Wednesday, October 16, noon ET
Online on Zoom
A presentation from 2024–2025 Frieda L. Miller Fellow Kerri K. Greenidge
Kerri K. Greenidge’s new book, under contract with Liveright Norton Press, uses African American history, biography, and literature to complicate the idea—propagated by white nationalists and accepted as fact by most liberal-leaning historians, scholars, and commentators—that New England is a predominantly white space in which African descended people and their communities have had little political effect.
Through the intertwined biographies of five New Englanders of African descent, from the mid-18th through the mid-20th century, Greenidge argues that the Liberalism for which New England is known—from the rise of antislavery through the progressive legacies of the New Deal—can only be understood within the context of the radical Black community that has traditionally played a small but significant role in the region’s defining political ethos.
Black Lead is an introduction to this new work, which challenges notions of Blackness, African-descended community politics, and the centrality of Black radicalism in the contested history of American Liberalism.
About the speaker
A scholar of African American history and biography, Kerri K. Greenidge is an associate professor at Tufts University and the author of two award-winning books: Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (Liveright, 2019) and The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family (Liveright, 2022). At Radcliffe, she will work on her latest monograph, a history of Black New England from the mid-18th through the mid-20th century.
