The Older Frederick Douglass Revealed In Yale's Newly Acquired Collection Of Family Scrapbooks (WNPR)

July 13, 2020

Yale historian David Blight says when he first saw a collection of family scrapbooks of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, he was astonished. Blight had been fascinated by Frederick Douglass all of his life. He’d written a book and edited autobiographies about the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day. But the scrapbooks offered new insights into Douglass’ life and eventually inspired Blight’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. The materials belonged to a collector, Dr. Walter Evans, and have recently been acquired by Yale’s Beinecke Library. Connecticut Public Radio’s Morning Edition host, Diane Orson, spoke with David Blight.

Walter Evans Collection of Frederick Douglass and Douglass Family Papers comes to the Beinecke Library

July 4, 2020

“What, To The American Slave, Is Your Fourth Of July?” (New Haven Independent)

July 3, 2020

Babz Rawls-Ivy, Erik Clemons, David Blight, and Walter O. Evans kept a Fourth of July tradition going — by reading Frederick Douglass’s 1852 Oration, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July.” Yale’s Beinecke Library traditionally holds a public reading of the letter on Independence Day. Due to Covid-19, this year Beinecke recorded local leaders doing the reading at the Institute Library, then put it on Youtube, in installments.

Celebrating Juneteenth with the Solomon Sir Jones films

June 19, 2020

IndieWire called Jones’ films “the most extensive film records we have of Southern and urban black life and culture at the time of rapid social and cultural change for African Americans during the 1920s, the very beginning of the Great Migration, which transformed not only black people as a whole, but America itself.”