Virtual Speaker Series: The Black Woods with Amy Godine

A Two-Way Resonance: How antislavery activists in New York and Vermont found common cause before the Civil War 

Amy Godine, author of The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier, explores the influence of Vermont's antislavery culture on a mid-19th-century abolitionist-founded farm initiative in northern New York.

Vermont's political egalitarianism was well known in antislavery New York. Black activists who embraced New York land baron Gerrit Smith's plan to resettle 3,000 Black New Yorkers in the Adirondack woods, revered Vermont for its agrarian and antislavery culture. White farmers in Vermont followed the progress of Smith's Black farm colony and kept tabs on the antislavery work of John Brown, the Adirondack farmer whose bid to seize a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry won him lasting fame. After the Civil War, several of the Black Adirondack pioneers resumed farming on new land in Vermont. With ample stories from archival sources, Godine documents the dynamism and fluidity of the New York/Vermont connection. 

From Saratoga Springs, New York, independent scholar Amy Godine has been writing and speaking about ethnic, migratory, and Black Adirondack history for more than three decades. Exhibits she has curated include Dreaming of Timbuctoo at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site in North Elba, New York.

Register to attend here.