and, before that, his business dealings included transactions in which Black Americans were among collateral for a loan.
As leader of the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project and part of a team that uncovered this story over the past six months, I remained nonplussed during most of this work. As a historian I have long investigated how enslavement was a tragically ordinary facet of early American life. Centuries ago, wealthy men such as Hopkins amassed their fortunes through endeavors only two or three degrees removed from the exploitation of people treated as property. Before the Civil War, Americans held more wealth in enslaved people than they did in railroads, banks and factories combined.
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How a University of Richmond researcher uncovered the campus's forgotten connection to slavery
Eric Kolenich, December 13, 2020, Richmond Times-Dispatch
On the campus of the University of Richmond, there is a grassy triangle of land southeast of Westhampton Lake. Dotted with oak and pine trees, the green space extends up a hill from Richmond Way and is trimmed by two university buildings.
Some 180 years ago, the space served as a cemetery for the enslaved people who lived and worked on a plantation that used to exist there. University leaders knew about the cemetery when they bought the land in 1910. They knew it in the 1940s and again in the 1950s when the graves were discovered during construction projects.
But the university made no acknowledgment of the people or the land’s purpose. Construction continued undeterred, and some of the bodies were exhumed and seemingly placed in other unmarked graves.
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How History Classes on the Women’s Suffrage Movement Leave Out the Work of Black Voting Rights Activists
Olivia B. Waxman, Video by Arpita Neja, December 8, 2020, Time
As soon as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were projected to win the 2020 presidential election on Nov. 8, women headed to Susan B. Anthony’s grave in Rochester, N.Y., to pay homage to the most famous American advocate for women receiving the right to vote. The suffragist is buried about an hour away from Seneca Falls, N.Y., the site of a women’s rights convention on July 19-20, 1848. It’s a meeting that American schoolchildren often learn is the birthplace of feminism and the start of the women’s suffrage movement.
But what many American schoolchildren don’t learn is that Susan B. Anthony was also fighting to ensure Black men didn’t get the right to vote before white women, that many suffragists excluded Black women from their events and that the fight for voting rights began much earlier.
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Reviving a Crop and an African-American Culture, Stalk by Stalk
Kim Severson, December 8, 2020, The New York Times
SAPELO ISLAND, Ga. — Fall is cane syrup season in pockets of the Deep South, where people still gather to grind sugar cane and boil its juice into dark, sweet syrup in iron kettles big enough to bathe in.
Homemade cane syrup used to be the only sweetener that some families in rural communities could afford. Not many of those sugar shacks remain, so a jar of well-made local syrup, with its sweet, grassy notes and molasses backbeat, is as prized as the first pressing of an estate olive oil.
This autumn, no cane syrup has been more significant than the batches Maurice Bailey and his friends made from the first purple ribbon sugar cane grown here on Sapelo Island since the 1800s.
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Inside One Woman’s Quest to Preserve the Disappearing Southern Appalachia
Pierre-Antoine Louis, Dec. 12, 2020, The New York Times
Mary Othella Burnette was born and raised in western North Carolina, in a small community in the mountains where a number of Black families settled after the end of the Civil War. Enslaved people, newly freed from local plantations, put down roots there, and Ms. Burnette is related to many of the earliest settlers of what is known as Southern Appalachia.
Now 89, and worried the oral histories passed down from the first residents and from her own family would be forever lost, she self-published a memoir in August. She began writing it in 2008, after attending a writing workshop for first-time authors. There, a facilitator introduced the idea of writing a letter to someone important in her life, someone who was no longer alive.
Ms. Burnette leapt at the idea. She could use it to explain why her cousin Elijah, known in her family as “Lige,” was honored in the title of her memoir, “Lige of the Black Walnut Tree.” He had died before Ms. Burnette was born, but she could tell by the way her father spoke of him that he had been one of his favorite first cousins.
continue AnnouncementsC.L.R. James Research Fellowship
 The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) is pleased to announce the 2021 C.L.R. James Research Fellowship to support research towards the completion of a dissertation or publication of a book. Named after Afro-Trinidadian theorist C.L.R. James, the research fellowships are intended to promote research in Black intellectual history by graduate students, independent scholars, and faculty members at any rank. Two fellowships of $2000 will be awarded this year to help cover the costs of domestic or international travel necessary to conduct research. In recognition of the ongoing challenges associated with COVID-19 and the difficulties of domestic and international travel, recipients of this year’s awards may use the funds for any research-related expense (i.e. to purchase books or other files needed for research projects). Application Deadline: December 15, 2020
Maria Stewart Journal Article Prize
The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) is pleased to announce the 2021 Maria Stewart Prize for the best journal article in Black intellectual history. Named after abolitionist and women’s rights activist-intellectual Maria Stewart, the prize will recognize the best journal article concerning Black intellectual history (broadly conceived) published between January 2020 and December 2020 by a member of AAIHS. The winner will receive $500, an award certificate, and a featured spot on Black Perspectives. The prize is open to scholars at all stages of their academic careers. The award winner will be announced formally at the 2021 AAIHS Conference in March. All application materials should be received by December 15, 2020.
Assistant Professor of African American Art and Art History
The African American Studies Department at Emory University, Atlanta, GA, invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor of African American Studies specializing in Art and Art History. Deadline: Dec 15, 2020 at 11:59 PM Eastern Time.
Tenure Track-Assistant Professor of African American History
The Department of History at The College of Wooster invites applications for a tenure-track position in African American History at the level of Assistant Professor, beginning in August 2021. We seek a broadly trained specialist in African American history. We are interested in candidates who can contribute to the College’s interdisciplinary programs (e.g., Africana Studies; Archaeology; Environmental Studies; Global & International Studies; Global Media & Digital Studies; Urban Studies; and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies). Ph.D. expected by August 2021. Applications received by December 15, 2020 will receive full consideration.
Roosevelt University - Visiting Assistant Professor, 20th Century
African American History
The History Program in the Department of Humanities at Roosevelt University in Chicago, IL invites applications for a full-time non-tenure track position as a Visiting Assistant Professor of History with a specialization in 20th century African American history. The two-year position commences in August 2021; the Ph.D. must be awarded by August 2021. Closing date: December 15, 2020
Assistant Professor, African/African Diaspora History
University of Denver
The History Department at the University of Denver invites applications for a full-time, tenure-track appointment in the history of Africa or African diaspora, period open. The appointment for this position is intended to begin in September 2021. We are especially interested in qualified candidates who can contribute to diversity, equity and inclusion through their teaching, research, and service. This includes candidates from underrepresented groups, those who have experience working with diverse student populations, and those with experience and versatility in inclusive pedagogy.
Please submit your application materials by January 4, 2021.
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