Warren Milteer, Jr. — Out of This Strife Will Come Freedom: Free People of Color and the Fight for Equal Rights in the Civil War Era

The Social Sciences Forum presents the annual Low Lecture, featuring Warren Milteer, Jr., associate professor of history at The George Washington University, who will speak on Out of This Strife Will Come Freedom: Free People of Color and the Fight for Equal Rights in the Civil War Era.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, the vast majority of the nation’s people of color were enslaved. Yet nearly half a million of these people were free. For the first time, Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr. recounts the story of free people of color in the Civil War era United States. He shows how the nation’s growing divide in the years leading up to the war, the events of the war itself, and the policies of the postwar period shaped the lives of free people of color living in various regions of the country. His telling also reflects on the ways free people of color used their voices, military service, and political acumen to push for a better version the United States. Calling upon their experiences fighting for equal rights in the prewar years, free people of color took advantage of the disruption created by the war to lobby for the end of discrimination across nation.

Warren Milteer, Jr. is a historian of the United States with research interests in early America, the nineteenth-century U.S., the U.S. South, free people of color, race, slavery, and Native America. His publications include two academic books, Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South (2021) and North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715-1885 (2020), the independently published Hertford County, North Carolina’s Free People of Color and Their Descendants (2016), as well as articles in the Journal of Social History and the North Carolina Historical Review.  Milteer was the recipient of the Southern Historical Association’s Charles S. Sydnor Award for the best book in Southern history in 2022, the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association’s Ragan Old North State Award for nonfiction in 2022, and the Historical Society of North Carolina’s R. D. W. Connor Award in 2014 and 2016 for the best journal article in the North Carolina Historical Review.

Admission is free.

This event is hosted by the Department of History and co-sponsored by the Center for Social Science Scholarship.