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Spring Lecture Series

Eclectic and Independent: Black Self-Advocacy Strategies, 1870 to 1930


Third in a series of lectures in conjunction with the exhibition “Gilded Age Newport in Color”

What you need to know

Eclectic and Independent: Black Self-Advocacy Strategies, 1870 to 1930 at Rosecliff has closed.

Conventional narratives of Black politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries tend to focus on two ideological choices: (1) Republican vs. Democrat, with African Americans siding with the party of Lincoln; and (2) (Booker T.) Washingtonian vs. DuBoisian, with African Americans preferring one of the two. Yet in Newport, there is evidence of a more idiosyncratic, localized and broader set of political strategies promoted by local Black leaders.

Bard College Professor Dr. Myra Armstead will set forth the menu of options pursued by Black Newporters who gave their own meaning to what collectively may be called independent politics.

For more information, email ProgramRSVP@NewportMansions.org.

Myra_Armstead

Dr. Myra Armstead

Dr. Myra Armstead is the Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies at Bard College and Senior Adviser to the President of Bard. She specializes in U.S. social and cultural history with emphasis on urban and African American history. Dr. Armstead holds a B.A. from Cornell University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She has written several books including Memory and Enslavement: Schuyler House, Old Saratoga, and the Saratoga Patent in History, Historical Practice, and the Historical Imagination (2023); Freedom's Gardener: James F. Brown, Horticulture, and the Hudson Valley in Antebellum America (2012); Mighty Change, Tall Within: Black Identity in the Hudson Valley (2003); and ‘Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August’: African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs (1999).

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