Author event with Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Ph.D.

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Book talk and conversation with historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Ph.D., author of The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn.
Award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796–1833), the enslaved, mixed-race wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, owner of Blue Spring Farm and U.S. vice president under Martin Van Buren. Though Johnson never freed Chinn, he often delegated to her the management of his property, including Choctaw Academy, a boarding school for Indigenous men and boys. Chinn, while enslaved, had substantial control over the couple's social, financial, and personal affairs, including overseeing Blue Spring's enslaved labor force.
What makes Chinn's life exceptional is the power that Johnson invested in her, the opportunities the couple's relationship afforded her and her daughters, and their community's tacit acceptance of the family — up to a point. When the family left their farm, they faced steep limits: pews at the rear of church, burial in separate graveyards, exclusion from town dances, and more. Outliving Chinn, Johnson was ruined politically by his relationship with her, and Myers compellingly demonstrates that it wasn't interracial sex that led to his downfall but his refusal to keep it —and Julia Chinn — behind closed doors.
The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn won the 2024 Publication Award from the Kentucky Historical Society, was shortlisted for the 2024 Stone Book Award by the National Museum of African American History, and received an honorable mention for the 2024 Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians.
This event is free. No registration necessary.
For more about Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, visit https://www.amritacmyers.com/