The Author Series Committee welcomes preeminent historian and writer Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black. She will be discussing her Pulitzer Prize-winning book COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War, (2024, Oxford University Press). Joining Dr. Fields-Black in conversation is University of Michigan Associate Professor of History & Women's and Gender Studies Dr. LaKisha Michelle Simmons.

Most Americans know of Harriet Tubman's legendary life: escaping enslavement in 1849, she led more than 60 others out of bondage via the Underground Railroad, gave instructions on getting to freedom to scores more, and went on to live a lifetime fighting for change. Yet the many biographies, children's books, and films about Tubman have less to say about a crucial chapter of Tubman’s life: during the Civil War, hired by the Union Army, she ventured into the heart of slave territory--Beaufort, South Carolina--to live, work, and gather intelligence for a daring raid up the Combahee River to attack rice plantations in the South Carolina Lowcountry, a breadbasket of the Confederacy.

Edda L. Fields-Black--herself a descendent of one of the formerly enslaved men who fought in the raid--shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched seven rice plantations and liberated 756 people, people whose Lowcountry Creole language and culture Tubman could not even understand. Black men who had liberated themselves from bondage on South Carolina's Sea Island cotton plantations after the Battle of Port Royal in November 1861 enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and risked their lives in the effort.

Using previous unexamined documents, including US Civil War Pension File, bills of sale, wills, marriage settlements, and estate papers from planters' families, Fields-Black brings to life intergenerational, extended enslaved families, neighbors, praise-house members, and sweethearts forced to work in South Carolina's deadly tidal rice swamps, sold, and separated during the antebellum period. When Tubman and the gunboats arrived and blew their steam whistles, many of those people clambered aboard, sailed to freedom, and were eventually reunited with their families. The able-bodied Black men freed in the Combahee River Raid enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought behind Confederate lines for the freedom of others still enslaved not just in South Carolina but Georgia and Florida.

After the war, many returned to the same rice plantations from which they had escaped, purchased land, married, and buried each other. In the early 20th century, the formerly enslaved people on the Sea Island cotton and indigo plantations, together with those in the semi-urban port cities of Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah, and on rice plantations in the coastal plains, created the distinctly American Gullah Geechee dialect, culture, and identity--perhaps the most significant legacy of Harriet Tubman's Combahee River Raid.

Copies of COMBEE will be available for purchase from Source Booksellers.

About Edda: Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black is a direct descendant of a formerly enslaved man who liberated himself after the Battle of Port Royal, joined the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers (34th Regiment USCT), and fought in the Combahee River Raid and Africans enslaved on rice plantations in Colleton County, SC. Since an early age, she has been curious about her grandparents “peculiar” speech patterns. Her mother’s historical and genealogical research was her first inkling of Gullah as both a rich language and culture with its peculiar history. Her desire to reclaim her family’s history and culture has taken her to the rice fields of Sierra Leone and Republic of Guinea in West Africa, South Carolina and Georgia.

Fields-Black is a specialist in the transnational history of West Africa rice, peasant farmers in the pre-colonial Upper Guinea coast and enslaved laborers on antebellum Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations. She is author of "Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora" and co-editor of "Rice: Global Networks and New Histories." She is executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice” (with three-time EMMY™ Award-winning classical music composer, John Wineglass). Fields-Black has worked as a consultant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the International African American Museum, and the Senator John Heinz History Center. She and her family live in Pittsburgh, where she teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University and serves as Director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center.

About LaKisha: LaKisha Michelle Simmons is a historian of African American gender history specializing in Black girlhood, history of the family, history of sexuality and southern history in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Simmons is the author of Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans (UNC Press, 2015), which won the SAWH Julia Cherry Spruill Prize for best book in southern women's history and received Honorable Mention for the ABWH Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award for the best book in African American women's history. She is the co-editor of The Global History of Black Girlhood (University of Illinois Press, summer 2022).

This is NOT a ticketed event, which means are seats are available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Registering for Edda's talk is highly encouraged in order to receive important updates about his visit.

Questions? Email msummers@detroitpubliclibrary.org!