Created Equal: Slavery by Another Name & The Freedom Riders

Join us for a film screening and discussion facilitated by Joanne Pope Melish!

Based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning book by Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name tells the stories of men, charged with crimes and often guilty of nothing, who were bought, sold, abused, and subjected to deadly working conditions. Raymond Arsenault’s 2007 book Freedom Riders served as the basis for the film of the same name, which tells the terrifying, moving, and suspenseful story of a time when white and black volunteers riding a bus into the Deep South risked being jailed, beaten, or killed, as white local and state authorities ignored or encouraged violent attacks. Clips from both films will be shown, and they can be viewed online in their entirety at: createdequal.neh.gov.

Joanne Pope Melish is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky and a visiting scholar in American Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860.

Created Equal: America’s Civil Rights Struggle is made possible through a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as part of its Bridging Cultures initiative, in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.