On Friday, October 3rd, Charles Roberts was the featured speaker at the Providence Athenaeum Ex Libris Lecture. Charles spoke about the importance of marking the landscape where slave history took place in Rhode Island. He also spoke about the origin of the human race in ancient Africa, the development of American Slavocracy as a socio-economic construct in “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” and he shared the story of his family’s flight from the South in search of better employment opportunities in the North while escaping the violence of the Jim Crow era. Finally, he spoke about the Battle of Rhode Island in 1778, where Black and Indigenous soldiers fought for patriot colonists’ freedom during the Revolutionary War, the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities during the Reconstruction Era and Gilded Age, the origin of Juneteenth celebrations, and the legacy of George T. Downing.