Beaufort’s Free Persons of Color through the Civil War and Reconstruction

Join Reconstruction Era National Historical Park for a new summer lecture series. The third lecture in the series will be by Park Ranger Dr. Tedi Light:

Of the estimated half million free people of color living in the United States, nearly half of them resided in the South with large, notable communities in cities like Charleston and New Orleans. While there were over 36,000 enslaved persons in Beaufort county in the 1860 census, there were also more than 800 freepeople. Park Ranger Dr. Tedi Light’s talk will trace the lives of that community through archival records that reveal the precarity of life on the fringes of a slave society and the opportunities seized during the Reconstruction Era.