Black Women on the Wisconsin Frontier—Race, Rights and Citizenship

Speaker: Christy Clark-Pujara. Professor
Department Chair of African American Studies at UW-Madison.

The story of Black people in Wisconsin is relatively recent history and plays out amidst European invasion, colonialization, removal, and confinement of the indigenous peoples. African American women faced a multitude of obstacles in their pursuit of freedom, the right to vote, and the protections of full citizenship. Their histories are critical to understanding contemporary attacks on civil rights.

About Our Speaker: Christy Clark-Pujara is a historian of colonial North America and the early American Republic. She is particularly interested in retrieving the hidden and unexplored histories of African Americans in areas that historians have not sufficiently examined—small towns and cities in the North and Midwest. Clark-Pujara contends that the full dimensions of the African American and the American experience cannot be appreciated without reference to how Black people managed their lives in places where they were few. She is the author of  Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island. Her current book project, Black on the Midwestern Frontier: From Slavery to Suffrage in the Wisconsin Territory examines how the practice of race-based slavery, black settlement, and debates over abolition and black rights shaped white-Black race relations in the Midwest.

Clark-Pujara is committed to both academic scholarship and public history. She works closely with the Nehemiah Center for Urban Development, where she teaches community history courses. Her public history work also includes writing blogs and op-eds like, “Many Tulsa Massacres: How the Myth of a Liberal North Erases a Long History of White Violence,” for the Smithsonian American History Magazine Clark-Pujara is also a Segment Producer, for an in-progress documentary “African American Midwest” 

Meal Choices: 

• Herb Roast Airline Breast Brown butter gnocchi, roast acorn squash, toasted pecans, Parmesan, Tuscan kale
• Brown Butter Gnocchi Roast acorn squash, toasted pecans, Parmesan, Tuscan kale

Member registration:

• Regular complimentary
• $38 Retiree & Sabbatical,
• $40 for Guests

Online registration closes Wednesday, January 7 at 5:00 pm