Dickinson to Host Discussion on Enslaved Woman’s Escape from George Washington
Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Author Erica Armstrong Dunbar to deliver 2023 Black History Month Keynote
by Rhyan Short '24
Dickinson’s 2023 Black History Month keynote address will detail the story of an enslaved woman who escaped from George Washington. Erica Armstrong Dunbar, historian, author and Rutgers University professor, will deliver the lecture “Running from the Washingtons: Ona Judge and The Founding of a Nation” on Wednesday, Feb. 15, at 7 p.m. in the Anita Tuvin Schlechter (ATS) Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public. Masks are optional but welcome.
Dunbar will talk about Washington’s pursuit of Ona Judge and how he used his power to circumvent slave laws in the North. She will also examine the paradox of slavery and freedom in early America.
This lecture draws from Dunbar’s scholarship on Judge, highlighted in her Frederick Douglass Book Prize-winning book Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge, a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. Dunbar has also published A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City and She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman. Dunbar is the national director of the Association of Black Women Historians as well as the Charles and Mary Beard Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers.
This event is sponsored by The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by The Office of Equity and Inclusivity, The Office of the President, The House Divided Project, The Division of Student Life, The Popel Shaw Center for Race & Ethnicity, The Women’s & Gender Resource Center, and the departments of Africana studies, women’s, gender, & sexuality studies, and law & policy.
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Published February 13, 2023