Out of This Strife Will Come Freedom: Free People of Color and the Fight for Equal Rights in the Civil War Era

The Low Lecture

Warren Milteer, Jr., Ph.D.
Associate Professor
U.S. History, Early America, Nineteenth-Century U.S.
The George Washington University

At the outbreak of the Civil War, the vast majority of the nation's people of color were enslaved. Yet nearly half a million of these people were free. For the first time, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. recounts the story of free people of color in the Civil War era United States. He shows how the nation's growing divide in the years leading up to the war, the events of the war itself, and the policies of the postwar period shaped the lives of free people of color living in various regions of the country. His telling also reflects on the ways free people of color used their voices, military service, and political acumen to push for a better version of the United States. Calling upon their experiences fighting for equal rights in the prewar years, free people of color took advantage of the disruption created by the war to lobby for the end of discrimination across the nation.

Hosted by the Department of History and co-sponsored by the Center for Social Science Scholarship.