Award-winning author and historian Edward Ball will discuss his book in progress, a pathbreaking work on four Black families that survived enslavement and forced migration, at a public program in Litrenta Lecture Hall. Ball is the 2022-23 Patrick Henry History Fellow at Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.

Ball has spent the academic year in Chestertown researching his new book Sold Down the River, an account of enslaved African Americans who were uprooted from the Chesapeake and resettled in the Mississippi Delta in the 50 years before the Civil War. “Sold down the river” was a phrase used by 19^th century African Americans to describe their experience of forced migration and separation at the hands of white enslavers.

This story of family separation will be told through the experiences of four living Black families whose ancestors survived the journey.

“It is a big piece of U.S. history, but overlooked, because its drama has not been told as one story,” Ball said. “It is an exodus story, a migration spectacle missing from national memory, a thousand-mile river of people that reached from the Chesapeake to Louisiana for fifty years.”

At the April 24 program, Ball will discuss his research in conversation with Adam Goodheart, the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of the Starr Center, whose book 1861 also highlighted stories of Black resistance to enslavement. This event is co-sponsored by the Rose O’Neill Literary House and is free and open to the public.

For the past 25 years, Ball has been widely recognized for challenging current-day white families to reckon honestly and openly with their ancestors’ legacies of enslavement, white supremacy, and white privilege. His first book, Slaves in the Family, an account of ten African American families enslaved on South Carolina plantations owned by Ball’s family, received the National Book Award for nonfiction.

Ball’s most recent book, Life of a Klansman (2020) turned a highly critical lens on his great-grandfather Constant Lecorgne, a virulent racist and marauder in the Ku Klux Klan. “This is a story for our cultural moment, as Americans begin to engage with and acknowledge the ways that white supremacy endures in our society,” wrote the noted Black author W. Ralph Eubanks in a Wall Street Journal review.

Ball is cognizant of the white-centered narratives that pervade histories of enslavement. “To look at white supremacy in the family mirror might be timely, but storytelling about past African American lives, still opaque in U.S. history, is the current challenge—and Sold Down the River tries to do some of that,” he said. “The book allows individual Black families, with their consent and participation, to convey and represent the vast story of the million people who were displaced.”

The Patrick Henry History Fellowship is cosponsored by Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and the Rose O’Neill Literary House. A full-time, residential fellowship, it supports outstanding work on American history by both scholars and non-academics with an emphasis on America’s founding era and/or the nation’s founding ideas. The fellowship was established and permanently endowed in 2008 with a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as support from the Nuttle family, descendants of the Revolutionary patriot Patrick Henry. Recipients of the fellowship, including many nationally acclaimed scholars, have taught and mentored Washington College undergraduates during their residencies.

In addition to his current residency, Ball has received past fellowships from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, as well as a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

 
BACK TO STARR EVENTS