Dr. Sarah Parker Remond, a native of Salem, Massachusetts, who has long lived abroad, has returned to our shores for a brief visit. We are pleased to announce that she has agreed to share with us insights into her anti-slavery work, her activities on behalf of women’s rights, and her work in the medical field.

Miss Remond, it will be recalled, was forcibly removed from the Howard Theatre in Boston and was a party to a subsequent lawsuit. In 1856, she sailed to Great Britain as an official speaker and fundraiser for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Her medical studies were undertaken in Italy.

All who have heard her speak have felt informed and gratified by the experience.

BYRON RUSHING
Decades before his election as a Massachusetts State Representative in 1982, Byron Rushing was involved in Civil Rights Movement efforts as a member of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) in New York and then the Northern Student Movement in Boston. Committed to the uncovering and preservation of Black history, Rushing is a former president of the Afro-American History Museum in Boston and oversaw lobbying efforts in Congress to establish the Boston African American National Historical Site.

In his work as a legislator, Rushing focuses on civil and human rights issues, including the development of democracy and efforts to end homelessness and make healthcare accessible to all. He is the original sponsor of the gay rights bill and is a spokesman against the restoration of the death penalty in Massachusetts. A champion for progressive politics and equitable treatment, Representative Rushing is also an elected deputy to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church

LYDIA DIAMOND
Reading from her play, Stickfly

Lydia R. Diamond is a Huntington Playwriting Fellow and a Resident Playwright at Chicago Dramatists. Her plays include Stage Black (Premiered at Arts Consortium of Cincinnati, 3rd Place Theadore Ward Prize), The Gift Horse (Premiered at Goodman Theatre, 2nd place Kesselring Prize, 1st Place Theadore Ward Prize); Stick Fly (Premiered at Congo Square Theatre Company, Joseph Jefferson Award recommended, BTAA Nominated); and The Inside (premiered at MPAACT Theatre Company), and recently published in TriQuarterly, where she is a contributing editor; Voyeurs de Venus (premiered at Chicago Dramatists, Joseph Jefferson Award recommended, BTAA Nominated, commissioned by Steppenwolf Theatre Co.)

Ms. Diamond's adaptation of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye premiered at Steppenwolf Theatre, won the Black Arts Alliance Image Award for Best New Play, and will be remounted at the Steppenwolf and moved to a co-production with New Victory in NY next season. Theatre Alliance, D.C., Playmakers Rep, N.C., and Plowshares, MI, will also mount productions The Bluest Eye this coming season. The Gift Horse is anthologized in 7 Black Plays, edited by Chuck Smith, Northwestern University Press. Ms. Diamond is currently working on her third Steppenwolf Theatre commission, a play based on Harriet Jacob's "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl", recently workshopped and presented at The Kennedy Center's New Visions New Voices festival. Ms. Diamond holds a B.S. in Theatre and Performance Studies from Northwestern University. She has taught playwriting at Columbia College Chicago, DePaul University, Loyola University, and Boston University.

VERDELL ROBERTS
Two Controversial Cases in New Haven History: The Amistad Affair and the Black Panther Trials

Verdell Roberts is an education consultant with the Southeastern Equity Center in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The Center provides technical assistance and training to the 8 southeastern states in the areas of diversity, racial and ethnic tension, desegregation, integration, court ordered unitary status, etc. An educator for over thirty five years, Roberts retired from the New Haven, Connecticut Public School System where she was Deputy Superintendent Roberts maintains professional affiliations with Yale’s Teachers Institute as well as other civic and educational groups. Presently, she lives in Columbia, South Carolina.

The purpose of this study is to make a descriptive comparison of two dramatic revolts for freedom in New Haven, Connecticut. The earlier of these is the so-called Amistad Affair of 1839, which occurred when the Abolitionist Movement was in high gear. The other one, the Black Panther trials of 1970, coincided with the high tide of the Civil Rights Movement. Each of these events seems to have resulted from a heightened awareness of injustice in America. This essay will look at the justification for both revolts and American society’s reactions to them.

LAWRENCE GOODHEART & PETER HINKS
Joseph Mountain, David Daggett, and the Meaning of Black Freedom in Late 18th Century Connecticut & England

The presentation analyzes Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain, A Negro, Who was executed at New-Haven, on the 20th Day of October, 1790, For a Rape and white amanuensis David Dagget’s depiction of Joseph Mountain. A young attorney at the time of Mountain’s execution, Dagget’s views of England as a “maelstrom” of intermixing amongst whites and blacks heavily influenced his depiction of Mountain in Sketches. For Dagget, freedom in aristocratic England meant only license for debauchery. Mountain’s rapid seizure and execution in 1790 in Connecticut testified conclusively that black freedom would not further affirm the devious distortions it assumed in Britain. Dagget was an important member of the antislavery Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom, and sought to establish that emancipation in New England could be managed gradually and responsibly. Most significantly, this meant maintaining the “natural” boundaries existing between black and white that had been so “corroded and violated” in England.

Lawrence Goodheart is a Professor of History at the University of Connecticut and the author of Abolitionist, Actuary, Atheist: Elizur Wright and the Reform Imperative (1990) and co-editor of Slavery in American Society (1993) and The Abolitionists (1995). During 2009-10, he was Senior Fulbright Lecturer in Turkey. His most recent book, The Solemn Sentence of Death: Capital Punishment in Connecticut, will be published in 2011.

Peter Hinks is earned his Ph.D in American History from Yale University in 1993. He has taught at Yale University, Bennington College, Grinnell College, U-Mass, Boston, and Hamilton College. He is the author of the award-winning book, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance. His current research reckons with slavery, emancipation, and race in Connecticut from 1750-1850. Dr. Hinks recently completed a new encyclopedia for Greenwood Press entitled Encyclopedia of Antislavery and Abolition and was the editorial consultant to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania for the preparation of William Still’s underground railroad journals from the 1850s for digitization and online access.

BOB GREENE
Maine’s Black Men of Ware

Focusing on the Peters family of Warren, Maine, this presentation will analyze the United States’ refusal to acknowledge African Americans’ contributions during wartime, beginning with America’s war for independence.

Bob Greene Retiring after a 36-year career as a journalist with The Associated Press, Greene returned to his roots by moving to South Portland, Maine. He is at least the eighth generation of his family to be born in Cumberland County, Maine, and began in 1991 to trace his roots. As an Associated Press writer, he has covered riots in Omaha, Neb., and Kansas City, Mo., the funeral of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and many other top news stories. He began traveling the world when he became the AP Tennis Writer and has covered the sport in places as far-flung as Paris, London, Shanghai, New York as well as Harare, Zimbabwe. He currently chairs the steering committee of the Jean Byers Sampson Center of Diversity at the University of Southern Maine’s Glickman Library and is on the board of directors of the Maine Philanthropy Center. He also finds time to research and speak on Maine’s lengthy African American history.

PEARLIE PETERS
Frederick Douglass and the Nantucket Connection: From Fugitive to Anti-Slavery Advocate

This paper will study the profound impact of Nantucket and the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society on Douglass’ transition from fugitive slave to anti-slavery advocate and platform speaker for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Nantucket and key figures of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society propelled Douglass’ political advocacy against the peculiar institution of slavery.

Dr. Pearlie-Mae Peters is a Professor of English at Rider University. Dr. Peters' scholarship includes African American literature and folklore, nineteenth century American literature and multi-ethnic American literature. Dr. Peters has published articles and has presented numerous scholarly papers on the life and works of Zora Neale Hurston. She has also contributed scholarly articles on African American literature to The Oxford Companion to African American Literature and The African American Encyclopedia.

COURTNEY MARSHALL
This (Covered) Bridge Called My Back: Locating New England’s Black Feminisms

The Combahee River Collective, a radical black feminist organization, was founded in Boston in 1974 and named for South Carolina’s Combahee River, the site of an 1863 military campaign led by Harriet Tubman in which over 700 enslaved people were freed. Over a century later, one of the Collective’s most important protests was in response to the murder of 12 African-American women in Boston in 1979. Using the concept of “bridging,” this paper argues that the group’s naming and protest against these murders illuminate the ways that, for black women, physical violence is not a southern or 19th century problem. By connecting the murders of black women in Boston and this historical raid against enslavement, Professor Marshall argues for the importance of New England to black feminist anti-violence theorizing and activism. In doing so, she bridges two bodies of criticism that rarely comment on one another: black women’s studies and works treating feminism in New England.

Courtney Marshall is an Assistant Professor of English and Women’s Studies at UNH. She earned a PhD in English and a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies from UCLA. Her research interests include African American women’s literature, critical race feminism, and carceral studies. She is completing a manuscript on the representation of the prison-industrial complex in twentieth-century African American women’s literary texts.

JOELLE RYAN
Remembering Rita: The Murder of an African American Transgender Woman in Massachusetts and the Sparking of an International Anti-Violence Movement

Rita Hester was an African American transgender woman who was brutally murdered in Allston, Massachusetts on November 28, 1998. Due to her murder, Gwen Smith, a trans activist in San Francisco, went on to create the Remembering Our Dead Web project and the Day of Remembrance (DOR) event. The DOR is an international, annual event held on November 20th to commemorate the tragic death of Rita Hester, and to memorialize all those who have perished due to anti-transgender hatred and bigotry. This paper argues that although the DOR is ground-breaking in many respects, it is also problematic. Trans-identity is repeatedly centered and given primary importance without adequate attention to other axes of identity and oppression, particularly race, ethnicity, region, nation, age, occupation, socio-economic status, and sex work-involvement. While the event has indeed mobilized some in the Trans community, its lack of attentiveness to race and class have alienated some trans women of color and poor trans people from participation.

Joelle Ryan graduated from UNH in 2005. She has nearly 20 years of experience as an activist for various progressive causes, including feminism, racial and economic justice, pacifism, size acceptance/weight diversity and transgender, bisexual, lesbian and gay liberation. She is the author of Gender Quake: Poems and the co-producer (with Peter Welch) of three autobiographical films, including Transilience, which is currently in production. In her teaching, research, organizing and activism, Joelle tries to promote inclusion, intersectional analyses and community-building for positive social change. She is currently a Lecturer in Women’s Studies and the Director of TransGender New Hampshire.

MARLA BRETTSCHNEIDER
Black New England & the African Jewish Diaspora: A Study of Jamaica Kincaid

This paper is a study of Jamaica Kincaid in the context of Jewish feminist critical race studies. Jamaica Kincaid was born and raised in St. John's, Antigua and moved to the United States in 1965; she has lived in Vermont since 1985. Later in her life, Kincaid has been sought out for her work on gardening and has come to “represent” the plant and other life of New England. However, Kincaid became an international name as a young writer symbolizing a quintessential Caribbean woman’s voice. Her work stands out in any study of Africana, Caribbean and African American, and African Diaspora literature. Jamaica Kincaid is also Jewish, has served as president of her synagogue, and been otherwise active in Jewish affairs. Kincaid is among a number of significant feminists--particularly feminists of color--whose Jewish identity is nearly exclusively overlooked. This Jewish feminist study of Kincaid will contribute to project of continuing to complicate conceptualizations of who black New Englanders are.

Marla Brettschneider is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire with a joint appointment in Political Science and Women's Studies. She currently serves as Coordinator of the Women's Studies Program and is co-founder and past Coordinator of the UNH Queer Studies Program. Brettschneider works at the nexus of Jewish, critical race, feminist, queer, and class-based democratic theories. She is author most recently of the award winning The Flamily Flamboyant: Race Politics, Queer Families, Jewish Lives, as well as of Democratic Theorizing From the Margins; Cornerstones of Peace: Jewish Identity Politics and Democratic Theory; and the award winning The Narrow Bridge: Jewish Views on Multiculturalism with aforward by Cornel West. She has published numerous articles and edited special editions of academic journals such as Race, Gender, and Class; NASHIM: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues; and The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.

JAMES FINLEY
“The Final Ruin of this Happy Republic”: The Agrarian Poetics of David Walker’s Appeal

This paper explores David Walker’s Appeal’s foundational role in defining American agrarianism and Thomas Jefferson’s conflation of landscape with identity. Following the assertion that Walker is fundamentally concerned with issues of land and agrarian labor, the paper provides an analysis of how Walker attempts to repair the fundamental racism of American agrarianism. Walker employs an agrarian poetics that imaginatively connects America’s rural landscape with its political landscape, and thereby demonstrates how Blacks have rightfully earned a place in America.

James Finley is a doctoral student at the University of New Hampshire, interested in landscape and identity in antebellum American literature. His article on Thoreau's The Maine Woods is forthcoming from ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.

ROBERT MUNRO
Gilbert Haven Jones and the Black Personalist Tradition

This paper will shed light on Gilbert Haven Jones’ contributions to the Black personalist tradition, a successful and influential movement for African American philosophical and religious thought. The tradition saw a rise in prominence and prestige at Boston University from the latter part of the 19th century to the 1960s—the former receiving no recognition until much later. To date, most work on the African American personalist tradition has included the likes of Martin Luther King, John Wesley Edward Bowen, and William Jefferson King. This paper makes the argument that Jones’ academic career—not just his publishing record—ought to be considered part of the tradition.

Robert Munro is a third year PhD Student in the African American and African Studies program at Michigan State. His research focuses on the history of African American philosophy and philosophers, Afro-German Studies and the history of the African American intellectual tradition. His dissertation will look at Gilbert Haven Jones’s philosophical contributions.

PATRICIA A. LOTT
“Bobalition” Broadsides ∓ Festive Enactments Staged in 19th Century Boston

This paper serves as a case study of the dialogic interplay between early and mid-19th century “bobalition” broadsides—visual representations that caricature Blacks—and commemorative celebrations in an around Boston by Black people of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. The analysis centers on the meanings that specific "bobalition" broadsides signified to the mostly illiterate white audiences for whose consumption they were created, in addition to the responses the broadsides provoked from Black spectators. While these representations of Black people’s alleged depravity were intended to be demonstrative of the need for a social order based upon white domination and Black subordination, African descendants’ festive enactments provided occasions to challenge white domination by (re)claiming power over representation.

Patricia A. Lott is a doctoral student in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University. Her dissertation—tentatively entitled "Disremembered and Unaccounted for: the Production of Amnesia Regarding Slavery as it Was Practiced in the U.S. North, 1820-1861"—will analyze gradual emancipation laws and practices, festive occasions in the civic calendar, and print culture including visual images and literary productions generated in the early- to mid-nineteenth century in order to trace how the North’s practice of slavery was remembered and forgotten by various groups in the region, such that the memory of a "free North" came to dominate America’s public collective memory.

CHRISTOPHER BROOKS
Keeping Face: Relations Between John S. Rock & Charles Sumner

The focus of this paper is to explore the relationship between John S. Rock—Black abolitionist and one of the most talented Lyceum speakers of his day—and Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. The presentation offers a discussion of how Rock, often considered the father of the notion “Black is beautiful”, befriended Sumner and how the relationship may have affected public discourse on race relations in antebellum and bellum Boston. How did the relationship between these two important men enhance or diminish Black representation in Boston?

Christopher Brooks completed a dual BA (history and philosophy) and an MA (American History) at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania. This was followed by post graduate work at Edinburgh University in Scotland, where, as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, he performed extensive work in comparative constitutional studies. Further this work, he subsequently became a research associate at the Center for North American Research at J.W. von Goethe University in Frankfurt Germany. During this time, he completed his doctoral work at the University of Kassel under Horst Dippel. His culminating work from his studies there was _Chisholm to Alden: James Wilson's Artificial Person in American Supreme Court History, 1793-1999_ (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2006). Dr. Brooks, currently an Assistant Professor of Constitutional and Legal History at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, is working on a full-length biography on John S. Rock, with the majority of his current research being on churches, education and race as it pertains to his subject's early life. Dr. Brooks also performs freelance translation work for the Bundesverfassungsgericht (The German Constitutional Court) on occasion.

ELIZABETHADA A. WRIGHT
The Rhetoricity of Collective Memory

Until fairly recently, public memorialization of African American past was close to non-existent. However, the cemetery is a memory site that interrupts the mainstream popular memory to tell stories of people on the margins of society. This presentation will stress the unusual and often unrecognized rhetorical power of cemeteries to tell stories that those in power would like to keep hidden, focusing on the African burial ground in Portsmouth, NH.

Elizabethada Wright is professor of English and Communication at Rivier College in Nashua. She has a PhD in Communication and Rhetoric from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a MA in English Literature from Columbia University. Dr. Wright’s scholarship includes nineteenth-century American women writers, the history of writing instruction in the United States, and collective memory studies. Among the subjects of Dr. Wright’s publications are the newspaper columnist Fanny Fern, the African Burying Ground in Portsmouth, and Civil War burial sites..

WHITNEY BATTLE-BAPTISTE
Remembering Du Bois: The Struggle for Recognition at the Du Bois Boyhood Homesite

W E B Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Among his many accomplishments he was a brilliant and tireless proponent for Black liberation and human liberation in the U.S. and around the world. Surprisingly, the town of his birth has only recently and amidst controversy seen fit to recognize Du Bois’ life and legacy. This paper presents aspects of the struggle to commemorate Du Bois in Great Barrington and how archaeology has and will figure in cooperative grassroots community efforts to give Du Bois a prominent place on the national historical landscape.

Whitney Battle-Baptiste is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr. Battle-Baptiste is a historical archaeologist interested in race, gender, and cultural landscapes. Her theoretical interests include Black Feminist theory, critical race theory and the African Diaspora. Her publications include commentaries and papers in edited volumes on historical archaeology and slavery in the Southern United States. She has conducted field work at many sites, including the home of Andrew Jackson in Nashville, Tennessee; Rich Neck Plantation in Williamsburg, Virginia; and The Abiel Smith School in Boston, Mass. Her latest research is at the W. E. B. DuBois boyhood homesite in Great Barrington, Mass. She is currently completing her first book project titled, Black Feminist Archaeology, published by Left Coast Press.

CAIT VAUGHAN
“I wish she was away”: Racializing Space in Harriet Wilson’s NH

This presentation combines a literary analysis of Harriet Wilson’s novel Our Nig with an analysis of contemporary white claims on space and resistance to the reality of a multicultural New Hampshire. Questions at the heart of the analysis include: Where is Harriet Wilson’s NH? How do she and her protagonist Frado inhabit a ‘place’ in New Hampshire’s historical memory, present landscape, and multicultural future? What implications do Harriet and Frado’s ‘locations’ carry for present day citizens and race relations in NH?

Cait Vaughan is the coordinator for UNH’s Africana & African American Studies program under the Center for the Humanities. She graduated from UNH in 2008 with a B.A. in English Literature and African American Studies.

REVEREND DAVID ALLEN PETTEE
Crossing Borders: Slavery in Two New England Families

This paper will detail a white minister's efforts to reconcile the effects of slavery on two New England families. Pettee used genealogical tools to locate and meet a living descendant of an African his family enslaved in colonial Newport, RI. While researching the family history of his new cousin Pat, Pettee recovered a long forgotten story. Pat is directly descended from Sarah Ann Major (Harris) Fayerweather, the young woman who approached Prudence Crandall in September 1832 about her desire "to get a little more learning" at Crandall's School for Girls in Canterbury, CT. The ensuing controversy led to the closure of the school and the passage of racist "Black Laws" in Connecticut. While Prudence Crandall is remembered as a Connecticut State Heroine, few know what became of the woman who would remain her life long friend.

Reverend David Allen Pettee serves the Unitarian Universalist Association as the Ministerial Credentialing Director. He is on the Community Practice Board of "Coming to the Table: Taking American (USA) Beyond the Legacy of Enslavement" an initiative based out of Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, VA that involves direct descendants of enslavement, black and white, in exploring their unique role in addressing the legacy of slavery, on a personal and societal level. Rev. Pettee has identified 33 New England ancestors who were enslavers, including one ancestor who sailed in the transatlantic slave trade. He is working on a book with a white descendant of Thomas Jefferson. They have listened to more than one hundred descendants of slaveholders, to learn how this large, but purposefully hidden group seeks to reconcile and make meaning of such a complicated family legacy.

DELIA KONZETT
War, Protest, and Race in Oscar Micheaux’s Within our Gates

Within our Gates is primarily perceived as a response to D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, challenging not only its racist representations but its Southern politics of segregation, lynching, and migration. While not disagreeing altogether with this perspective, this paper analyzes Micheaux’s film from within the context of war. Americans and its minorities have traditionally viewed war as an opportunity to advance socially. During WWI, many Americans, including African Americans, joined the cause to escape poverty and provincialism. This paper will analyze Within our Gates as a response to WWI and the opportunities and obstacles it created for African Americans.

Delia Konzett is Assistant Professor of English and Cinema/American/ Women's Studies at UNH. She is the author of Ethnic Modernisms and is currently working on WWII Film and Orientalism.

REGINALD WILBURN
Paternal Loss & Patriarchal Love in Lydia Diamond’s “Stickfly”





Reginald A. Wilburn is an assistant professor of English, specializing in Milton and the African American literary tradition. Other academic interests include feminist, gender, and sexuality studies in addition to interrogating rhetorical connections between music and the literary word. As a teacher, Dr. Wilburn is committed to promoting visionary readers, thinkers, and writers through what he identifies as an "erotic pedagogy of liberation." This philosophy of teaching stems from his experiences as an alumnus of the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers and the theoretical writings of Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Paulo Freire.

JACKIE PARKER
Standing straight up as an actress in Black New England

Boston Actress Jacqui Parker will discuss Black representation in the theatre and how she has managed to survived as an African American professional actor in New England for the last twenty years. She will provide a few tricks of the trade that she has learned along the way.

Jacqui Parker is an Award Winning Actor, Director, and Playwright. She recently received critical acclaim for her role as Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, at the Lyric Stage Company. She was also seen as Mrs. Keckley and Mrs. Thomas in A Civil War Christmas, at Huntington Theatre Company for which she received an IRNE Award for Best Supporting Actress ; Another Huntington Theatre production was her role of Mother in “Breath Boom,(IRNE)” May N'Kame in Going to St. Ives, and Cashier in Ponies (The Gloucester Stage Company), Banquo in Macbeth (Actor’s Shakespeare Project), Caroline in "Caroline or Change (IRNE) and Inez in “Our Lady of 121st Street,”Her directing credits include: Once On This Island, Mother G, Feathers on my Arms ..... Zora Neale Flying High, Zooman and the Sign, Sorry Don’t Fix It, Goin’ to the Promise Land to name a few. Jacqui is the Artistic Director of the Our Place Theatre Project and the founder of Boston’s Annual African American Theatre Festival. Jacqui received the 2004 Boston Theatre Hero Award given by StageSource and the 2009 Drylongso Award by Community Change for her role in the struggle against racism.