Keynote Lecture 2 - Annual Conference | Amrita Chakrabarti Myers (Indiana University, Bloomington) “Dangerous Characters”: Black Women, Constructions of Freedom, and White Violence in the Post-Civil War South

We are delighted to welcome Prof. Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers of Indiana University, Bloomington, and current REAF visiting professor, to give a keynote lecture at our annual conference on “Dangerous Characters”: Black Women, Constructions of Freedom, and White Violence in the Post-Civil War South.

Abstract | Freedom. A small word with a long, often tortuous history. Its definition is constantly evolving, and still hotly contested. Perhaps the only thing people can agree on is that, as US labor activist and leader A. Philip Randolph noted, “Freedom is never granted. It is won.” This talk focuses on this “friction of freedom” by focusing on the lives of Black women in the Post-Civil War South.

In the post-slavery era, demanded freedom had dangerous consequences for Black women. In a time and place where Black folks’ labor no longer directly benefited white southerners, the response to Black women who expected equity and justice was varying levels of white violence. Black women were assaulted and lynched not only to punish individual women, however, but to terrorize entire Black communities and remind them of what happened when a Black woman forgot her place as a silent and submissive laborer to white people’s needs.

“Dangerous Characters” illuminates that the struggle to determine who is free in the United States, and what freedom ought to look like for various groups, especially Black women, has been long and bloody. It is also ongoing. By recovering these stories, we gain new clarity and insights on the “afterlives of slavery” in the post-Civil War Era and into our present moment.

Bio | Amrita Chakrabarti Myers is the Ruth N. Halls Professor of History and Gender Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, where she is also affiliated with African American and African Diaspora Studies and American Studies. An award-winning historian, writer, educator, and public intellectual, her work examines the intersections of race, gender, power, freedom, and citizenship in the lives of Black women in the United States, particularly in the nineteenth-century South.

Professor Myers is the author of the acclaimed book Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston, which received multiple national awards for its groundbreaking analysis of how free and enslaved Black women navigated and challenged systems of oppression in the antebellum South. Her most recent book, The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn, recovers the life of Julia Chinn, an enslaved Black woman whose long-term relationship with U.S. Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson illuminates the complex entanglements of race, slavery, gender, and power in American history.

Beyond her scholarship, Professor Myers is deeply engaged in public history, social justice advocacy, and community-based work. Through her teaching, writing, public speaking, and diversity and equity initiatives, she seeks to connect historical inquiry with contemporary conversations about systemic racism, inequality, and social change. Her work demonstrates how recovering marginalized voices from the past can reshape our understanding of American history and its continuing impact on the present.

The Leibniz ScienceCampus 2026 Annual Conference is supported by the Hans Vielberth Regensburg University Foundation. The conference takes place in cooperation with REAF.