Olson Great Plains series explores Black history

The first event is 5:30 p.m. Sept. 1 at the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Barbara Weitz Community Engagement Center, where panelists will discuss the Jim Crow era in Omaha and the practice of redlining. In the New Deal era, bank lenders, insurers and government agencies would draw red lines on maps to indicate neighborhoods with minority occupants, deeming them “high-risk for mortgage lenders.” In these neighborhoods, residents were refused loans, subjected to predatory lending and denied financial services. The panel, moderated by Jeannette Jones, Happold Professor of History and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, includes Christina Dando, professor of geography at UNO; Eric L. Ewing, executive director of the Great Plains Black History Museum; and Salvador Lindquist, associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

At 5:30 p.m. Sept. 10 at Sheldon Museum of Art, artist Elizabeth Burden will speak about her artwork and the exhibition “Elsewhere/The Prairie was Ours,” on view through Dec. 19 at the Great Plains Art Museum. Burden is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice of artistic archiving combines studio work and social engagement to explore memory, history, inheritance and the relationship between past, present and future. Working across painting, video, sound, coding, mapping and other media, she creates spaces for critical thinking, feeling and reflecting. Born and raised in Lincoln, Burden is the great-granddaughter of Henry and Mary Burden, among Nebraska’s first Black homesteaders. She lives and works in Tucson, Arizona. Burden is the Great Plains Art Museum’s 2026 Elizabeth Rubendall Artist in Residence. The lecture is also part of the Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist lecture series.

At 5:30 p.m. Sept. 15 in the Nebraska Union’s Heritage Room, author Caleb Gayle will speak about his book “Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State,” which is this year’s winner of the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize. In “Black Moses,” also longlisted for the National Book Award, Gayle recounts the extraordinary tale of Edward McCabe, a Black man who championed the idea to create a state within the U.S. governed by and for Black people — and the racism, politics and greed that thwarted him. As the sweeping changes brought by the Civil War and Reconstruction began to wither, anger at the opportunities available to newly freed Black people rose and both Blacks and whites searched for new places to settle.