Scott to chronicle paths from slavery to freedom

Updated 12:00 PM February 9, 2004

Distinguished University Professor Lecture

Scott to chronicle paths from slavery to freedom

By Jared Wadley
News Service

Many people prefer to leave the subject of slavery in the past, but not U-M professor Rebecca Scott.

As an historian, Scott believes that people in the United States and other parts of the world can benefit from trying to understand how national citizenship emerged after the end of slavery in their respective countries.

"Slavery has an ending date, which makes it seem bounded, and perhaps safely locked away in the past. But post-emancipation society has no ending date; it is the direct antecedent to the world we live in today," says Scott, the Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and professor of law.

Scott will trace the life histories of several people who lived through the transition from slavery to freedom in Cuba and Louisiana in her Distinguished University Professorship Lecture at 4 p.m. Feb. 10 in the Rackham Amphitheatre.

Scott is recognized for her groundbreaking publications on slavery, race and law in post-emancipation Cuba, Brazil and the United States. She has been visiting Cienfuegos, a port city in southern Cuba, for several years to work with archival documents and to interview residents about their families who lived during slavery—which ended in that country in 1886.

By talking to family members, who often are receptive about sharing their legacies, she is able to lend more voices to Cuba's history, she says.

"It feels alive to me, that I can sit and talk with them, and we can move their stories into a sphere that may otherwise seem populated only by national heroes," she says.

An archivist in Cienfuegos and a German historian in Cuba collaborate with Scott on her lectures and writings.

Scott, who joined the U-M faculty in 1980, says her interest in slavery originated in 1974 as a graduate student studying history at Princeton University. At that time, many historians influenced by the civil rights movement were reexamining the period of slavery and emancipation in the United States. Scott's first research involved how children in North Carolina had been legally bound to labor for their former masters in the late 1860s despite the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.

That work piqued her curiosity about how emancipation unfolded in other societies, such as Cuba and Brazil, which were among the largest slaveholding countries in the 19th century.

Through her research, Scott learned that as Cuba and the United States emerged from slavery, former slaves stepped forcefully onto the public scene to claim rights and public standing. In each country, a deadly struggle followed over the shape of citizenship after slavery. At the end of the 19th century, these struggles took constitutional forms, leading to widespread disfranchisement in the United States, but to universal suffrage for men in Cuba. Those political outcomes, in turn, helped to define the boundaries of freedom for people of African descent.

The Distinguished University Professorships, created in 1947, provide recipients maximum freedom to pursue scholarly and teaching efforts to contribute to the University and the nation.

Each professorship is named for a person of distinction in the same general field as the recipient, preferably a person associated with U-M. Scott's professorship is named after Charles Gibson, a scholar of colonial Latin America and U-M history professor from 1965-83.

Distinguished University Professor Lecture

Scott to chronicle paths from slavery to freedom

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