Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History, co-author Gregory P. Downs in conversation with Vincent Brown

In August 1831, a group of enslaved people in Southampton County, Virginia, rose up to fight for their freedom. They attacked the plantations on which their enslavers lived and attempted to march on the county seat of Jerusalem, from which they planned to launch an uprising across the South. After the rebellion was suppressed, well over a hundred people, Black and white, lay dead or were hanged. The uprising was the idea of a single man: Nat Turner. An enslaved preacher, he was as enigmatic as he was brilliant. He was also something more—a prophet, one who claimed to have received visions from the Spirit urging him to act.

Gregory P. Downs is professor of history at University of California, Davis. He is the author of three books on the Civil War Era and a book of short stories, as well as many op-eds for leading newspapers. He is co-editor of the ‘Journal of the Civil War Era’. Downs assisted in the completion of ‘Nat Turner, Black Prophet’ which represents the research of Anthony E. Kaye (1962–2017).

Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He teaches courses in Atlantic history, African diaspora studies, and the history of slavery in the Americas. Brown is the author of The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery and Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, and he is producer of Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, an audiovisual documentary broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens.

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