The Black Elite and The Gilded Age: Race, Wealth, and Class

The Duke and Durham communities are invited to join the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University as we host Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar and Dr. Carla Peterson as part of our Global Inequality Research Initiative (GIRI) capstone event for the 2022 spring semester.
"The Black Elite and the Gilded Age: Race, Wealth, and Class" will feature a conversation on that topic between Dr. Dunbar, Dr. Peterson, and Dr. William A. "Sandy" Darity Jr., the Cook Center's founding director and the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics at Duke University. Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of history and associate chair of the history department at Duke University, will moderate the conversation.
Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar is the Charles and Mary Beard Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on the lives of women of African descent living in America in the 18th and 19th centuries. In addition to her role as the National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians, Dr. Dunbar has also helped shape the portrayal of historical Black women in popular culture as the co-executive producer of the historical drama series Gilded Age on HBO.
Dr. Carla Peterson is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research similarly focuses on the work of African-American women writers in the nineteenth century. Most recently, she wrote Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York (2012), which highlights the lives of a previously unconsidered cohort of Black elite society in the 1800s.
Following the panel discussion and question and answer session with the audience, the first students to have completed the new minor in inequality studies, a collaboration between the Cook Center and Duke's history department, will receive certificates commemorating their achievement. Afterward there will be a reception outside with light food and beverages.

Photo credit: Alison Cohen Rosa/HBO