Clifford Oratokhai

Clifford Oratokhai is a doctoral student in the Department of History at Howard University. Originally from Boston, by way of Nigeria and Ghana, he holds a B.A. in History from Worcester State University and an M.A. in International Relations & Political Science from Suffolk University. His intellectual interests lie in the 19th Century Antebellum South, Civil War and Reconstruction and enslaved and free Black Women’s history and resistance. He seeks to explore emancipation through the modality of gender, examining the myriad of ways Black women defined, redefined, and articulated their own provocative conceptions of womanhood and freedom, which sought to encapsulate and amplify their stratified experience. Examining the ways in which Southern Black freedwomen embraced emancipation not only as freedom of, but the freedom to, in their claiming of domestic, public and political agency and autonomy and its resulting transformation of courts, the Freedmen’s Bureau and public administration in the (re)creation of policy and gendered norms and expectations.