Tuesday, October 16 at 7:00pm
Griffin Hall, 6
A public lecture by Professor Kendra T. Field, ’99 from the University of California-Riverside. Professor Field recovers the story of the little-known back-to-Africa movement and the lifelong migrants who created it. Chief Sam’s movement began in Oklahoma, an American borderland at the turn of the twentieth century, and ended on the western coast of Africa during the First World War. Its roots, however, stretched across the American South and back to the transatlantic slave trade. She uses the story of one family of freed people to argue this movement was no mere prelude to Garveyism and the Great Migration, but rather capstone to what Carter Woodson once called “a century of negro migration.”
Kendra is a Williams Alum and assistant professor of history at UC Riverside. She works on family history, African American history and Native American history. Her book, Growing Up with the Country: A Family History of Race and American Expansion is under contract and coming out soon.
Co-sponsored by the History Department and Africana Studies.