"Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom"

Name: "Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom"
Start: 2025-11-06T17:30:00-06:00
Location: University of Memphis University Center

Schedule

Thu, 06 Nov, 2025 at 05:30 pm

UTC-06:00

Location

University of Memphis University Center | Memphis, TN

Join us for the annual Belle McWilliams Lecture, co-sponsored with the Department of History. As always, free and open to all!
Full details: https://www.memphis.edu/moch/events/index.php#HISTORY
Frederick Knight // Howard University
Belle McWilliams Lecture Series
Thursday, November 6, 2025
5:30pm Reception // 6:00pm Lecture
Maxine Smith University Center River Room (UC 342)
Dr. Knight will explore the pivotal role that elders played in African American families and communities through Reconstruction. Drawing on a wide range of printed and archival materials from the period, he will also examine how black and white Southerners used competing ideas about age to forge kinship, community, and freedom over the nineteenth century.
Frederick Knight is an expert on early African American and African Diaspora history. He is the author of Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom (Penn Press, 2024), which argues that elders were central to African American community formation through Reconstruction. The book also demonstrates how whites and blacks mobilized competing ideas about age to exercise power from the era of slavery through the period of emancipation in the United States. His first book Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850 (NYU Press, 2010) traces how Africans, though carried across the Atlantic against their wills, drew upon knowledge from their homelands to shape the agricultural and material worlds of New World slave labor camps. He has published scholarly articles and book chapters on black history, and his work has appeared in the Journal of Negro History, the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, The History Transactions of Ghana, Early American Studies, the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, and The Conversation.