Northern Slavery and the Preservation of Memory
Kyera Singleton, Royall House and Slave Quarters
Wednesday, June 16 at 2 p.m.
About the talk: As this country has reckoned with dueling pandemics, Covid-19 and systemic racism, many conversations about racial injustice and social justice have dominated the minds of millions of people. In this talk, Kyera Singleton, who is the Executive Director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters, will discuss how and why former sites of slavery, as places of history, memory, and education, are crucial to reckoning with our current moment and imagining a more just world.
About the Royall House and Slave Quarters: In the eighteenth century, the Royall House and Slave Quarters was home to the largest slaveholding family in Massachusetts and the enslaved Black women, men, and children who made their lavish way of life possible. Today, the Royall House and Slave Quarters is a museum whose architecture, household items, archaeological artifacts, and public programs bear witness to intertwined stories of wealth and bondage and contestations of freedom in Massachusetts.
Kyera Singleton is the Executive Director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters. She is also a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor in the Department of American Culture. For the 2021–2022 academic year, she is an American Democracy Fellow in the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. Before joining the Warren Center as an American Democracy Fellow, she held prestigious academic fellowships from the Beinecke Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Emory University's James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, and the American Association of University Women (AAUW). From 2018 through 2019, Kyera served as the Humanity in Action Policy Fellow for the ACLU of Georgia, focusing on mass incarceration, reproductive justice, and voting rights. As a public history scholar, Kyera recently served as an advisor on the Boston Art Commission's Recontextualization Subcommittee for the bronze Emancipation Group Statue. She is also a member of the Board of Public Humanities Fellows at Brown University, which brings together a collection of museum leaders from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.
Charter Oak Sponsor: Connecticut Explored
Golden Key Sponsor: Fallon & Wilkinson
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