Join our featured author and a guest historian-expert for an insightful discussion of Nat Turner, Black Prophet, a bold reinterpretation of the causes and legacy of Nat Turner's rebellion. This new, definitive account offers a fresh look at Black history.

In August 1831, a group of enslaved people in Southampton County, Virginia, rose up to fight for their freedom. They attacked the plantations on which their enslavers lived and attempted to march on the county seat of Jerusalem, from which they planned to launch an uprising across the South. After the rebellion was suppressed, well over a hundred people, Black and white, lay dead or were hanged. The uprising was the idea of a single man: Nat Turner. An enslaved preacher, he was as enigmatic as he was brilliant. He was also something more—a prophet, one who claimed to have received visions from the Spirit urging him to act.

With co-author Gregory P. Downs and moderator-historian Vincent Brown of Harvard, we’ll unpack how and why Nat Turner inspired the largest enslaved people’s rebellion in the US between 1811 and 1861 and became an enduring icon of resistance.  Nat Turner, Black Prophet, a narrative history by the late historian Anthony E. Kaye and Downs, his collaborator, provides a new understanding of one of the nineteenth century's most decisive events.

Gregory P. Downs is professor of history at University of California, Davis. He is the author of three books on the Civil War Era and a book of short stories, as well as many op-eds for leading newspapers. He is co-editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era. Downs assisted in the completion of Nat Turner, Black Prophet which represents the research of Anthony E. Kaye (1962–2017). Dr. Kaye taught history at Pennsylvania State University and was the vice president of scholarly programs at the National Humanities Center. Kaye was an influential scholar of Atlantic slavery and American history, and the author of a prior well-regarded history of enslaved people and their understanding of space and place, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South. He also served as an associate editor of The Journal of the Civil War Era and was an editor of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project.

Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He teaches courses in Atlantic history, African diaspora studies, and the history of slavery in the Americas. Brown is the author of The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery and Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, and he is producer of Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, an audiovisual documentary broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens, and the short video series The Bigger Picture for PBS Digital Studios. He is also on the Scholars’ Council for American Ancestors’ 10 Million Names Project.

Presented in partnership with Boston Public Library, Ford Hall Forum at Suffolk University, and GBH Forum Network