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Conference 2007

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Black New England Conference 2007: Lecture Summaries

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Thursday, May 31: UNH Huddleston Hall Ball Room

1:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Tour #1: Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail Tour
Tour #2: Harriet Wilson and Milford's Black Heritage Trail Tour

PORTSMOUTH BLACK HERITAGE TRAIL

Portsmouth, New Hampshire has been home to Africans and Black Americans for more than 350 years. This tour will take visitors to 13 sites where Portsmouth's Black residents lived, worked, prayed and celebrated including the Pearl Street Church, the Rockingham Hotel and the recently uncovered site of the African Burying Ground.

Min. 10 people

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MILFORD BLACK HERITAGE TRAIL

Conference participants will meet at Huddleston Hall in Durham to travel by bus to Milford, New Hampshire where we will see the house where Harriet Wilson lived, her school, the church she attended, the old town hall where abolitionists met, and the town cemetery among other sites.

Min. 12 people

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7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Movie & Discussion

LOST BOUNDARIES

Lost Boundaries tells the true story of an African American physician and his family living in a New Hampshire community and the effect it had on the oldest child when he discovered he was not White. Winner of a Cannes film festival award, Lost Boundaries was largely shot in the towns of Portsmouth and Durham, in New Hampshire and in Kittery, Maine. It was one of the first mainstream films to treat Black people as autonomous human beings

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Friday, June 1: UNH Huddleston Hall Ballroom

9:00-10:15 am
Session #1: JAN ALBERGHENE PRESENTS: A Conversation with Barbara Neely

BARBARA NEELY
“A Conversation with Barbara Neely”

African American mystery author Barbara Neely was born in the small Dutch community of Lebanon, Pennsylvania in 1941. Neely, the eldest of Ann and Bernard's three children, attended a Catholic elementary school and was the only child in her class of Dutch-speaking students to speak English fluently. She was also the only student of African American descent to attend her elementary and high school.

In 1971, Neely moved to Pittsburgh where she obtained a master's degree in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Pittsburgh. Three years later she became deeply involved in local activism and organized a community-based home for formerly incarcerated women in a suburb of Pittsburgh called Shady Side. Despite her efforts to give these women some hope for the future, local residents opposed the program's presence in their neighborhood. The facility was ridiculed and pressured to move to the inner city. However, Neely successfully fought to keep the program in place.

Neely had always dreamed of becoming an author and actually wrote short stories before turning to novel writing. In 1978, Neely received the inspiration she needed to pursue a writing career. After watching an old woman in San Francisco dance in front of a band, Neely was convinced to take her work to the next level. Neely recalls, "She [the dancing woman] started pointing to people, and when she turned and pointed to me, it seemed to me that she was saying, 'Do it today, because today is all you have.'"

Jan Alberghene is a professor of English at Fitchburg State College located in north central Massachusetts just a short drive from Milford, N.H., the setting of much of Our Nig and the memorial to its author, Harriet E. Wilson. Jan is the co-editor with Beverly Lyons Clark of Little Women and the Feminist Imagination: Criticism, Controversy, and Personal Essays as well as the author of numerous articles on children's literature and cultural constructions of American identity. She teaches a wide range of courses in American literature and writing that feature the voices and visions of individuals and groups too often marginalized in both academia and the culture at large. Not surprisingly, Dr. Alberghene takes great pleasure in her participation in the vast informal network of women in academia who regularly swap off and share their favorite detective fiction, although she steadfastly refuses to part with her four novels by Barbara Neely.

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10:30 - 12:00 pm
Session #2: Black Life in New England

BARBARA WHITE
“The Walkers of Worchester”

In "The Walkers of Worcester," Barbara A. White resurrects the Walker family of Worcester, Mass., which was probably the family who aided author Harriet E. Wilson after she went to Massachusetts. Although Worcester had only a tiny population of African Americans (about 1%), the Walkers nonetheless participated in a viable black community.

Barbara A. White is Professor Emerita and former coordinator of the Women's Studies Program at the University of New Hampshire. She has written or edited several books on American women writers in the nineteenth century. The latest, a biography of the Beecher sisters, was published by Yale University Press in 2003. White also serves as the historian on the board of the Harriet Wilson Project.

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JOANNE POPE MELISH
“The Prejudice of Tradition: Paul Cuffee, William J. Brown, and the Changing Racial Landscape of Early 19th-Century New England ”

This talk discusses two important black leaders of similar background and abilities in the Rhode Island/Massachusetts area, one born just before the other died, whose social identities, life prospects, and career trajectories were radically different as a consequence of the way the gradual end of slavery changed the racial landscape in early 19th-century New England.

Joanne Pope Melish was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, and received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University. In addition to her book, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860 (Cornell University Press, 1998), she has published several articles on race, slavery, and the public history of slavery in New England. Currently she is working on a book tentatively entitled "Race in the Vernacular: Language, Landscape, and the Remaking of Social Identities in the Post-Slavery North." She teaches at the University of Kentucky and is co-director of a new initiative to create an Africana Studies Department at the university.

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CRAIG WILDER
“Abolitionist in Sentiment, But Not in Conduct: Race, Politics, and the American College, 1828-1840”

On campus after campus, the question of the appropriateness of abolitionist discourse and anti-slavery action divided college students, faculties, and trustees. Coinciding with a wave of pro-slavery attacks on white and black abolitionists in the Northeast, the campus wars fundamentally altered the American college. This lecture examines the divisive, painful, and, at times, violent process through which abolitionists and abolitionist ideas gained access to college communities.

Craig Steven Wilder is professor of history at Dartmouth College and a visiting professor at the New School University, New York City. His current research examines the Black struggle for education in New York City.

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KRISTIN WATERS
“Crying Out for Liberty. Concepts of Freedom & Equity in the Early Abolition Movement”

This presentation explores the radical philosophies of freedom and equality developed by Maria Stewart and David Walker. Racial patriarchy provides the underlying social and political structure, as well as a prevalent ideology found in North America. Like the philosopher John Locke, Thomas Jefferson appealed to natural rights and reason to underlie arguments for liberal equality. Yet in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, abolitionist David Walker ridicules Jefferson's "Christian" hypocrisy in supporting both slavery and equality. New England native Maria W. Stewart echoes Walker's refrain in her 1830s speech when she asserts that "all the nations of the earth are crying out for liberty and equality," and argues that God "hath made you a little lower than the angels when; and according to the Constitution of the United States, he hath made all men free and equal."

Kristin Waters is Professor of Philosophy at Worcester State College and Visiting Research Associate at the Women's Studies Research Center of Brandeis University. Her new book is Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, co-edited with Carol B. Conaway (University of Vermont Press, 2007)

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12:15 - 1:15 pm
Lunch Speaker

1:30-3:00 pm
Session #3: Black Cultural Expressions in New England

NAPOLEON JONES HENDERSON
“Blues and the Abstract Truth; Color in Blackness”

Within the construct and lens of New England the African sensibility of polyrhythmic synchronicity and the strength of forbearance has manifest itself in the variant images of visual works that represent a manifestation (the entirety) of "Black" New England. The degree to which Africans/Blacks have populated this area of the continental United States since early eras of growth has produced a vast variety of visual works that illuminate the lives of these individuals via what we identify as "Art". "Blues and the Abstract Truth" is a metaphor for the post-modern modem in which we (African/Black New Englanders) have had to exist in these United States. Post Modern is here used as a marker of behavior and sensibility rather than an adherence to "Post Modernism" as a discipline as such.

Napoleon Jones Henderson attended the Sorbonne in Paris , received a B.A. of Fine Arts from the Art Institute of Chicago and did his graduate studies at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. He is a founding member of Africobra, one of the most important visual arts collectives to come out of the Chicago Black Arts Movement. He received the Mayor of Boston "Award of Recognition for Outdoor Sculpture Exhibit," the Massachusetts State Senate "Omical Citation for Cultural Excellenc," and an "Award of Excellence" from the National Conference of Artists.

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DELIA KONZETT
“Revisiting the Past and Re-imagining the Future: Revisionary Representations of Black New England in Contemporary American Cinema”

While African American culture in New England has its concrete historical contours and sociological parameters, it has also captured the interest of filmmakers in their attempts to re-imagine New England as an open rather than ossified and already settled site of Anglo-American culture. As such, these films operate more within the realm of a utopian or revisionary imagination, allowing its directors to revisit particular historical times and insert or imagine alternative views of history. In this approach, the past and present are not yet closed and indeed may hold the key for a different future. This paper will explore revisionary representations of African Americans living in New England in three contemporary films: Matty Rich's The Inkwell (1994); Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven (2002); and Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006).

Delia Konzett is an Assistant Professor of English, Film and American Studies at the University of New Hampshire, in Durham.

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LARRY BENAQUIST
Lost Boundaries

This presentation is a brief overview of how the film, Lost Boundaries, was made, its impact on the Johnston family and the community, and the film's aftermath. One of the first mainstream films to treat African Americans as autonomous people, Lost Boundaries passed under the radar, initially, as a typical family melodrama, only to challenge the received interpretations of American Black life. In 1989, Keene State College hosted the Fortieth Anniversary Lost Boundaries reunion, which brought cast, crew, and the Johnston family together, with the community of Keene, to view a screening of the film. The event was covered by NPR, The Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, and resulted in an Emmy-nominated documentary produced by NHPTV, Home to Keene: The Lost Boundaries Reunion. Over a thousand people came to meet the Johnston family, to meet the descendants of Louis de Rochemont, the producer of Lost Boundaries, and the cast of the film, including Mel Ferrer and William Greaves. The State of New Hampshire recognized the Johnston family as a First Family of the State.

Larry Benaquist is founder and chair of the Film Studies program at Keene State College. He received his Ph.D. from Syracuse University in Renaissance Studies, and oversees a program with one hundred majors and a faculty of ten. He is a documentary filmmaker, having produced most recently Here Am I, Send Me: The Journey of Jonathan Daniels, which has aired frequently on PBS. This documentary tells the story of Jonathan Daniels, native of New Hampshire, who died in 1965 in the deep south saving the life of a young, African American civil rights worker, as she was about to be shot by a white deputy sheriff. He is a frequent contributor to radio shows and panels on issues of film and culture. He is currently working on two documentary projects dealing with the Holocaust, based on research he and his colleague, Bill Sullivan, did regarding the Unitarian Church and rescue operations in Europe in the early years of the second world war.

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3:15-4:45 pm
Session #4: Early Black New England

DINAH MAYO-BOBEE
“Servile Discontents: Slavery and Resistance in Colonial New Hampshire, 1645-1785”

One of the more persistent beliefs about slavery in New Hampshire is that it was relatively mild because compared with other colonies the number of slaves in New Hampshire was small and their treatment consistent with that of hired servants. Corollary to this interpretation is the argument that manumission and abolitionism met little resistance in New England because there was little at stake for slaveholders. Yet, recently, scholars have challenged these ideas, demonstrating that slavery in New Hampshire was more widely practiced and the treatment of slaves more complex than historians previously believed. Expanding on recent scholarship, this paper examines resistance to bondage in New Hampshire beginning in 1645, and argues that slavery played an important part in the socioeconomic development of New Hampshire, and demonstrates the ways that the slaves themselves took the lead in the fight for freedom and equality.

This presentation reflects on over fifty cases of slave resistance, extracted from newspaper advertisements, provincial records, and manuscript collections. Moreover, this paper recognizes slaves as historical actors as it explores the dangers they faced on the frontier, various forms of exploitation, including the use of slaves to execute criminal activities, and the circumstances that contributed to specific runaway cases. In its entirety, this exploration of resistance to slavery underscores the benefits of reassessing slavery in New England and delving even deeper into the lives of African Americans in the colonial era. Most importantly, this study helps to broaden our understanding of how slavery operated on the lives of the colony's black inhabitants during the most crucial periods of New England’s development.

Dinah Mayo-Bobee received her Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in May 2007, where she also earned her Masters degree in 2001. Her dissertation "Something Energetic and Spirit," which focuses on national politics, examines the revitalization of the Federalist Party in New England and chronicles the emergence of antislavery politics in the early national period. The article "Servile Discontents" began as an independent project for which Dinah received the Michael Kraus Research Award from the American Historical Association in 2003. The paper deals with slavery in colonial New Hampshire and investigates its place in the colony's social fabric and cultural development.

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ERIC KIMBALL
“Far Beyond the Shores: The Centrality of Caribbean Slave Labor in the Making of Colonial Connecticut.”

While investigating the experiences of African Americans within Colonial New England remains a crucial endeavor, this presentation is an argument that the primary importance of African American labor in building the region’s economic expansion in the colonial era only fully emerges from an analysis which examines the connections between this region and the Caribbean. The islands were the most important export market for goods produced in New England and the largest region supplying imports. We will examine the specifics behind this circuit of commodity exchange for one colony, Connecticut, between 1768 and 1775. Although Connecticut had the largest number of African-Americans of any of the four New England colonies by 1776, accounting for roughly three percent of the total population, the importance of slave labor for Connecticut's economy lay outside the landed boundaries of the colony. The significance of African-American labor in the economic development of Connecticut emerged from the circuit of labor production linking the colony to the heart of Atlantic slave economy: the Caribbean. Kimball’s analysis seeks to expand the current interpretative framework for understanding the importance of slavery regarding colonies which contained a comparatively small number of slaves, like Connecticut, but whose economic fortunes were inexorably linked to regions dependent upon the labor of African slaves.

Eric Kimball is a Ph.D. Candidate (Pass with Distinction) in Early American History, University of Pittsburgh, Fall 2004. Dissertation: "An essential Link, in a Vast Chain": New England and the West Indies, 1700-1775. Master of Arts in History (High Pass), University of New Hampshire, May 2002. Bachelor of Arts (Cum Laude), University of New Hampshire, May 1993. Majors: History, Communication.

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KATHRYN GROVER
“African American Settlement Patterns in New England to 1860”

This talk will describe the places of origin of people of African descent who lived in New England before the Civil War. Based in particular on research in Massachusetts—including such cities and towns as Boston, New Bedford, Nantucket, Lowell, Springfield, Ashburnham, and Northhampton—the talk will explore how such factors as inland and coastal location, rural and urban setting, historical presence of people of color, and aspects of local Anglo-American culture influenced African American settlement in this region.

Kathryn Grover is an independent researcher, writer, and editor and has worked in African American history for almost twenty years. She is the author of Make a Way Somehow: African American Life in a Northern Community (Syracuse University Press, 1994), which won that press's John Ben Snow Prize in 2002, and of The Fugitive's Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). For the National Park Service's Boston African American National Historic site, she and Jan da Silva researched and wrote a Historic Resource Study of significant sites on the historically black north slope of Beacon Hill in 2002; for Massachusetts Historical Commission and the National Park Service's Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, she researched and wrote a context statement about fugitives and fugitive assistance in Massachusetts, with architectural historian Neil Larson, in 2003-4. That project included studies of Underground Railroad activity in Salem and Lowell. She also has prepared National Historic Landmark and National Register nominations for five Massachusetts properties with documented Underground Railroad associations. In 2004-5 she worked on Nantucket under a James Bradford Ames fellowship on the role of whaling and kinship among black whalers on the island and the mainland.

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7:00-9:30 pm
Keynote Address & Opening Reception (MUB Theatre 1)

JAMES CAMPBELL
“Navigating the Past: Reflections on Brown University's Steering Committee on Slavery & Justice”

An overview of the committee's origins and outcomes, combined with reflections on the broader questions of historical memory and retrospective justice.

James Campbell has a B.A. from Yale (1980) and Ph.D. from Stanford (1989), both in History. He is currently an associate professor of American Civilization, Africana Studies and History at Brown. Campbell previously taught at Northwestern University and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Author of various articles and two books, Song of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa and Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005. From 2003-2006 Campbell chaired Brown's Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.

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Saturday, June 2: UNH Huddleston Hall Ballroom

9:00 - 10:30 a.m.
Session #5: Black New England, Africa, and the Caribbean

WILLI COLEMAN
“Sarah Parker Remond... hot lead to pour on the Americans.”

While African Americans in New England may not have been subjected to the daily horrors of out right slavery they did not exempt themselves from the battle to bring human bondage to an end. In Massachusetts as in other areas Black women formed a strong and consistent line of resistance. This talk will focus on Sarah Parker Remond as an extraordinary example of their fortitude. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Remond was unusual in at least two respects. She not only took the fight against slavery into the international arena, she also traveled abroad staging her own one-woman fight for education and other civil liberties denied in her own country.

Willi Coleman is Associate Professor of History and U.S. ALANA Studies at the University of Vermont.

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CAROLYN FLUEHR-LOBBAN
“Discovering and Recovering a 19th century Pioneering Haitian Scholar in Rhode Island”

Antenor Firmin (1850-1911), Haitian author of a pioneering work in race and anthropology De l'egalite des Races Humaines, Anthropologie Positive (Paris, 1885), was perhaps the first anthropologist of African descent. He was discovered in an "Anthropology of Race and Racism" class at Rhode Island College in 1988 when former student Jacques R. Georges brought the work to the attention of Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban; his rare book was recovered and translated into English as a result of an event sponsored by the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society in 1994; and the first conference to receive and critically discuss this work of anthropology and early pan-Africanism and negritude was held at Rhode Island College in 2001.

Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban has a Ph.D. in Anthropology—African and African American Studies Rhode Island College.

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JAMES CAMPBELL
“Back to Africa? The Politics of Black Repatriation in Post Revolutionary New England ”

This presentation will focus on the first African emigration initiatives that emerged among black communities in Rhode Island in the late eighteenth century.

James Campbell has a B.A. from Yale (1980) and Ph.D. from Stanford (1989), both in History. He is currently an associate professor of American Civilization, Africana Studies and History at Brown. Campbell has previously taught at Northwestern University and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was a chair on Brown's Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice from 2003-2006. He is the author of various articles and two books, Song of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa and Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005.

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DENISE GONSALVES
“Cape Verdeans: Uncovering a Hidden Community”

The Cape Verdean community is not new to New England, however, it has often been hidden because of its history and resemblance to other cultures. In this presentation, we will explore the history of Cape Verdeans coming to the United States and the challenges they faced, particularly around issues of race and culture. There will be a special focus on the current work with Cape Verdeans in the Boston Area and their struggle to regain their identity.

Denise Gonsalves received her Bachelors Degree in Social Work from Wheelock College and later went on to receive her Masters Degree in Social Work from Boston University in 1997. While at Boston University, she began working at Dorchester CARES as an intern. In 2003, she left Dorchester CARES to become the first Executive Director of Cape Verdean Community UNIDO, formerly known as the Cape Verdean Community Task Force. Here she has built collaborations, created new programs for youth and adults, and organized sections of the community for peace initiatives and civic engagement. Her focus is engaging youth to become active participants in the development and implementation of programs, such as the Boston Connecting Cultures Mural Project and the Investing in Human Potential Middle School Project.

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10:45 - 12:15 p.m.
Session #6: Social Memories, Memorials and Trails

FRANCES JONES SNEED
“Du Bois and African American Heritage in the Upper Housatonic Valley ”

A short history of the work of the Upper Housatonic African American Trail in southern Berkshire County in western Massachusetts and Northern Connecticut.

Frances Jones-Sneed, Ph.D., is professor of history, former department chairperson, and director of the Berkshire Center for the Study of Local History and Culture at MCLA. For the past eight years, she has researched local history in Berkshire County. She has published and presented on oral history research, African Americans and their sense of place in the American West, African American women’s clubs in Missouri and Washington State, and the Mississippi civil rights movement.

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DEBORAH MACK
“Uncomfortable Truths: New England and Slavery in Public Dialogue and Public Culture.”

This presentation addresses the significance of the rediscovery of the Portsmouth, New Hampshire African burial site, and how its presence reincorporates the African American presence into the core historical narrative of New England and the larger regional eastern seaboard. 2007 marks the bicentenary of the parliamentary abolition of the British slave trade. The landmark year of 1807 had important consequences for Britain's most important trading partners in New England and the Caribbean, in that the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade both shifted domestic economies and fueled the domestic slave trade. This site—and its interpretive memorialization—is an important site of evidence as well as in the national/international stories that are reshaping civic engagement and public culture in the larger Atlantic world.

Deborah L. Mack consults extensively on museum, interpretive, academic, and cultural tourism issues with organizations in the United States and abroad. She is one of the original five scholars appointed by the Smithsonian Institution to an advisory committee for the planned National Museum of African American History and Culture. She has been involved with the development of the museum since 2002 as a consultant and advisor. Deborah Mack’s professional positions have included manager of exhibits and education programs at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Cincinnati; research associate and curator of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University; and project director of Africa, the Field Museum's major permanent installation on the biology, cultures, and environments of Africa.

Dr. Mack has a Ph.D. in anthropology and a B.A. in geography. She has taught anthropology and African studies; worked in museum collections, film production, and anthropological research; and developed, led, and lectured for heritage tourism programs in the United States and Africa. She is an active member and board member of a number of professional organizations; serves on the advisory board of McIntosh SEED (Sustainable Environmental and Economic Development), in McIntosh County, Georgia; and served two three-year terms on the advisory Smithsonian Council.

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RACHEL TALBOT ROSS
“Maine's Freedom Trails ”

A brief presentation on Maine's Black heritage and the creation of the Freedom Trails Tour.

Rachel Talbot Ross is the director of Equal Opportunity & Multicultural Affairs for the city of Portland and current president of the NAACP Portland Branch. She serves as the chair for the Maine advisory committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and is on several boards including Tengo Voz (I Have Voice), Maine Haiti Solidarity, Peace and Justice in Israel/Palestine, and the African American Collection of Maine for the University of Southern Maine. As a ninth generation Mainer, she comes from a legacy that is committed to preserving African American history in Maine. Rachel is leading efforts to create the "Portland (Underground Railroad) Freedom Trail" and, in conjunction with ecological preservation efforts, to produce public awareness materials and curriculum on Malaga Island, an African American settlement of the 1860’s located off the coast of Phippsburg in Maine.

Daniel Minter is an accomplished artist who works in a variety of media. His paintings and sculpture have been exhibited both nationally and internationally at galleries and museums including the Seattle Art Museum, The Tacoma Art Museum, Bates Collage, The Meridian International Center and Clark Collage. In addition is work is in a collection owned by the Microsoft Corporation and many other private collectors. Minter has illustrated seven children's books that have won numerous awards, including the Oppenheimer Toy Portfolio, Texas Blue Bonnet Book and the Carter G. Woodson Honer Book. He has lived in New York, Chicago and Seattle, where he taught art at various institutions from the Studio Museum in Harlem to the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as public and private schools.

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12:30 - 1:00 pm
Lunch Speaker

JOANNE POPE MELISH
“A Racial Vernacular: Language and Self-Definition in Post-Slavery New England ”

This talk discusses how the language of "race"—i.e., the categories through which social identities gained meaning—were being negotiated by slaves and the growing population of free people of color from the late 18th through the mid 19th centuries in New England.

Joanne Pope Melish was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, and received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University. In addition to her book, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860 (Cornell University Press, 1998), she has published several articles on race, slavery, and the public history of slavery in New England. Currently she is working on a book tentatively entitled Race in the Vernacular: Language, Landscape, and the Remaking of Social Identities in the Post-Slavery North. She teaches at the University of Kentucky and is co-director of a new initiative to create an Africana Studies Department at the university.

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1:45 - 3:30 pm
Session #7: Research and Teaching Local Black History

This workshop will feature Valerie Cunningham, Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail and director of UNH Black Heritage Partnerships, JerriAnne Boggis, Harriet Wilson Project and UNH coordinator of Diversity Educational Programs, and David Watters, director of the Center for New England Culture. They will present their work on projects funded by the UNH President’s Excellence Award as examples of the methods, issues, and materials in local historical research on Black life in New Hampshire. Valerie Cunningham will discuss preservation and documentation of Rock Rest, an African American tourist home in Kittery, Maine, during the era of segregated public accommodations. JerriAnne Boggis will provide materials on Milford, New Hampshire discovered in researching the life of Harriet Wilson, the author of the first novel published by an African American woman, Our Nig (1859). David Watters will examine the stories of African Americans to be found in New Hampshire town histories, census records, Revolutionary War pension records, graveyards, and other sources. This workshop will include a how-to, hands-on session which should be of interest to members of local historical societies, genealogists, and especially to teachers who want to connect their classrooms to local Black history.

JerriAnne Boggis is the founder and director of the Harriet Wilson Project, a nonprofit organization designed to research and promote New Hampshire's black history through public recognition and celebration of Harriet Wilson and other historical African American figures. Boggis has developed and presented several cultural events to the New Hampshire public not only through her work as a community activist but also as the Coordinator for Diversity Educational Programs at the University of New Hampshire. Ms Boggis is co-coordinator for the Black New England Conference.

Valerie Cunningham is the president and founder of the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail in New Hampshire, a self-guided walking tour of more than 24 sites within the city of Portsmouth. Since its establishment in 1995 the Trail, as an organization, has expanded its interest and influence to include stories and sites within the southeastern corner known as the Seacoast, which also includes the southern coastal area of Maine. She helped to coordinate and plan New Hampshire's first African American preservation project, the Pearl Street Church, New Hampshire's first Black-owned church building. Currently, she is the project manager working with public and private partners in Maine and New Hampshire to preserve n historic African American guest house in Kittery Point, Maine, and a recently recovered 18th century African Burial Ground in Portsmouth. Valerie is the Coordinator of Black Heritage Partnerships at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, providing opportunities for the academic community and the expanding African American communities of the state to become more familiar with available educational and service opportunities.

David Watters is Director of the Center for New England Culture and Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. He is co-editor of The Encyclopedia of New England and the author of books and articles on New England literature, culture, history, and gravestone art. He serves as a trustee of the New Hampshire Historical Society, the Robert Frost Homestead Foundation, and the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail.

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