The Baton Foundation

Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad
2025-03-09 15:00 - 16:30 (America/New_York) | GA
About the Book
Riding Jane Crow tells the overlooked story of Black women on American trains, from before the Civil War to more contemporary times. How did Black intellectual women such as Ida B. Wells fight racial segregation through lawsuits, before the (in)famous Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision of 1896? Who were the Black women who worked as Pullman maids, along with the more well-known Pullman porters? How does the experience of Black women on the American railroad provide a more accurate measure of American ingenuity and progress? These questions and others will be answered during this virtual talk.
About the Author
Miriam Thaggert is a professor of English at the University at Buffalo. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on African American literature, history, and culture. Her previous book was on the Harlem Renaissance, Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance. She has also written on films such as Imitation of Life, Twelve Years a Slave, and Mahogany. She is currently working on the Buffalo-area African American poet Lucille Clifton and Percival Everett’s novel, The Trees. She grew up in southwest Louisiana and obtained her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley.
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An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South
2025-04-13 15:00 - 16:30
About the Book
Between Fort Sumter and Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands of Black men, women, and children through a persisting trade in enslaved people. They did so for numerous reasons, including to adapt to the conflict, to invest in their desired slaveholding future, and to fend off the onset of emancipation. These transactions had profound impacts on the enslaved–their lives and families, and the ways in which they pursued freedom during the war. The surviving traffic in humanity thus shaped the experience of the Civil War and its aftermath for all inhabitants of the wartime South.
About the Speaker
Robert Colby is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. His first book, An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South, was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press. His research has won awards from the Society of American Historians and the Society of Civil War Historians and has been published in the Journal of the Civil War Era, Journal of the Early Republic, and Slavery & Abolition.
Register Here for Zoom Lecture
