Presented by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

February 21, 2021 at 2:00 p.m. EST

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Gilder Lehrman Book Breaks features the most exciting history scholars in America discussing their books with host William Roka live, followed by a Q&A with home audiences.

Join us online on Sunday, February 21 from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. ET (11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. PT) with Kabria Baumgartner as she discusses her book “In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America.”

Most people learn about school desegregation in the context of the mid-twentieth-century South: Brown v. Board of Education, Ruby Bridges, and the Little Rock Nine. Yet a century before that, African American women and girls in the North led the fight for equal school rights—the right of all to a quality education on an equal basis. Massachusetts was the epicenter of the equal school rights movement, which began in the 1830s and continued through the 1860s, spreading to Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Baumgartner examines the educational lives of young African American women like Sarah Harris, Rosetta Morrison, Sarah Parker Remond, and Eunice Ross. These young women adopted a range of protest strategies, from writing editorials on education and petitioning local school committees to boycotting racially segregated schools. Amid this surge of activism, these young women became educational reformers, and their valuable work reshaped public education in and around the Northeast.

Purchase books for Book Breaks at https://bookshop.org/lists/book-breaks.
All purchases support the Gilder Lehrman Institute and independent bookstores.

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Published by Meadow Dibble

Meadow Dibble is Director of Community-Engaged Research at the Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous, and Tribal Populations and founding Director of Atlantic Black Box, a nonprofit devoted to researching and reckoning with New England’s role in the slave trade and the economy of enslavement. She is currently in her third year as a Visiting Scholar at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Meadow received her Doctorate from Brown’s Department of French with a focus on Postcolonial studies and taught Francophone African literature at Colby College from 2005–08. Originally from Cape Cod, she lived for six years on Senegal’s Cape Verde peninsula, where she published a cultural magazine and coordinated foreign study programs. In 2016, Meadow experienced a brutal awakening to the reality of her hometown’s deep investment in the global slave economy. Ever since, she has been researching complicity among Cape Cod’s sea captains while developing The Atlantic Black Box Project.

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