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"Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston" with Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers

This first installment in the Department of History's 2013-2014 Virtual Lecture Series will feature Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Dr. Myers will speak on her book, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston.

Dr. Myers is a historian of the black female experience in the United States, and her research interests revolve around issues and ideas of race, gender, freedom, and citizenship, and the ways in which these constructs intersect with one another in the lives of black women in the Old South.

Her first book, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston, (UNC Press, 2011) examines the lives of free black women, both legal and de facto, in Charleston, South Carolina, from 1790-1860. At its heart, the project analyzes the tactics that black female Charlestonians utilized to acquire, define, and defend their own vision of freedom, methods which included the acquisition of wealth, networking with people in positions of power, and utilizing the state's judicial apparatus. Examining life, liberty, and ideas about civil rights from the perspective of those invested with the least formal power in the Old South, this study concludes that antebellum black women used all the resources at their disposal to enjoy a freedom of their own design as opposed to one that was shaped for them by white southerners. Drawing on family papers, legislative documents, probate records, parish registers, census data, tax lists and city directories, this project thus restores black women to their rightful place as social, economic, and political actors in the pre-war South.