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Juniata to Host Inaugural Dr. Maurice C. Taylor '72 Lecture on Social Justice with Keynote by Dr. Edda Fields-Black
(Posted February 26, 2025)
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Dr. Edda Fields-Black
Dr. Edda Fields-Black
HUNTINGDON, Pa.– Juniata College will host the inaugural Dr. Maurice C. Taylor ’72 Lecture on Social Justice with keynote speaker and author Dr. Edda Fields-Black at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, March 3, 2025, in Alumni Hall, Brumbaugh Academic Center.
Free and open to the public, Fields-Black will discuss her new book, “Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War,” which offers the fullest account to date of Tubman’s Civil War service as a cook, nurse, scout, and spy, as well as her heroic leadership in a Union military operation. Her narrative tells the untold story of the Combahee River Raid, in which Union ships rescued and transported more than 750 former enslaved people who had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation five months earlier.
A professor in the Department of History and Director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University, Fields-Black is also the author of “Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora” and co-author of “Rice: Global Networks and New Histories.”
“In Abrams v. United States, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued in dissent that ‘the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,’” said Taylor. “Both the concept of a robust marketplace of ideas and the spirit of dissent in the service of truth represent the foundation for this Lectureship on Social Justice.”
The Dr. Maurice C. Taylor ’72 Lectureship on Social Justice provides funding to support an annual public lecture. The speaker, whose professional and/or personal life has contributed to social justice, shall also engage with the Juniata community of faculty, staff, students, and invitees.
Contact April Feagley at feaglea@juniata.edu or (814) 641-3131 for more information.