Chris Lehman celebrates ‘Slavery’s Reach’ release

Christopher Lehman, professor of ethnic and women’s studies

“Slavery’s Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State” was released Oct. 1 by the Minnesota Historical Society Press. Through a set of mutually-beneficial relationships, southern slaveholders and Minnesotans enriched Minnesota while helping to continue the enslavement of the men and women whose labor made that wealth possible. 

The book takes a look at how Minnesotans invited slaveholders to bring their wealth into the new state from before statehood until the Civil War. Dozens of southern slaveholders, or those raised in slave-holding families, purchased land in the state and invested in Minnesota businesses, institutions and communities. It details how their investments in Minnesota in turn supported their plantations in the South. 

Minnesotans eagerly catered to the southern slaveholders by recruiting their investment in the state and petitioning the legislature to make slavery legal for vacationing southerners who brought their enslaved people with them to the state. 

Lehman compiled the information on slaveholders’ influence in Minnesota through careful research into censuses, newspapers, and archival collections.

His current book adds to the work that he’s done to enrich the African-American historical canon.

His 2014 book, “Power, Politics, and the Decline of the Civil Rights Movement: A Fragile Coalition, 1967–1973,” argues factionalism and government sabotage diminished the efforts of the four major African-American organizations in the late ’60s and early ’70s. His 2011 volume, “Slavery in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1787-1865,” documents the persistence of slavery in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin through the end of the Civil War. Although African American slavery was banned in the region in 1787, slaves were held here by soldiers and federal officials.

His previous books, “A Critical History of Soul Train on Television,” “The Colored Cartoon: Black Representation in American Animated Short Films” and “American Animated Cartoons of the Vietnam Era” drew national reviews and media coverage.

“The Colored Cartoon” was honored by the Association of College and Research Libraries as an outstanding academic title in 2008. View Lehman’s Amazon page.

Last summer Lehman was a Summer Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research through the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A professor of ethnic studies, Lehman coordinates the African American Studies minor at St. Cloud State and is the former faculty adviser for the Council of African American Students on campus.

Lehman holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Oklahoma State University. He earned his advanced degrees at University of Massachusetts Amherst: a master’s in history and doctorate in African American studies. 

Lehman has taught at St. Cloud State since 2002.