The Vice President's Black Wife

年度克罗斯利讲座*

在这个讲座中, award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers will share the troubling and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn, the enslaved wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, who served as vice president of the 美国 under Martin Van Buren. 约翰逊没有释放中国, 但 during his frequent absences from his estate, he delegated to her the management of his property, 包括乔克托学院, a boarding school for Indigenous men and boys on the grounds. 另外, Chinn, 尽管她被奴役, oversaw Blue Spring's slave labor force and had substantial control over economic, 社会, 金融, and personal affairs within the couple's world. Chinn's relationship with Johnson was unlikely to have been consensual, 然而, 因为她从未被释放.

What makes Chinn's life exceptional is the power that Johnson invested in her, the opportunities the couple's relationship afforded her and her daughters, and the local white community's tacit acceptance of the family—up to a point. When the family left their Kentucky farm, they faced steep limits: pews at the rear of the church, 埋葬在不同的墓地, 被排除在城镇舞会之外, 和更多的. 最终, Johnson’s relationship with Chinn ruined his greater political aspirations, 但, 迈尔斯会解释, it wasn't interracial sex that led to his downfall 但 his refusal to keep it—and Julia Chinn—behind closed doors.

传记

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers serves as Director of Graduate Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington, where she also serves as the Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor of 历史. A historian of the black female experience in the 美国, her research interests revolve around issues of race, 性别, 自由, and power and the ways in which these constructs intersect with one another in the lives of black women in the Old South.

迈尔斯的第一本书， Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston, examines the lives of free black women, both legal and 事实上的, in Charleston, South Carolina, from 1790-1860. 她最近的一本书， The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn, will serve as the basis for her lecture at UNE. 

Myers has won several awards and honors, including an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, the Phillis Wheatley Book Prize for best monograph in Black Studies, the Julia Cherry Spruill Book Award for best monograph in Southern Women’s 历史, the Anna Julia Cooper-CLR James Book Award for, best monograph in Africana Studies, 和乔治C. 罗杰斯小. Book Award for best monograph on South Carolina 历史.

建议阅读

迈尔斯，阿姆丽塔·查克拉巴蒂. The Vice President’s Black Wife the Untold Life of Julia Chinn. The University of North Carolina Press, 2023.

* The Crosley Lecture is named in memory of 牧师. Marion Crosley and his wife Mehitable Adelia Swift Crosley and is funded by Barbara Goodbody, a longtime friend of Westbrook College and the University of New England. 牧师. Crosley was a Universalist minister who lived in 波特兰 from 1885 to 1889 and served on the board of the Westbrook Seminary, which later became Westbrook College and is now part of UNE. 这个讲座, 1984年成立, was initially devoted to the topic of ethics, 但 the founding of the 全球人文中心 and the launch of a global initiatives program at the University of New England led to the renaming of the lecture to best reflect Barbara’s interest in global traditions and her tireless immersion in the world of ideas and arts.