Introducing The Atlantic Black Box Project
12-1 pm on Friday, July 24th
Meadow Dibble, a Visiting Scholar at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, will join Maine Conservation Alliance to discuss the Atlantic Black Box Project—a Portland-based public history initiative devoted to researching and reckoning with New England’s role in the slave trade and the economy of enslavement. Despite the 1820 federal act that made participation in the slave trade a capital offense, many merchants and mariners of this region continued to engage in this illicit traffic, right up to the eve of the Civil War. This highly lucrative activity, along with the related practices of provisioning plantations of the Americas and processing their produce in Northern mills, served as the primary fuel powering New England’s economic ascent. And yet our regional narratives have carefully avoided this topic for the past two centuries. All are welcome. Register here.
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Published by Meadow Dibble
Meadow Dibble is Director of Community-Engaged Research at the Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous, and Tribal Populations and founding Director of Atlantic Black Box, a nonprofit devoted to researching and reckoning with New England’s role in the slave trade and the economy of enslavement. She is currently in her third year as a Visiting Scholar at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Meadow received her Doctorate from Brown’s Department of French with a focus on Postcolonial studies and taught Francophone African literature at Colby College from 2005–08. Originally from Cape Cod, she lived for six years on Senegal’s Cape Verde peninsula, where she published a cultural magazine and coordinated foreign study programs. In 2016, Meadow experienced a brutal awakening to the reality of her hometown’s deep investment in the global slave economy. Ever since, she has been researching complicity among Cape Cod’s sea captains while developing The Atlantic Black Box Project.
View all posts by Meadow Dibble