Black History Month Lecture

The Department of History presents this free and open to the public lecture for our 2025 Black History Month Speaker Series, which features Dr. Ronald Angelo Johnson, Ralph & Bessie Mae Lynn Chair and Associate Professor of History at Baylor University. 

The lecture will be held on February 5th, 2025 at the Paul L Foster Campus for Business and Innovation, 1621 S 3rd St. Waco, TX 76706, in room 240.  The lecture will be held from 4:00 - 5:00 pm. 

The lecture “A Reinterpretation of Blackness & Freedom in the American Revolution” will introduce the Baylor community to the research methods and sources utilized in his latest book, Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy during the American Revolution. Johnson's latest book offers a story in which Black and white patriots, along with their allies of color from Saint-Domingue (later Haiti), fight together for US independence—though guided by diverse motivations.

Entangled Alliances is a US history of the American Revolution, which fuses the search for freedom by Black and white founders in the United States and Saint-Domingue into a coherent story of collective resistance during the most explosive twenty-year period of the eighteenth century. While modern understandings of freedom are often linked to the US Declaration of Independence, Entangled Alliances argues the desire of Black Atlantic inhabitants for liberty and their will to resist slavery predated the fateful standoff between Minutemen and Redcoats at Lexington and Concord. 

Entangled Alliances and the Black History Month lecture will offer scholars, educators, and lay readers new ways to understand and to teach important Black participation in revolutionary moments like the Boston Massacre and the Siege of Savannah.