A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South

Fully half the enslaved people in the South lived not on sprawling plantations but on small properties; this pattern prevailed in much of Virginia. Testimony from criminal trials in Prince Edward County reveals that cruelty was baked into the system, but also that in households of five, ten, fifteen, or twenty people, exploiters and exploited knew each other well. The enslaved, enslavers, overseers, and poor whites drank, played, slept, and even committed crimes together. Yet whippings happened often, enslaved families were split up, and in 1861, most white men in Prince Edward County were ready to fight to defend the right to own other human beings. White Virginians recognized the humanity of their Black neighbors even as they remained committed to a system that abused and sometimes terrorized them.. Dr. Melvin Ely’s lecture will take a close look at interracial life in slaveholding Virginia. He researches and teaches the history of Black Americans, the South, popular culture and media, and race and ethnicity. Before joining William & Mary, he taught at Yale University, where he received both the Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication and Research and the Prize for Teaching Excellence, and he served as Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.