Toni Morrison based her book Beloved on Margaret Garner—a 19th century black woman who killed her daughter to prevent the child from being re-enslaved. A community conversation sponsored by the Chicago Foundation for Women will focus on her story tonight.

This fall “Margaret Garner” comes to Chicago as an opera. Anthropologist Delores Walters says the slavery story helps bring discussions of race and gender to the forefront.

WALTERS: Margaret Garner’s resistence is a model for many of us in thinking about how we resist some of the barriers in our own lives.

Walters will talk about those issues tonight at DuSable Museum of African-American History.

I’m Natalie Moore, Chicago Public Radio.