In this special episode of Talking in the Library, Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens, Director of the Program in African American History, speaks with Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson about her powerful new book, Force & Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Force and Freedom provides the first historical analysis exclusively focused on the tactical use of violence among antebellum black activists. Carter Jackson argues that through tactical violence black abolitionist leaders accomplished what white nonviolent abolitionists could not: creating the conditions that necessitated the Civil War.

Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson is the Knafel Assistant Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. Her research focuses on slavery and the abolitionists, violence as a political discourse, historical film, and black women’s history.

David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America. Boston, 1829.