Black History Now Lecture: Making Themselves: Two Teamohs, North and South

Portsmouth Art & Cultural Center

Speaker: Dr. Rafia Zafar, Professor at Washington University in Saint Louis

In 1990, over a century after the manuscript was completed, God Made Man, Man Made the Slave, the Virginia-born George Teamoh’s 19th-century autobiography, was published. Before its publication, Teamoh’s story was little known, as its multiple, blue-bound copy books in the Carter Woodson Papers at the Library of Congress were seen mostly by historians of the 19th century United States. Teamoh’s hand-written pages illuminated not only his former enslavement but also his career as one of the earliest Black elected officials in the United States. In the course of co-editing his autobiography, Dr. Zafar, a direct Teamoh descendant working with the historians F. Nash Boney and Richard L. Hume, learned there was another Teamoh with a career as an elected official and author. This talk charts the parallel paths of an uncle and a nephew, both born in the 19th century, who led intriguingly parallel lives in the 19th and early 20th centuries.