CMU Juneteenth 2024: Freedom Day

We are excited to once again partner with Sankofa, CMU’s Black Faculty and Staff Alliance Employee Resource Group, to kick off this time of remembrance and celebration to reinvigorate the power of our communal voice for freedom that is informed by the lessons of our past. Allies, supporters and friends are welcome to gather, build relationships and come together in celebration of Juneteenth.

Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black is a direct descendant of a formerly enslaved man who liberated himself after the Battle of Port Royal, joined the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers (34th Regiment USCT), and fought in the Combahee River Raid and Africans enslaved on rice plantations in Colleton County, SC. Since an early age, she has been curious about her grandparent’s “peculiar” speech patterns. Her mother’s historical and genealogical research was her first inkling of Gullah as both a rich language and culture with its peculiar history. Her desire to reclaim her family’s history and culture has taken her to the rice fields of Sierra Leone and Republic of Guinea in West Africa, South Carolina and Georgia.

Fields-Black’s new book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid and Black Freedom during the Civil War is the first detailed account of one of the most dramatic episodes of the Civil War, and the central part Harriet Tubman played in it. COMBEE presents new, never-before-seen documents that give significant new interpretation of Harriet Tubman’s life and legacy and identifies the enslaved people who escaped enslavement on seven rice plantations on the Combahee River Raid, tracing them backwards into enslavement and forward into freedom.

Fields-Black is a specialist in the transnational history of West Africa rice, peasant farmers in the pre-colonial Upper Guinea coast and enslaved laborers on antebellum Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations. She is the author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora and co-editor of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories. She is executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice” (with three-time EMMY™ Award-winning classical music composer, John Wineglass). Fields-Black has worked as a consultant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the International African American Museum, and the Senator John Heinz History Center. She and her family live in Pittsburgh, where she teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University.