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Fighting for Freedom: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and the Civil War
Harriet Tubman’s Civil War service was the least known part of her legendary life. Drawing on her groundbreaking research for her new book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid and Black Freedom during the Civil War, DR. EDDA FIELDS-BLACK will discuss how Tubman, the intelligence she gathered, and her ring of spies, scouts, and pilots played a central war in the Combahee River Raid, one of the most dramatic episodes of the Civil War and the largest and most successful slave rebellion in US history. She contextualizes Tubman, her group of men, the US Colored Troops risking their freedom and their very lives so that others might be free is a small slice of the long history of Black freedom.
“Say Their Names:” Research Approaches to the History of Slavery and the African Diaspora
Reflecting on the groundbreaking work from her new book, COMBEE, and her decades of experience uncovering the voices of Africans and people of African descent. DR. EDDA FIELDS-BLACK shows how historians of slavery and genealogists can recover the names and stories of their enslaved ancestors in the Civil War Pension files. She discusses how finding her own ancestor (Hector Fields, #4th Regiment, Company C, USCT) led her to reconstruct the enslaved community that liberated themselves in the Combahee River Raid and enabled her to tell an intimate story of enslaved people’s lives and a triumphant story of them seizing their freedom. This research method coupled with newly digitized records could help millions of African American families find their enslaved ancestors.
Reviving the Humanities, Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice
DR. EDDA FIELDS-BLACK’s work embodies “taking history off the shelf and putting it on stage.” It is an exemplar of how humanists remain relevant, can combat declining enrollments in humanities courses and of humanities majors. In this multi-media presentation, Fields-Black discusses her new kind of collaboration, a humanist (an historian) with world renowned visual and performing artists, to reimagine the past of Africans enslaved on Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations by telling our ancestors’ story, an African and African-American story, through a classical music genre.
Facing Climate Change: West African Rice Farmers and Lowcountry Rice Fields
From her decades of experience conducting research in West African and South Carolina/ Georgia historic rice fields, DR. EDDA FIELDS-BLACK sheds light on the West African skill and ingenuity used by enslaved Africans and their descendants, upsetting stereotypes about enslaved laborers acting solely as brute laborers by. And, she looks for lessons in the past to solve current and future challenges as both the West African rice farmers and the historic Lowcountry rice fields are threatened by sea level rise and climate.
Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black is a direct descendant of a formerly enslaved man who liberated himself after the Battle of Port Royal, joined the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers (34th Regiment USCT), and fought in the Combahee River Raid and Africans enslaved on rice plantations in Colleton County, SC. Since an early age, she has been curious about her grandparent’s “peculiar” speech patterns. Her mother’s historical and genealogical research was her first inkling of Gullah as both a rich language and culture with its peculiar history. Her desire to reclaim her family’s history and culture has taken her to the rice fields of Sierra Leone and Republic of Guinea in West Africa, South Carolina and Georgia.
Fields-Black’s new book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid and Black Freedom during the Civil War is the first detailed account of one of the most dramatic episodes of the Civil War, and the central part Harriet Tubman played in it. COMBEE presents new, never-before-seen documents that give significant new interpretation of Harriet Tubman’s life and legacy and identifies the enslaved people who escaped enslavement on 7 rice plantations on the Combahee River Raid, tracing them backwards into enslavement and forward into freedom.
Fields-Black is a specialist in the transnational history of West Africa rice, peasant farmers in the pre-colonial Upper Guinea coast and enslaved laborers on antebellum Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations. She is the author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora and co-editor of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories. She is executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice” (with three-time EMMY™ Award-winning classical music composer, John Wineglass). Fields-Black has worked as a consultant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the International African American Museum, and the Senator John Heinz History Center. She and her family live in Pittsburgh, where she teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University.
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