Woodlawn Lecture Series: John Black’s Negro: A Slave Out of Place

Description

Wednesday, August 8, 6-7 pm Join us for a lecture by Todd Little-Siebold on the lives of two slaves living in Ellsworth, Maine in the early 1800s. Little-Siebold is a professor of history and Latin American studies at College of the Atlantic. The discovery of two slaves living in Ellsworth in the “free” state of Maine in 1820 reveals that much of what we thought we knew about north and south, free and slave are myths constructed after the fact to rewrite the uncomfortable history of race relations in New England. In Maine, the whitest state in the Union, the histories of slavery and servitude have been left out of the common narrative about the region’s history of hearty yeoman farmers and intrepid fishermen braving the elements. This talk will try to bring back in the mystery of two slaves living and laboring in Ellsworth in what was then the State of Massachusetts, which supposedly had done away with slavery forty years earlier.