Distinguished and award-winning scholar Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham will deliver the 2021 James Weldon Johnson Distinguished Lecture at Emory University via Zoom on Thursday, April 1, at 4 p.m.

Higginbotham’s talk, “History in the Face of Slavery: A Family Portrait,” will include a presentation of photographs related to her own family from the slavery era into the first two decades of the 20th century, with a focus on the role of photographs as sources of history. 

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by Emory’s James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference. Register here.

Higginbotham is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies and the chair of the Department of History at Harvard University. She also is the national president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, most notably the 2014 National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama for “illuminating the African American journey.” In March 2019, she received the John Hope Franklin Award sponsored by Diverse magazine and the TIAA Institute.

The James Weldon Johnson Distinguished Lecture is an opportunity to bring to Atlanta the innovative work of leading national scholars of race, whose ideas are hugely significant and relevant to the problems of our time. And as a memorial lecture, these contemporary talks serve as important bridges in the intellectual and realistic continuum from the scholar-activism of James Weldon Johnson’s day to the present.

Visit www.jwji.emory.edu for more information. Stay current with JWJI events on the James Weldon Johnson Institute page on Facebook and @JWJIEmory on Twitter.