Category Commentary
With national debates raging across America on race relations, patriotism and confederate memorials, I often turn back to history to have a better understanding of the present and future. In fact, the understanding of historical events, places and people can… Continue Reading →
Recently I posted an image on Facebook of my great aunt and uncle at Easton’s Beach in Newport, RI around 1917. I noted my aunt, Lillie Forrester Carr was an early African American graduate of the New England Conservatory of… Continue Reading →
For me, my African heritage ancestor’s trials of enslavement is not a distant historical occurrence, but something that shaped my family life then and to this very day. I have studied the subject extensively, lectured in many historic cities and… Continue Reading →
For better or worse, far too many historical interpretations of the European Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the enslavement of Africans in the Western Hemisphere have overshadowed the narratives of the Africans themselves, rendering their past lives and accomplishments nearly invisible… Continue Reading →
Many times, when you live and were raised in a historic community like my home in Newport, Rhode Island, you take for granted the significant sites and structures in the place you call home. My family has lived on Vernon… Continue Reading →
In all the years that I have worked researching and interpreting slave cemeteries, the most interesting and baffling discovery I have come across is the matching burial markers in Newport, RI and Dorchester, MA of a young slave girl named… Continue Reading →
Nearly two hundred years before the 1963 March on Washington for Peace & Jobs and before Richard Allen, Fredrick Douglas, Harriett Tubman, WEB Dubois, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, there was an African man who brought vision,… Continue Reading →
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When the Human Being Counts
Here are two images I would like to offer for the last day of Black History Month in 2108. My great, great grandmother, Narcissa Forrester and her slave doll (c. 1830) from when she was a little girl in Virginia…. Continue Reading →