PRIDE 2026: Book and Author: The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram: The Man Who Stared Down World War II in the Name of Love  

Presented in partnership with Center on Halsted 

On the eve of World War II, a young Black scholar named Reed Peggram arrived in Paris on the same prestigious fellowship that had once sent Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston abroad. He was queer. He was brilliant. He had been educated at Harvard and Columbia. And he had no intention of returning to a segregated America.  

In Europe, Peggram built a life that his home country would not permit. He sat for portraits by famous artists. He charmed minor royalty. And as gas masks were distributed across the City of Lights, he fell in love with Arne, a Danish scholar with whom he formed a deep and enduring bond. What followed was a years-long flight across a war-torn continent, capture by Nazis, a daring escape, and a personal war for the right to live openly in a world determined to deny him that. 

Award-winning historian Ethelene Whitmire, a professor of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, discovered Peggram’s story through a trove of personal letters unearthed by one of his descendants.  

Join us as Whitmire takes the audience inside her years-long investigation, revealing how she reconstructed Peggram’s world from letters and archives, what his story uncovers about queer Black life in wartime Europe, and why a man written out of the historical record still has something urgent to say to us now. 

A post-program book signing and reception will follow. 

Free to the public. Reservations required.