Four Score Speaker Series: Dr. Leonne M. Hudson

Join us Tuesday, April 7, 2026, at 7 p.m. CT, for an exciting conversation with author Dr. Leonne M. Hudson on his latest book Black Americans in Mourning: Reactions to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth carried out the first presidential assassination in United States history. The euphoria resulting from General Lee’s surrender evaporated at the news of Abraham Lincoln’s murder. Beginning with the assassination itself and chronicling Lincoln’s three-week-long national funeral, historian Leonne M. Hudson captures the profound sadness of Black Americans as they mourned the crafter of the Emancipation Proclamation and the man they thought of as their earthly Moses, father, friend, and benefactor. Hudson continues the narrative by detailing the postwar efforts of African Americans to gain citizenship and voting rights. Black Americans in Mourning includes the tributes of prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, and Elizabeth Keckley, who raised their voices to honor Lincoln, as well as formal expressions of grief by institutions and organizations such as the United States Colored Troops. In a triumph of research, Hudson also features the voices of lesser-known Black people who mourned Lincoln across the country, showing that the outpouring of individual and collective grief helped set the stage for his enduring glorification. Dr. Leonne M. Hudson, associate professor emeritus at Kent State University, is also the author of The Odyssey of a Southerner: The Life and Times of Gustavus Woodson Smith, the editor of Company “A” Corps of Engineers, U.S.A., 1846-1848, in the Mexican War, and the coeditor of Democracy and the American Civil War: Race and African Americans in the Nineteenth Century. For more information, visit our website at www.lincolnpresidential.org.