What:   

A lecture by Elise Lemire, who grew up in Lincoln and is now a professor at Purchase College, State University of New York.  Author of Black Walden, an account of slavery in the Lincoln and Concord areas of Massachusetts 

When: 

Saturday, June 19, 2021  4:00 p.m.

Hosted by:  

The Bemis Lecture Series and The Lincoln Historical Society

Where:   

On Zoom

Register in advance:

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_djg_-xpwRVu5tpDOQfRlWg

Additional information:

Juneteenth, or June Nineteenth, celebrates the nation’s second, but no less important, independence day, when federal troops arrived in Texas in 1865 to ensure that all of the people enslaved there were freed.

In celebration of this day, the Bemis Lecture Series and the Lincoln Historical Society, will host, in a virtual event, Elise Lemire, author of Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts (2009; 2019 with a new preface).

Professor Lemire grew up in Lincoln on land once tended and tilled by men and women enslaved by Lincoln’s wealthiest land-owner.  Lemire credits Lincoln’s history for sparking her interest in how Lincoln and its neighboring town of Concord were indelibly shaped by slavery.  Professor Lemire will recount the history of slavery in Lincoln and Concord and discuss how Lincoln might make this history more visible in the local landscape as a means of beginning to address the complicated truths of the town’s colonial past.

Elise Lemire is Professor of Literature at Purchase College, the State University of New York, and she is a two-time fellowship recipient from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  She is also the author of the just released Battle Green Vietnam: The 1971 March on Concord, Lexington, and Boston.