W&M Featured Events

Location

Join us as we continue to explore the theme of the 15th Annual Lemon Project Spring Symposium, "Undefeated: Black Resilience through Resistance, Creativity, and Cooperation," for a Lemon's Legacies Porch Talk with Dr. Lynn Wood Mollenauer, Dr. Tiffany Gilbert, and Dr. Cara Ward.

Forty years after the Civil War, Wilmington, North Carolina was a uniquely integrated town with a Black majority population whose members held positions of social, economic, and political power. On November 10, 1898, a coalition of white supremacists deposed the biracial Fusionist government. Militia forces terrorized Black neighborhoods. The number of those murdered and displaced during the Wilmington Massacre and Coup, as it is now called, remains unknown—and unknowable—to this day. This Porch Talk centers on community responses to violence, loss, and dislocation. Lynn Mollenauer will focus on Alexander Huggins, a former slave and Union veteran, who founded an export business and remained in the city after 1898. Cara Ward will discuss her work with preservice teachers investigating the lasting impact of the coup. Tiffany Gilbert will reflect on post-1898 rage and its sublimation into expressions of performative community. Together, these papers interrogate the prismatic legacy and afterlife of the massacre.

Cara Faulkner Ward is an Assistant Professor of Social Studies in the Watson College of Education at UNCW. She has a B.A. in History and an M.A.T. in Secondary Social Studies from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and earned her Ed.D. in Educational Leadership and Administration from UNCW. Her research focuses on social studies education including the use of history labs to teach historical thinking skills and how racialized violence is addressed in curriculum standards. Cara’s work has been widely published in such journals as Social Studies and the Young Learner and The Journal of Social Studies Research. In 2024, she was awarded an NEH grant to direct a Summer Teacher Institute entitled Wilmington 1898: Geographies of Rage, Resistance, and Resilience.

Lynn Wood Mollenauer is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at University of North Carolina Wilmington. A cultural historian whose research examines the interconnections between science, magic, and religion, she holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. from Amherst College. She is Co-Director (with Gilbert) of UNCW’s 1898 Legacies and Futures Research Collective, which aims to nurture constructive dialogue, innovative pedagogies, and new partnerships that contribute to the ongoing remembrance and restoration efforts taking place throughout the Cape Fear region. She is currently co-editing a volume exploring the legacies and futures of the 1898 massacre with Tiffany Gilbert, which will be available in 2026.

Tiffany Gilbert is department chair and Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she teaches primarily in the areas of post-1945 American literature, film, and popular culture. She has a B.A. in English from William & Mary, an M.A. in English from Clemson University, and a Ph.D. in English from The University of Virginia. With Mollenauer and Ward, she received a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities to host a summer institute focused on Wilmington Massacre and Coup. She is also co-editing a volume of essays, The 1898 Wilmington Massacre: Critical Explorations on Insurrection, Black Resilience, and Black Futures, under contract with Louisiana State University Press.

Sponsored by: The Lemon Project

Contact

setho2@wm.edu, Dr. Sarah Thomas

This Event Appears On

• W&M Featured Events
• Diversity & Inclusion Events
• The Lemon Project Events