Dr. Wilma King to Give Black History Month Lecture

Follow us on Twitter: @BaylorUMedia

Dr. Wilma King, Arvarh E. Strickland Distinguished Professor at the University of Missouri-Colombia, will lecture on "Chattel's Children: Enslaved Girls and Boys in the North and South before 1865" in honor of Black History Month at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 23, in Kayser Auditorium of the Hankamer School of Business on the Baylor University campus. This lecture, sponsored by the Baylor History Department, is free and open to the public.

King received her bachelor's in U.S. history from Jackson State University. She holds a doctorate in recent U.S. history from Indiana University. She is the recipient of the first Arvarh E. Strickland Chair in Black History and Culture, and arrived at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1999 where she teaches courses on African-American women in U.S. history and contributes to the Black Studies Program.

Her research interests involve African Americans, specifically women and children, two important and influential groups that history has consistently overlooked, she said.

"In many instances, free black women have not been included to any great extent in general histories of African Americans, but my research will help to fill that void," King said.

Her book Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth Century America received the 1997 Outstanding Book Award from the National College of Black Political Scientists. The recently published African American Childhoods in Historical Perspective examines the lives of black children through the modern Civil Rights Movement.

King also is producing a body of work focused on African-American children. She is working on a second edition of Stolen Childhood that will include a chapter on children in the transatlantic slave trade.

For more information on this lecture, go to www.baylor.edu/history or contact Jones at (245) 710-6299.

by Jessica Puente, student newswriter, (254) 710-6805