Join historian and author Kendra T. Field as she traces the migration of African American families in the South, to Indian Territory and West Africa from her book Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race and Nation after the Civil War. Her research explores the important role African American families played in the development of Black and Black Indian towns and delves into multiracial nuances of migration. This work provides a wider historical lens to understand how families pursued freedom under the threat of economic and political inequality, and Jim Crow segregation.  

Kendra Taira Field is an associate professor of history at Tufts University and Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University. She has served as Assistant Editor to David L. Lewis’ W.E.B. DuBois:  A Biography (2009). Her current book project The Stories We Tell is (W.W. Norton) is a history of African American genealogy and storytelling from the Middle Passage through the present.  She is the recipient of the Western Writers of America's 2017 Spur Award for Best Western Short Nonfiction, the 2016 Boahen-Wilks Prize, and the 2022 NAACP W.E.B. DuBois Award.