About

Part of the 2025-2026 Humanities Lab, "Slavery, Freedom, and the Midwest: African Americans at Miami University and in Oxford," led by Dr. Jazma Sutton (Assistant Professor of History at Miami University), this project brings students, faculty, and community members together to uncover the lives and legacies of several generations of African Americans who shaped Miami University and Oxford. From the foundational labor of free and formerly enslaved African Americans that sustained the university during the antebellum and Reconstruction periods to the emergence of Black student life and leadership in the Jim Crow era, members have engaged in archival research, oral history, and descendant collaboration.