Free Men on Abandoned Lands: The Aporia of the Settler Campus

Owing to the current Campus Access Level, all prospective attendees must register by 4PM on October 16. Registration will automatically close at that time.

Free Men on Abandoned Lands: The Aporia of the Settler Campus

Lecture by
Chaired by

W.E.B. Du Bois cited informal, Black-led free schools as the most radical innovation of Reconstruction and perhaps its greatest loss as they were institutionalized by its end. This talk tells a new story about the expansion of higher education in the United States, one centered on the struggle for control over schools founded by the formerly enslaved between these communities, the state-run Freedman’s Bureau, missionary organizations, and philanthropic foundations. This talk will argue that building campaigns and the negotiation and management of funding, lands, labor, and form reveal the unsettled status of the Black college from an instrument of liberation to one of social control. Beginning with the foundation and early development of the Hampton Institute, which foregrounded education as part of the project of reparations, the talk will build from the legal concept of abandonment as a precondition for new possession to the centrality of land claims, settlement, and separatism in the development of a second campus, the Tuskegee Institute, led by Hampton graduate Booker T. Washington.

The Society of Fellows hosts the Thursday Lecture Series (TLS), which runs regularly throughout the academic year. During the Fall Semester TLS, our Fellows present their own work, chaired by Columbia faculty.

Please email to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.

Host or Publisher The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities