Slavery’s Lasting Impacts Is Topic of Two-Day Symposium - NewsAdvance.com : News - Local Lynchburg, Va. Area
To raise discussion about slavery and its lasting impacts on the United States, Randolph College and Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest are calling upon scholars, artists and the community at large for a two-day symposium.
The conference, “Facing the Past, Freeing the Future: Slavery’s Legacy, Freedom’s Promise,” will be held April 3-5.
Scholars will include Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family” Christy Coleman, president of the American Civil War Center in Richmond; and Spencer Crew, a former director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati.
The symposium, open to the public, was developed to celebrate an official partnership between Randolph College and Poplar Forest to share resources and add internship opportunities for students.
“Black and white Americans have been sharing this continent since the early 17th century, yet they’ve never really been properly introduced. They still remain separated to a degree that is not healthy for the body politic and not healthy for any of us,” he said. “That’s the legacy of slavery and it does seem to me … we’ll never fully move past that in any healthy way unless we totally and fearlessly and completely face what slavery was and did to us.”
A detailed schedule is available at web.randolphcollege.edu.