Our Hungry for History series continues with: Flora Butler Abbott Sengstacke; From Slavery to the Chicago Defender.
Flora Butler Abbott Sengstacke (1847-1932) lived enslaved as a child and adolescent in Savannah. Despite the hardships of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, she guided her eldest son, Robert Abbott, and lived to see his success as founder and editor of the Chicago Defender, the most influential African American newspaper of the time.
About the Speaker: Martha Keber received a B.A. degree in history from the University of Redlands and a Ph.D. at Emory University. A French historian by training, she spent most of her university career teaching at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville. A growing interest in the history of coastal Georgia led to the publication of Seas of Gold, Seas of Cotton (2002), a biography of Christophe Poulain DuBignon of Jekyll Island. Since her retirement in 2005, she participated in an initiative by the City of Savannah to preserve the history of changing neighborhoods. She wrote a history of three African American neighborhoods in western Savannah under the title of Low Land and the High Road (2008), followed three years later by Ebb and Flow: Life and Community in Eastern Savannah.
