Gilder-Jordan Lecture: “Black Family Matters in History from Slavery to Our Own Times” with Tera Hunter

Tera W. Hunter is the 2026 Gilder-Jordan Lecturer in Southern Cultural History. Hunter will discuss how the Black family is significant to understanding legacies of race and power in American history, dating back to the colonial era. The Black family has been a powerful force in shaping how people of African ancestry are treated within and outside the body politic and a source of survival and strength. Her lecture will place into focus different episodes from slavery (when marriage and families were not legally recognized) to the aftermath of emancipation, as families have faced new challenges in the Jim Crow and post–civil rights eras. How we regard the Black family socially and economically matters not only to the people directly impacted but to the well-being of the nation at large. Tera W. Hunter is the Edwards Professor of American History and Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century and To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War. Organized through the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the African American Studies Program, the Center for Civil War Research, and the Department of History, the Gilder-Jordan Lecture Series is made possible through the generosity of the Gilder Foundation, Inc. The series honors the late Richard Gilder of New York and his family, as well as University of Mississippi alumni Dan and Lou Jordan of Virginia.