African American Women during Slavery and Freedom

Dr. Julianne Malveaux, President Emerita of Bennett College, America’s oldest historically black college for women, moderates a conversation with Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens and Hannah Rosen.

Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens is an Assistant Professor of History at Queens College, CUNY in Queens, New York. Over the past few years, Dr. Cooper Owens has made a number of appearances on national and international media outlets such as PBS, NPR, Al Jazeera America, and Slate.com as an expert on issues of race, Southern identity, medicine, and U.S. slavery. Dr. Cooper Owens’ manuscript, Mothers of Gynecology: Slavery, Race, and the Birth of Professional American Women’s Medicine is coming out of the University of Georgia Press’ Race and Atlantic World Series in 2017.

Dr. Hannah Rosen, Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at William and Mary, received a B.A. from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Her research and teaching have focused on the social and cultural history of the nineteenth-century United States, and particularly on African Americans and the intersection of race and gender in histories of slavery, emancipation, and postemancipation society. She is the author of Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (UNC Press, 2009, recipient of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize, the Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians, and the Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Southern Association of Women’s Historians).

BENJAMIN DRUMMOND EMANCIPATION DAY CELEBRATION
On April 16, 2015, Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital inaugurated its first annual Benjamin Drummond Emancipation Day Celebration. In commemorating the end of slavery in the nation’s capital, Hill Center will present three days of celebratory and scholarly programs. These free and public events will bring together a diverse group of prominent scholars, artists, and public figures for programming that will have broad public appeal and engage attendees in a deeper understanding of the African American experience during the Civil War.

In 1864, Abraham Lincoln commissioned a Civil War Naval Hospital near the Marine Barracks on Capitol Hill. The Old Naval Hospital opened its doors in 1866 and Benjamin Drummond, an African American seaman, was the hospital’s first patient. The series is named in his honor.

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