Description:

Please join us (in person or online) to celebrate the release of Black Organizing in Pre-Civil War Illinois: Creating Community, Demanding Justice.

This event will feature a panel discussion with the exhibit organizers. Attendees can come to the in-person event at Northwestern, or participate virtually through a live Zoom.

>>If you will participate remotely, please click the "Register" link below.

>>If you will participate in person, please come to the Trienens Forum (Room #1515) in Kresge Hall.

Panel discussants

Emiliano Aguilar, Lia Davis, Josh Honn, Valeria Lira-Ruelas, Kate Masur, Hope McCaffrey, Shira Nash, Mikala Stokes, Marquis Taylor, and Matt Taylor.

About the exhibit

This new web exhibit—produced over the last two years by a team of Northwestern students, staff, and faculty—charts the history of African American life and activism in Illinois in the 1840s and 1850s. It describes how Black settlers moved here and established communities despite the racist “black laws” of Illinois that were designed to marginalize and exclude them. Early Black organizing culminated in the first statewide Black political convention, which met in Chicago in 1853. The exhibit explains how that convention came into existence and what it accomplished. It also offers biographies of twenty-five individual Black women and men whose fascinating stories reveal some of the diversity of Black life in the Midwest in this period. 

The web exhibit, which is freely available to the public, illuminates the early African American history of Illinois for a broad audience. It is associated with and inspired by the renowned Colored Conventions Project, based at Penn State University. The organizers hope the exhibit will provide new materials for teaching Illinois Black history, prompt new questions, and inspire new research.

Photo: John and Mary Jones, pictured in the 1840s. (Courtesy of Wikimedia commons and Bruce Purnell.)