Clark to Host Panel Discussion on Civil War Slave Refugee Camps

Thursday, January 31, 2019
GoLocalWorcester News Team

Amy Murrell Taylor

To celebrate Black History Month, the Clark University History Department will host a panel discussion titled “Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps.”

The event will take place on Tuesday, February 5 at 6 p.m. in the Fireside Lounge of Dana Commons.

The Panel

This Speakers Panel will feature special guest Amy Murrell Taylor of the University of Kentucky, in conversation with Clark history professors Janette Greenwood and Ousmane Power-Greene.

Taylor, associate professor of history, is author of “Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps,” which examines the experiences of slaves who fled plantations to seek refuge inside the lines of the Union army as it moved into the Confederacy.

The book draws on a survey of slave camps throughout the country to reveal what these refugees from slavery went through as they made their way through the vast landscape of army-supervised camps that emerged during the war.

Along with “Embattled Freedom,” Taylor’s recent publications include “The Divided Family in Civil War America.” Her research interests include the U.S. in the 19th century, the American South, the Civil War, and gender and family.

Professor Greenwood teaches a variety of courses in U.S. History at Clark, including Race and Ethnicity in American History, History of the American South, Reconstruction, and The Gilded Age, and is affiliated with Clark’s program in Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies. She has published countless articles and books, including “First Fruits of Freedom: The Migration of Former Slaves and Their Search for Equality in Worcester, Massachusetts” in 2010.

In 2018, she was awarded the 24th annual Historic New England Book Prize for “Rediscovering an American Community of Color: The Photographs of William Bullard, 1897-1917,” which she co-authored with Nancy Kathryn Burns, associate curator at the Worcester Art Museum.

Professor Power-Greene teaches courses for undergraduates and graduate students on American history with a focus on African American internationalism and comparative social and political movements.

His book, “Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement,” examines black Americans’ efforts to agitate for equal rights in the North and Midwest in the face of the American Colonization Society’s colonization movement, which hoped to compel free blacks to leave the United States for Liberia.

He has been at Clark since 2007.