Lecture – SoMD Freedom Suits: Reckoning w/American Slavery

The speaker will be Dr. William G. Thomas II, author and history professor, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He will discuss the freedom suits and the families of Southern Maryland featured in his prize-winning book, "A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War." For more than 70 years and five generations, the enslaved families on the Western Shore of Maryland filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Thomas will describe how the story of these families and their freedom suits relates to the moral problem of slavery in American history and its legacies today.