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Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom
May 19 @ 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm EDT
The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about the importance of Black elders during the eras of enslavement and emancipation. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
Would there have been a Frederick Douglass if it were not for Betsy Bailey, the grandmother who raised him? Would Harriet Jacobs have written her renowned autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, if her grandmother, a free Black woman named Molly Horniblow, had not enabled Jacobs’ escape from slavery?
In Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), Frederick C. Knight explores the experiences of African Americans with aging and in old age during the eras of slavery and emancipation. Though slavery put a premium on young labor, elders worked as caregivers, domestics, cooks, or midwives and performed other tasks in the margins of Southern and Northern economies. Looking at Black families, churches, mutual aid societies, and homes for the aged, Knight demonstrates the pivotal role of elders in the history of African American community formation through Reconstruction.
Drawing on a wide array of printed and archival sources, including slave narratives, plantation records, letters, diaries, meeting minutes, and state and federal archives, Knight also examines how Blacks and Whites, men and women, the young and the old developed competing ideas about age and aging, differences that shaped social relations in coastal West and West Central Africa, the Atlantic and domestic slave trades, colonial and antebellum Southern slave societies, and emancipation in the North and South.
Black Elders offers a unique window into the individual and collective lives of African Americans, the day-to-day struggles they waged with regards to their experiences of aging, and how they drew upon these resources to define the meaning of family, community, and freedom. Please use this link to purchase the book.
About the Author
Frederick Knight is professor of history at Morehouse College. He specializes in the history of African Americans and the African Diaspora before 1900. Dr. Knight has held fellowships at the Center for Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara; the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia; the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization at Brown University; and the University of California, Riverside, where he held the P. Sterling Stuckey Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American history. He has also served in various capacities with scholarly organizations including Imagining America, the American Historical Association, and the Omohundro Institute.
Professor Knight has published numerous book chapters and articles in his field. Prior to this current book, Black Elders, he published Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850 (NYU Press, 2010). It traces how Africans, though carried across the Atlantic against their wills, drew upon knowledge from their homelands to shape the agricultural and material worlds of New World slave labor camps.
Professor Knight received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside.