THE BLACK WOODS AND ADIRONDACK EXCEPTIONALISM

Amy Godine

Author! Author! Winter Lyceum Series
Sunday, February 25
2:00pm

$5 suggested donation

In 1846 and 1847, a wealthy upstate abolitionist, Gerrit Smith, parceled out 120,000 Adirondack acres to three thousand poor, landless Black New Yorkers. His goal: to help his “grantees” gain voting rights denied to all Black men except the wealthiest. Amy Godine explores the imprint of Adirondack exceptionalism on Smith, on the Black activists who helped Smith find his deedholders, on the homesteaders themselves, and on the generations of historians, travel writers and biographers whose own kind of racialized exceptionalism rationalized their dismissal of Smith’s bold idea and the Black pioneers for 175 years.

From Saratoga Springs, independent scholar Amy Godine, author of The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier (Cornell, 2024) is a writer, curator, and lecturer with a longstanding interest in ethnic, migratory, and Black history in the Adirondack region.