Join Friends of the Main Library St. Augustine for a presentation by Dr. Heather Andrea Williams, Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, as she discusses her 2012 book, “Help Me To Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery.” After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant “information wanted” advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members. Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records and diaries to guide readers back to devastating moments of family separation during slavery when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses and children. Williams shows how searches for family members in the post-Civil War era continue to reverberate in African American culture in the ongoing search for family history and connection across generations.

Dr. Heather Williams is Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania. After training at Harvard, Williams pursued a successful legal career that included time in the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of New York. She then returned to graduate school at Yale to work on African American history and to foster her love of teaching. Since receiving her Ph.D. in 2002, she has established herself as one of the top scholars specializing in the study of slavery and African American history in the 18th and 19th century American South. Her book Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom won the Lillian Smith Book Award 2006 of the Southern Regional Council; American Educational Research Association New Scholar’s Book Award 2005-2006; George A. and Jeanne S. DeLong Book Prize for 2005, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing; Honor Book 2006, Black Caucus of the American Library Association; and, Honorable Mention 2006, History of Education Society Book Prize. Williams is also the author of A Very Short Introduction to American Slavery, published by Oxford University Press. She has received a prestigious Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship for her current project on Jamaican immigration to the United States.

The Lincolnville Museum and Cultural Center is housed in the old Excelsior School building.  The school had been given to the Friends of Lincolnville who started the museum to preserve Lincolnville’s rich black heritage. Today it is a joint effort through three non-profit groups: Friends of Lincolnville, Flagler College Enactus, and St. Augustine Community School of Performing Arts.

The Wednesday Brown Bag Lunch Program is free and open to the public. This presentation will be held on the 2nd floor of the museum. An elevator is available.  For additional information, please call the Main Library at 904.827.6940.