CMU Juneteenth 2024: Freedom Day
CMU Community Events
2024 Juneteenth Keynote Lecture with Dr. Edda Fields-Black: “Fighting for Freedom: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and the Civil War”
Tuesday, June 18, 2024, at 12 p.m.
Simmons Auditorium B, First Floor, Tepper School of Business
Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black is an associate professor of history in CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences and a specialist in the transnational histories of West African rice farmers, the African diaspora and enslaved laborers on Lowcountry rice plantations. A direct descendant of an enslaved man who escaped during the Civil War, she has traced her ancestry to rice plantations in South Carolina and West Africa. Her new book, “COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War,” provides a detailed account of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman's most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants.
Her Juneteenth lecture will explore 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 U.S. history.
Third Annual Juneteenth Welcome Reception with Sankofa Employee Resource Group
Monday, June 17, 2024, from 4:30 - 6:30 p.m.
PNC Foundation Room, Second Floor, Tepper School of Business
We are excited to once again partner with Sankofa, CMU’s Black Faculty and Staff Alliance Employee Resource Group, to kick off this time of remembrance and celebration to reinvigorate the power of our communal voice for freedom that is informed by the lessons of our past. Allies, supporters and friends are welcome to gather, build relationships and come together in celebration of Juneteenth.