As part of the LeRoy Collins Leon County Public Library's annual support for the Festival of Freedom honoring the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in Tallahassee, we are happy to present Dr. Katherine Mooney at the Dr. B.L. Perry Branch Library on Monday 5/9 at 7:00.  This event is free to the public and the Dr. B.L. Perry branch will be open from 6:30-8:30.  Light refreshments will be served as well.  There will also be book displays at both the Dr. B.L. Perry Branch and the Main Library with materials on emancipation, early Tallahassee, and civil rights during the month of May.

Dr. Mooney's speech is entitled “Living Freedom: The Consequences of Emancipation and Why They Still Matter”.  She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2012 and is an associate professor at Florida State University. Her research interests are the U.S. South, cultural history, 19th century U.S. slavery, and race and gender.  Dr.  Mooney is interested in the cultural history of inequality in the United States--how it is imagined and made into political and legal discourse, how it plays out in people's daily lives. She primarily works on the history of slavery and its legacies. Her book, Race Horse Men, examines the generations of black men who worked with thoroughbred horses from the colonial period to the 1920s. She is presently at work on several new projects.