Event: “For the Common Benefit of the Place” Black Freedom in Early Boston
Wednesday, August 19th | 7:00 pm Old North Digital Speaker Series Register here
Public historian and local author Alex Goldfeld will give an illustrated presentation on Boston’s African-American community in the 1600s. He will draw on his graduate research in The History of the Streets of Boston’s North End to speak about life for Boston’s earliest black residents. The audience will get glimpses of free Black Bostonians as well as efforts to control them by law throughout Massachusetts.
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.
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