D.C. Mondays: Williams' Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and his Cargo of Black Convicts

Jeff Forret

Monday, April 5th

In the mid-19th century, William H. Williams operated a slave pen in Washington, D.C., known as the Yellow House, and actively trafficked in enslaved men, women and children for more than twenty years. In this talk, author Jeff Forret discusses his book Williams' Gang, which examines slave criminality, the coastwise domestic slave trade and southern jurisprudence. The books draws from court records, newspapers, governors' files, slave manifests, slave narratives, travelers' accounts and penitentiary data.

About Jeff Forret

Jeff Forret is professor of History at Lamar University, Texas, where he was named Distinguished Faculty Research Fellow from 2016 to 2019 and again from 2019 until 2021. He won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for his book Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South (2015) and has authored Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside (2006), among other works.