Friday Night Talks: Amy Godine, “The Black Woods”

Join us for a talk with Amy Godine, author of The Black Woods. Godine will present about her book and then take questions from the audience. Copies of the book will be available at the event.

In The Black Woods, Amy Godine recalls the pioneering Black families who moved to the Adirondacks in the mid-19th century to build farms and rural communities, and to gain the right to vote. In 1846 and ’47, upstate abolitionist and land baron donated 120,000 Adirondack acres to 3,000 Black New York men to ease their migration from the cities and their access to the vote. Since 1821, Black New Yorkers were denied the vote unless they could show ownership of $250 in real property. The Black Woods plumbs the rich experience of the grantee-pioneers on an obdurate, unknown frontier, and tracks the fate of Smith’s “scheme of justice and benevolence” in the resistant pages of Adirondack history, and in Black memory, too.