My New Orleans
05/24/2021
NEW ORLEANS (press release) – The Sons and Daughters of the United States Middle Passage (SDUSMP) selected “Monumental: Oscar Dunn and His Radical Fight in Reconstruction Louisiana” as a recipient of its 2021 Phillis Wheatley Book Award. The announcement was made Friday, May 21, at the annual SDUSMP meeting, which was held virtually.
Established in 2011, SDUSMP is a nonprofit lineage society dedicated to preserving the memory of its members’ freed and enslaved ancestors. Its Phillis Wheatley Book Award recognizes works published within the past five years covering the topic of American slavery. The prize’s namesake was a Gambia native captured by slave traders as a child and sold to a family in Boston in 1761. She became the first African American to author a book, a 1773 collection of poems.