Black Freedom: Public Celebration and Commemoration as Practices of Remembrance and Repair
About this event
Join the Library of Virginia for an event with Blair LM Kelley, President and Director of the National Humanities Center, in celebration of her newly published book, Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days.
Admission is free and open to all. Please register here.
Drawing on Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days, Blair LM Kelley will discuss how Black communities have created counter histories through traditions of commemorations and celebration. Using emancipation celebrations as a lens, she considered how remembrance became acts of renewal and repair, shaping how communities understand the past, create pathways for survival in the future, and crucial models for our present challenges.
About the speaker:
Blair LM Kelley is an award-winning author, historian, and scholar of the African American experience. She is also the president and director of the National Humanities Center, the only independent center for advanced study in the world dedicated exclusively to the humanities. Kelley is the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship (2010) which was awarded the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize and Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (2023), which received the 2024 Brooklyn Library Book Award, the 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award, the 2024 Philip Taft Labor History Prize, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in History.
Sponsor(s): Humanities Research Center, VCU College of Humanities and Sciences
Event contact: Ellie Musgrave, musgraveec@vcu.edu
Registration Info
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