Profs & Pints Nashville: Blood, Brass, and Ink

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Blood, Brass, and Ink,” on how Black military service served as an engine for Black liberation, with Marquita Reed-Wright, assistant professor of history at Tennessee State University and teacher of courses on the African American experience.

Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at [https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/nashville-blood-brass-ink ]

As our nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence it confronts a sharp paradox: Many of those who laid their bodies on the line for our Republic were Black service members whose humanity it had actively denied.

Learn how Black soldiers’ fights on battlefields intertwined with the Blacks struggle for basic civil rights at home from Dr. Marquita Reed-Wright, an advocate of public history who teaches employs material culture and deep storytelling in teaching it.

Her talk will take her audience through three distinct conflicts—the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II—using historical objects and literature. It will pair frontline veterans and their physical artifacts with revolutionary Black women writers who preserved what official archives tried to erase.

We’ll look at Revolutionary War patriot Prince Hall’s military record and freedom petitions and the anti-tyranny verse that Phillis Wheatley used to challenge the founding rhetoric of 1776.
We’ll examine a brass uniform button recovered from the Civil War and delve into the Civil War camp diaries of Susie King Taylor, a documenter of combat, literacy, and Reconstruction.

The combat ribbon earned by Medgar Evers in fighting in Europe in World War II will set the stage for a discussion of how the postwar literature of Gwendolyn Brooks and Alice Childress captured the fury of those fighting Jim Crow.

Attendees will discover how Black service members transformed the tools of warfare into civil-rights campaigns. The talk will conclude by connecting these historic battles directly to modern debates over voting rights and public memory, showing how the generation-spanning struggle to hold America accountable to its founding promises remains vital today. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Medgar Evers in uniform during World War II (U.S. Army photo/ public domain).