If Wishes Were Sources: Speculation And The Saga Of James Bradley, Oberlin’s ‘First’ Black Student

This is a hybrid event. The in-person reception will begin at 4:30 pm.

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James Bradley was not the first African American to study at Oberlin College, but chroniclers and historians of abolition have long mistaken the facts of his life. This essay reinterprets the available evidence, not simply to correct the record but to critique the appropriation of freed people’s life narratives in antislavery storytelling. Scholars of slavery have shown the value of fabulation or speculation for addressing omissions and suppressions of enslaved voices in the archive. Bradley’s case suggests that the inverse can also be true, that endeavoring to fill gaps in the stories of freed people can reproduce harm rather than redress it.