Reframing the Gilded Age: Representation of the Black Elite in HBO 's The Gilded Age

ABSTRACT This article examines how HBO's The Gilded Age (2022–) challenges the erasure of African Americans in period dramas about that time by highlighting the experiences of Peggy Scott, a fictional Black journalist from an affluent Brooklyn family. While popular histories of the Gilded Age often focus on the white industrialists of the period, the series incorporates the often‐overlooked Black elite of late nineteenth‐century New York, referencing historical figures such as T. Thomas Fortune and Sarah Garnet. With guidance from historical consultants like Rutgers history professor Erica Armstrong Dunbar, and drawing inspiration from Carla Peterson's Black Gotham , the show questions the conventional portrayals of Black life as limited to enslavement or poverty. Peggy functions as a disruptor of the white‐dominant storyline, resisting stereotyping while representing the tensions of her gender, race, and class. Ultimately, the series reshapes public memory of the era by moving beyond just the exhibition of white wealth that it is usually associated with and making the agency and ambition of the Black upper class visible and compelling.