African American Studies

Join us as Worcester poets share their responses inspired by material from the Brown Family Collections, one of the earliest and largest intact nineteenth-century Black family’s libraries in America. The collections center around William and Martha Ann Brown, who were married in Worcester in 1850, and their son, Charles F. Brown.

Join us as literary historian Tara A. Bynum discusses her new book Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America. In the book, Bynum tells the compelling stories of four early American writers who expressed feeling good despite living while enslaved or only nominally free. The poet Phillis Wheatley delights in writing letters to a friend. Ministers John Marrant and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw memorialize their love for God.

Master Slave Husband Wife tells the remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled White man and William posing as “his” slave. The Crafts’ own 1860 narrative, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, provides a powerful first-hand account of this extraordinary act of mutual self-emancipation. Yet, many mysteries remain that the Crafts would not or could not discuss.

Co-Sponsored by Africana Studies at the College of the Holy Cross

Scholars have explored how nineteenth-century scrapbooks and friendship albums circulated among free black women in the North to showcase their middle-class status and close networks. However, little is known about how black girls participated in this sentimental practice. In this lecture, Nazera Sadiq Wright will discuss how histories of black girlhood are often “buried” in literary genres less likely to be studied. Recovering these histories involves using types of literature that move beyond the bound book.

From the colonial through the antebellum era, enslaved women in the US used lethal force as the ultimate form of resistance. By amplifying their voices and experiences, Brooding Over Bloody Revenge (Cambridge University Press, 2023) strongly challenges assumptions that enslaved women only participated in covert, non-violent forms of resistance, when in fact they consistently seized justice for themselves and organized toward revolt. Nikki M. Taylor reveals how women killed for deeply personal instances of injustice committed by their owners.