I Can’t Wait to Call You My Wife, a reading by Rita Roberts

Professor Roberts will be reading from her latest book, I Can’t Wait to Call You My Wife.

In this stirring curatorial achievement, a scholar compiles letters exchanged among African Americans as the Civil War blasted away the scaffolding of bondage, hinting at an uncertain future. In 1861, a Virginia slave, John Washington, proposed marriage to Annie, a free Blackwoman, in an intimate note that attests to the burden and beauty of historical memory: “Oh if I was home with you tonight how happy should I be I would endeavor to cheer thee. I think sometimes I will have a thousand little love stories to tell you when I come home… I am really anxious to marry. Now, more than ever.”

Rita Roberts, professor of history and Africana studies and the Nathaniel Wright Stephenson Chair in History and Biography, has been is a central part of multiple programs at Scripps and across The Claremont Colleges, including the History Department, the Intercollegiate Department of Africana Studies, and the American Studies Program. She has also taught in all three courses of the Core Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities. Her courses engage students in the study of the history of the early United States, 16th- through 21st-century African American history, African diaspora, black intellectuals and the politics of race, and the modern Civil Rights Movement, among other topics. She holds master’s and PhD degrees in history from the University of California, Berkeley.

Please join us; for more information please contact Claire De Chaine at [email protected].

Co-sponsored by Africana Studies, American Studies, Dean of the Faculty’s Office, and the History Department.