James McCune Smith Memorial Lecture
James McCune Smith Memorial Lecture
Black History Month, College of Arts
Date: Thursday 29 October 2020
Time: 15:30 - 17:00
Venue: Zoom
Category: Public lectures, Academic events, Student events, Alumni events
Speaker: Prof Matthew J. Smith
Prof Matthew J. Smith (UCL) will deliver this year's James McCune Smith Memorial Lecture. Organised by the University of Glasgow's Dr Christine Whyte and hosted by the University's Beniba Centre for Slavery Studies.
Professor Smith is the Director of UCL’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership (LBS) and Chair in the Department of History at UCL. He has served as head of the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. He is the author of Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica After Emancipation, awarded the 2015 Haiti Illumination Project Book Prize by the Haitian Studies Association, and of Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, which was the winner of the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis prize for the best book in Caribbean Studies from the Caribbean Studies Association.
About this Event
In 1804 the republic of Haiti became the first Caribbean territory to abolish slavery and demolish colonial rule. This was an end and beginning. Freedom from slavery meant that in a world dominated by imperial powers Haiti would be considered a threat to notions of white rule. But for Haiti’s Caribbean neighbours it was something more promising. Haiti defined the contours of Caribbean Freedom and inspired contradictory visions of the future of the region.
This presentation will examine the implications of Haitian independence for black people in the Caribbean after slavery. It will give special focus to the movement of Haitians across the archipelago and how the stories of their intersecting lives tell us volumes of the expectations of liberty and decolonization and the enduring struggle for recognition among black Caribbeans.
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James McCune Smith was the first African American to be awarded a medical degree, receiving an MD from the University of Glasgow in 1837. Born into slavery in 1813, he was freed by New York State's Emancipation Act on July 4, 1827. McCune Smith went on to gain three qualifications from the University of Glasgow - a bachelor's degree in 1835, a master’s degree in 1836, and his medical doctorate in 1837.