In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America (Book Talk)

In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America (Book Talk)

Tuesday, May 18, 2021

5:30 p.m. EST

The story of school desegregation in the United States often begins in the mid-twentieth-century South. Drawing on archival sources and genealogical records, Kabria Baumgartner uncovers the story’s origins in the nineteenth-century Northeast and identifies a previously overlooked group of activists: African American girls and women. In Pursuit of Knowledge argues that African American girls and women strategized, organized, wrote, and protested for equal school rights—not just for themselves, but for all. Their activism gave rise to a new vision of womanhood: the purposeful woman, who was learned, active, resilient, and forward-thinking. Moreover, these young women set in motion equal-school-rights victories at the local and state level, and laid the groundwork for further action to democratize schools in twentieth-century America.

About the Author:

Kabria Baumgartner, Ph.D., is an associate professor of American Studies and English and core faculty in the Women’s and Gender Studies department at the University of New Hampshire, where she was named the 2019 Outstanding Assistant Professor. Her research and writing interests focus on African American history, literature, and culture in nineteenth-century New England. She is the author of the award-winning book, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America (New York University Press, 2019), which tells the story of African American girls and women who fought to democratize public and private schools in the nineteenth-century Northeast. She has also published numerous scholarly articles and book chapters, and her op-eds and other popular writing have been featured in the Washington Post, WBUR’s blog Cognoscenti, and Historic New England Magazine. She is writing a biography of the African American lawyer Robert Morris. To learn more, visit www.kabriabaumgartner.com.

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