Թϱ Center for Global Humanities presents ‘The Vice President’s Black Wife’ on Jan. 27
Most of us have a general familiarity with the racial caste system that pervaded for generations across the American South. We might even imagine that we can appreciate the calculations enslaved African Americans made as they struggled to claim agency in a system designed to strip them of their autonomy and ensure their submission. But the lives of these oppressed people were far more complex and the decisions they faced far more gut-wrenching than most of us could ever fully imagine today.
This is the argument award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers will make when she visits the Թϱ Center for Global Humanities to share the troubling story of Julia Ann Chinn, the enslaved wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, who served as vice president of the United States under Martin Van Buren. Myers will present “The Vice President’s Black Wife” on Monday, Jan. 27, at 6 p.m. in Arthur P. Girard Innovation Hall at the Թϱ Portland Campus for the Health Sciences.
The fact that most Americans today have never even heard of Chinn exemplifies the phenomenon known as “historic erasure.” Chinn didn’t fit neatly into the expected stereotype for Black women of her day, and therefore, it was necessary and not at all coincidental that she be silenced and her story largely forgotten. Fortunately, Myers’ painstaking research has rescued Chinn’s story from the shadows of our national memory.
As Myers will detail when she visits Թϱ, although Johnson never freed Chinn, during his frequent absences from his estate, he delegated to her the management of his property Blue Springs, including Choctaw Academy, a boarding school for Indigenous men and boys on the grounds. Additionally, Chinn oversaw Blue Springs’ slave labor force and had substantial control over economic, social, financial, and personal affairs within the couple's world.
Ultimately, Myers will argue, that what makes Chinn's life exceptional is the power Johnson invested in her, the opportunities the couple’s relationship afforded her and their daughters, and white members of the local community’s tacit acceptance of her — up to a point.
Myers serves as director of Graduate Studies in the Indiana University-Bloomington History Department, where she also serves as the Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor of History. A historian of the Black female experience in the United States, her research interests revolve around issues of race, gender, freedom, and power and the ways in which these constructs intersect with one another in the lives of Black women in the Old South.
Myers’ first book, “Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston,” examines the lives of free Black women, both legal and de facto, in Charleston, South Carolina, from 1790-1860. Her most recent book, “The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn,” will serve as the basis for her lecture at UNE.
Myers has won several awards and honors, including an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, the Phillis Wheatley Book Prize for best monograph in Black Studies, the Julia Cherry Spruill Book Award for best monograph in Southern Women’s History, the Anna Julia Cooper-CLR James Book Award for best monograph in Africana Studies, and the George C. Rogers Jr. Book Award for best monograph on South Carolina History.
This will be the first of six events this semester at the Թϱ Center for Global Humanities, where lectures are always free, open to the public, and streamed live online. For more information and to watch the event, please visit the Center for Global Humanities website.