Join us (in person or online) for our monthly conversation with historians, researchers, and educators as we discuss topics related to Indiana’s Black heritage. For February, our guest speaker Leon Bates (Local historian, veteran, and educator) will introduce us to the story of Lieutenant Colonel Joseph H. Ward, M.D.

A first-generation freedman, born in a slave cabin in Wilson, North Carolina; Ward went on to become a physician, surgeon, entrepreneur, army officer, first African American to lead a U.S. Army field hospital, first African American to lead a U.S. veteran’s hospital, and the first African American to lead a major hospital in the United States. He did all this at the height of the Jim Crow era, between Plessy vs. Ferguson and Brown vs. Board of Education (1896-1954), and yet, almost no one knows his name.

Sponsored by Indiana Landmarks’ Black Heritage Preservation Program, Indiana Humanities, IUPUI Africana Studies Program, and ASALH Joseph Taylor Branch (Association of the Study of African American Life and History).