SUSAN EVA O’DONOVAN W/ CHARLES W. MCKINNEY JR.: MOVING TOWARD FREEDOM

Join us as we welcome SUSAN EVA O'DONOVAN in conversation with CHARLES W. MCKINNEY JR. on TUESDAY, AUGUST 25 at 6:00 PM to celebrate the release of her new book MOVING TOWARD FREEDOM ABOUT THE BOOK: A magisterial, groundbreaking new study of the lives of enslaved Americans on the cusp of the Civil War that places them--and their hard-won political knowledge--rightly at the center of the fight for freedom The enduring image of American slavery has been of workers trapped on plantations, shuttling from squalid quarters to the fields and back again, or confined to the homes of abusive owners, constantly under surveillance and restriction. But if that were the whole picture, how would black Southerners have organized into such a formidable force the moment war erupted?

With Moving Toward Freedom, eminent historian Susan Eva O'Donovan radically widens the lens to reveal a new landscape of the slaveholding South: one in which enslaved workers were not pinned in place but mobile, deployed as laborers--and even as captains--on steamboats and ferries, or as teamsters transporting staple crops across the expanding country, or as ladies' maids waiting on their mistresses on European vacations. While performing brutal and involuntary work, O'Donovan argues, enslaved Americans managed to accumulate the crucial experience and knowledge that they would use to bring about their own liberation. Piecing together an extraordinary archive of letters, travel passes, receipts, and other documentation of lives in which literacy was illegal, O'Donovan allows her subjects to speak for themselves as they move through markets, jails, waterways, gold mines, and foreign lands.

In so doing, O'Donovan demonstrates that slavery's incredible profitability depended on a fundamentally unsustainable balance between commercial imperatives and slaveholders' drive for control--one that enslaved workers eventually succeeded in using to their advantage, bringing slavery to its knees. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Susan Eva O'Donovan is an associate professor of history at the University of Memphis. She is the author of Becoming Free in the Cotton South and coeditor of two volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, part of the ongoing scholarship of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland.

She is an Organization of American Historians distinguished lecturer and the codirector of the Memphis Massacre project, a public commemoration of Reconstruction. ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER: Charles W. McKinney, Jr. is Professor of History at Rhodes College.

His areas of expertise are the Civil Rights/Black Power Era, African American Activism, and African American Politics. He received a bachelor’s degree in history from Morehouse College and completed his doctoral studies at Duke University. His first book was titled Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina.

His second project, co-edited with Aram Goudsouzian, is An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee. His most recent book, co-edited with Françoise Hamlin, is titled From Rights To Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle, published by Vanderbilt University Press. His writing has appeared in newspapers and information venues across the country, including the Memphis Commercial Appeal, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Black Perspectives, Vanity Fair, and MLK50: Justice Through Journalism.

He has provided commentary on radio programs across the country, news outlets in the United Kingdom, Europe, China, New Zealand, Australia, and has appeared on CNN.