Millington Bergeson-Lockwood Talk
Millington Bergeson-Lockwood Talk
The Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies invites you to attend a talk by Professor Millington Bergeson-Lockwood (UMD) titled "Black Boston and ‘The Beast’: Benjamin Butler and Conflicts over African American Partisanship in 1880s Boston, Massachusetts.' Comments by Professor Robert Chiles (UMD).
Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to millercenter@umd.edu
Millington Bergeson-Lockwood specializes in African American and nineteenth and twentieth century United States urban, political, and legal history. He received his bachelor’s degree from Boston College in 2003 and his master’s degree in 2009 and Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan in 2011. He is currently a lecturer at the University of Maryland. Before joining Maryland, he was an adjunct assistant professor at George Mason University and the 2012-2013 postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE) at Carnegie Mellon University.
Dr. Bergeson-Lockwood’s presentation today is drawn from his first book, A Union Among Ourselves: African Americans and Urban Politics in Boston, Massachusetts, 1865-1903, currently in progress. In this larger project, he argues that electoral politics and partisanship shaped African Americans’ public political identity and that debates over party affiliation were proxy fights over the place of black citizens in the nation. A Union Among Ourselves forces a rethinking of the relationship between grassroots mobilization and the formal political process as it illuminates the significance of African Americans’ use of urban political party machinery to advance their struggle for racial equality and full citizenship rights.
In addition to his current project, Dr. Bergeson-Lockwood is beginning a second book that explores the contours of public accommodation discrimination in the nineteenth century. Drawn from this latest research, his article, “‘We Do Not Care Particularly About the Skating Rinks’: African American Challenges to Racial Discrimination in Places of Public Amusement in Nineteenth Century Boston, Massachusetts,” is forthcoming from the Journal of the Civil War Era.
A pdf of the paper will be made available on Friday April 25th.