EVENTS
UNDERGROUNDS BEFORE RAILWAY: escaping slavery
RAAB AUDITORIUM, BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY AND LIVE-STREAMED
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2024, 6-7:30PM ET
MARGARET NEWELL WITH EGYPT LLOYD
If you couldn’t vote in elections, you voted with your feet. Award-winning historian Margaret Newell, author of Brethren by Nature, tells the story of the 17th and 18th century people who rejected tyranny and ran away - fleeing slavery with the help of a wide underground network of Indigenous and Black people. Egypt Lloyd, co-founder of the Slave Legacy History Coalition and descendant of enslaved people in Cambridge, joins this exploration of claiming liberty.
I Pledge Allegiance: sovereignty in the dawnland
ONLINE
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2024, 7-8:30PM ET
MACK SCOTT
What unites people from Roger Williams to Weetamoo to William Blackstone? They all found sanctuary in Narragansett Country, today’s Rhode Island. Narragansett Tribal member and Brown University historian Mack Scott reveals a world in which diverse people of all backgrounds pledged new allegiances and found sanctuary and self-determination - a world that holds lessons for us today.
“petition after petition”: a fight for freedom
ONLINE
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2024, 7-8:30PM ET
CHERNOH SESAY, JR.
Nearly 150 years after the Puritans wrote laws granting themselves inherent rights, Boston’s Black Freemasons petitioned for freedom - claiming the rights denied to people, they wrote, who were “detained in a state of slavery in the Bowels of a free Christian Country.” Join historian Chernoh Sesay Jr. in this vital talk on the Black freemasons’ powerful, eloquent petitions for freedom and their role in the abolitionist movement - shedding light on the complicated relationship between “tyrannies” and “liberties” in the Revolutionary era.
“This presentation nailed it - and should cause people to sit back and realize that mankind has done a lousy job of planning for pandemics because they don’t pay attention to history.”
participant, reading group