Black Women's Battles for Survivors' Benefits in Post-Civil War America

2507 University Avenue,Des Moines IA 50311

25 February, 2022

Description

Dr. Brandi Brimmer will present a guest lecture, open to the public, as part of Drake University's celebration of Black History Month. This presentation explores how poor Black women used newly opened federal institutions during the Reconstruction era to make claims of citizenship and build new lives for themselves in freedom. Based on an analysis pension files initiated by southern Black women, it will examine how newly freed Black women leveraged their status as Union widows to gain access to U.S. pension bureaucracy. Brandi C. Brimmer (She/Her) is the Morehead-Cain Associate Professor in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research recovers poor and working-class Black women’s social justice vision and battles for citizenship during the nineteenth century. She is the author of Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South (Duke University Press, December 2020), which received Honorable Mention for the ABWH Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award for the best book in African American Women’s History. Additionally, her scholarly articles have appeared in the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of the Civil War Era. Brimmer’s research has been supported by the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities Project at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Benjamin Quarles Humanities Institute at Morgan State University, the College of Liberal Arts at Case Western University, the Ford Foundation, and the North Caroliniana Society. Prior to joining the faculty at UNC-CH, she was a residential fellow at the National Humanities Center and taught in the Department of History at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.