From Slavery to Liberation Taught by Edward Derr
Written by Alex Karreman
This winter Edward Derr is teaching a class called From Slavery to Liberation, which mainly focuses on the US chattel slavery system. This class will be one of the few Black Studies classes that SOU offers so it’s a good idea to jump onto this class before it fills up! Edward Derr is a student success coordinator for SOU and mainly for the social studies majors. He was born in Connecticut but grew up in New York City. That is where he got his undergraduate degree. He would do a lot of semi-street interviews with many different people (focusing on Black individuals) when working on his undergraduate and graduate degrees. Edward worked on his graduate degree in Chicago, where he studied the slave liberation movement in the US and colonial forces within the US. Within these studies, he presented how chattel slavery continues to affect Black Americans even today through colonialism.
Edward has some serious academic backing with knowledge of the subject but what about the actual class itself? Having been able to speak to Edward he gave me a bit of information about what the class would cover. He mentioned that he starts a bit further back in time than some professors would do for this subject and continues forward a good 20 years more than most would. He does this to provide more context for what is being taught and lets the students have a better understanding of the subject. He will be starting on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean with some African kingdoms and talking about the state of mostly Western and Northern Africa during the 1700s – 1800s. He will mostly be focusing on precolonial Africa, but will also talk a bit about the precolonial Americas. He will then of course talk about the colonization of these three continents. Focusing on Columbus’s “discovery” and his ideology going into this “New World.” Edward will then go into talking about how slavery turned into chattel slavery within the US and how the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch participated in the system.
Further from the beginning, Edward will go into the culture of slavery, its political status, and England’s role in it. Then is the American Abolition and Revolution, with a focus on Eli Whitney, and how those events affected slavery. Ending out he will talk about the Abolitionist mindset pertaining to slavery, the Civil War, and finally the Reconstruction era. Throughout the class, we will be jumping from the US to a few other countries that contributed, hindered, or helped the slavery system with it all tying back to the US chattel slavery system. Edward will also be talking a bit about how chattel slavery affects the US today and how we are still seeing people trying to dissuade from learning important history. Black Studies has been under fire recently throughout the US and that will be talked about in this class. Finally, I asked Edward if he had anything else he would like students to know about the class or himself and his answer was intriguing. Edward at one point in his life went to an African country and was able to teach there. He talked about his studies in the US and was able to get some more insight into the subject. So if you wanna take an interesting class with a well-versed professor consider signing up for ERS 399 From Slavery to Liberation on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:30 – 5:20 pm.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/sou_ers_program
Written by Alex Auzas
