Black Life in the North Woods: Amy Godine and Alice Green

Black Life in the North Woods: Amy Godine and Alice Green
Thursday, March 14, 2024
Albany Public Library
Moderated by NYS Writers Institute Director Paul Grondahl
A conversation about the Black history of the Adirondack Mountains with historian Amy Godine and legendary civil rights activist Alice Green.
Amy Godine is the author of The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier (Nov. 2023), a history of the pioneering Black families who migrated to the Adirondacks in the 1800s, mostly from urban areas, to establish farms and rural communities and-significantly - secured the right to vote in New York.
Filmmaker Ken Burns said, “The Black Woods is a beautifully written, painstakingly researched, and uncommonly nuanced story.”
Alice Green is the author of a new, second memoir, Outsider: Stories of Growing Up Black in the Adirondacks (Sept. 2023), an account of her childhood and young adulthood as one of very few Black residents in the tiny hamlet of Witherbee, Essex County, where her family grappled with poverty and racial issues in the mid-20th century.
Green is the executive director of the Center for Law and Justice, a civil rights organization she founded in 1985 in Albany. She earned multiple degrees at UAlbany, including a B.A. in Africana Studies, and a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice.
Cosponsored by the History Department and Alumni Association at UAlbany.