[Signed Lincoln University Broadside and Newspaper for a Lecture by David Bradley, author of the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning Novel, “The Chaneysville Incident.”]

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Two signed items promoting a campus book signing and lecture by Black novelist and university instructor, David Bradley (b.1950).

Bradley wrote the historical novel, The Chaneysville Incident, based on a real-life mass murder of enslaved persons escaping on the Underground Railroad. The novel received the 1982 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. The student newspaper explains how the book came into being:

The Chaneysville Incident is based on an event brought to light by Bradley’s mother, Harriette. Mrs. Bradley, a local historian in Bedford, Pennsylvania, did research on local blacks for the area’s 1970 bicentennial. She learned of thirteen runaway slaves who had been intercepted near Chaneysville, Pennsylvania, on their flight for freedom along the Underground Railroad in the mid-1800s. The slaves, who had told their captors that they would rather die than be sent back into slavery, were taken at their word and murdered. After Mrs. Bradley informed her son that she had discovered the slaves’ burial site, he decided to write their story.

The broadside announces Bradley’s campus lecture which was preceded by a book signing. Both items are identically signed and datelined: “David Bradley, Jr., March 29, 1983, Lincoln University.”

Lincoln University was the first degree-granting Black college (HBCU) in the United States.

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