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A Family History of Slavery and Freedom

February 28, 2018 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Kendra Field’s “Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War”

Wednesday, February 28
6:30 pm
Free for members and guests

Join us as we celebrate Black History Month by welcoming Kendra Field, Williams College class of 1999 and author of Growing Up with the Country, the masterful and poignant story of three African-American families who journeyed west after emancipation.  Drawing on decades of archival research and family lore within and beyond the United States, Field traces the journey of her own ancestors out of the South to Native American Territory, where they participated in the development of black and black Native American towns and settlements.  Field’s epic family history mirrors a larger piece of our national history, chronicling the westward migration of freedom’s first generation in the fifty years after emancipation.

When statehood, oil speculation, and Jim Crow segregation imperiled their lives and livelihoods, these formerly enslaved men and women again chose emigration.  Some migrants launched a powerful back-to-Africa movement, while others moved on to Canada and Mexico.  Their lives and choices deepen and widen the roots of the Great Migration. Drawing upon her own ancestry, interweaving black, white, and Indian histories, Field’s beautifully wrought narrative explores how ideas about race and color powerfully shaped the pursuit of freedom.

Kendra Field ’99 is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University.  Field has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, and Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center in American History.  Field received her Ph.D. in American History from New York University.  She also holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a B.A. from Williams College.

Details

Date:
February 28, 2018
Time:
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm