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This lecture by Michael L. Dickinson, Ph.D., examines the central contradiction of the Declaration of Independence. While proclaiming that all men are created equal, the emerging nation upheld systems of slavery and racial exclusion. The session explores how people of African descent navigated this tension, contributed to the Revolutionary War, and challenged the boundaries of freedom in pursuit of the American promise.

About the speaker

Michael L. Dickinson (Ph.D., University of Delaware) is an associate professor in the Department of History in the College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University. His research focuses on African American history, particularly Black life and labor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across the United States and the Atlantic World. He is the author of "Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic" (University of Georgia Press, 2022), which received the Paul E. Lovejoy Book Prize for excellence and originality in slavery scholarship.