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Profs and Pints DC presents: “The Fight Against Slavery in Washington,” with Adam Rothman, professor of History and American Studies at Georgetown University and principal curator of the Georgetown Slavery Archive.
Washington, D.C. epitomized the tension between freedom and slavery in the early United States. The nation’s capital was once a slave city, home to thousands of enslaved people and a bustling trade in human beings. Yet slaves and their allies worked to oppose slavery in the city’s streets, in its courts, and in political arenas.
Learn about this aspect of our city’s history from Adam Rothman, a historian of slavery and the author of Facing Georgetown’s History: A Reader in Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation, of Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery, and of Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South.
Professor Rothman will trace the multifaceted struggle to end slavery in the nation’s capital from the city’s founding to the wartime abolition of slavery in the District in 1862, several months before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
He’ll familiarize you with the key figures and dramatic events of this history, and leave you with a rich sense of how slavery and the fight against it shaped Washington D.C. as we continue to experience it today. He’ll show how slavery and the fight against it left footprints around the city and offer suggestions on how you can learn more on your own. (Advance tickets: $12. Doors: $15, or $13 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later. Please allow yourself time to place any orders and get seated and settled in.)
Image derived from a broadside against slavery in the District of Columbia published by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1836. (Library of Congress.)
