Black Declarations of Independence: Before and After 1776

The Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, in partnership with American Philosophical Society, will host Black Declarations of Independence, Before and After 1776, a two-day public conference exploring how Black people have articulated, enacted, and reimagined freedom across time.

The significance of this event is especially urgent amid current debates and controversies surrounding Philadelphia’s 250th-anniversary commemorations. This gathering insists that any reckoning with 1776 must also attend to the multiple, ongoing declarations of freedom that mark the presence and persistence of Black life within, and beyond, American history.

We are pleased to announce that our headlining speakers will include:

• Christopher Brown, historian of the British empire and professor of history at Columbia University, with award-winning projects such as Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (2006)
• Catherine Clinton, Denman Chair of American History at the University of Texas in San Antonio, Professor Emerita at Queen’s University Belfast, and a pioneering historian of American women, the American South, and the Civil War
• Vanessa Northington Gamble, University Professor of Medical Humanities at The George Washington University, internationally recognized expert on the history of American medicine, author of several widely acclaimed publications on racial and ethnic disparities in health care and bioethics
• Annette Gordon-Reed, Carl. M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University, and Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello (2008) and On Juneteenth (2021)
• Elizabeth Hinton, professor of History, Black Studies, and Law at Yale University, and author of New York Times Notables, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (2016) and America on Fire (2021)
• Nell Irvin Painter, renowned historian, artist, author, and Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, Princeton University, with bestsellers such as Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (1996)
• Jonathan Schroeder, historian, literary critic, lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design, and editor of John Swanson Jacobs’s long lost autobiographical slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery (2024)
• Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (2016), with an upcoming release, Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage (2026)

The full program can be found here.