Elizabeth Freeman and the Telling of Black Stories
On Friday, August 19 at 4 p.m., the W. E. B. Du Bois Center for Freedom and Democracy (formerly Clinton Church Restoration) will present a roundtable discussion on the life and legacy of Elizabeth Freeman, the first enslaved African American to successfully sue for her freedom in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The roundtable discussion will take place at 4:00 p.m. at Dewey Hall in Sheffield. A reception will follow.
Elizabeth Freeman has been somewhat of a local hero in the Berkshires for decades. Her life and legacy have been interpreted through exhibits at the Colonel John Ashley House in Sheffield, a stop on the Upper Housatonic Valley African American Heritage Trail, and through a number of books about her life. Much of the telling of her story has been shaped by a biography written by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, the daughter of Freeman’s longtime employer. Nationally, Freeman has been memorialized by a statue at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture; her portrait appeared in The 1619 Project, a history of U.S. slavery published in 2019 by the New York Times. A feature film based on her life is in the making.
“But Freeman never told her own story,” noted Dr. Sari Edelstein in ‘Good Mother, Farewell’: Elizabeth Freeman’s Silence and the Stories of Mumbet, an article published by the New England Quarterly in 2019.
“The recent proliferation of children’s books on Freeman vividly demonstrates the desire for a celebratory national story, one that can be seamlessly woven into grade school curricula that enshrine the founding ideals and ennoble exceptional individuals,” Edelstein wrote. “And yet, Freeman’s story is more complex than such accounts allow, and the instrumentalization of her life narrative raises questions about the stories told in the absence or suppression of archival material and about how narrative serves as one tool among many for the containment of black lives, even those that are celebrated.”
At the August 19th roundtable, Dr. Edelstein, an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, will be joined by three Du Bois Freedom Center scholars — Dr. Kendra T. Field, an associate professor of History and Africana Studies and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University; Dr. Kerri Greenidge, an assistant professor of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University and interim director of the Center’s American Studies Program; and Dr. Frances Jones Sneed, professor emeritus of history at MCLA — to engage with the realities of Freeman’s story and use it as an entryway into a larger conversation about stories, silences, and the ethics of African American public history.
The roundtable discussion will take place at 4:00 p.m. at Dewey Hall, 91 Main Street Sheffield. Suggested donation at the door: $20 (more if you can, less if you can’t). A light reception will follow the talk.
Elizabeth Freeman and the Telling of Black Stories is cosponsored by Dewey Memorial Hall, Housatonic Heritage and the Upper Housatonic African American Heritage Trail, and the African American Trail Project at Tufts University, with support from the Sheffield Historical Society. The roundtable is the first in a series of events honoring Elizabeth Freeman’s journey to freedom that will take place in Sheffield from August 19-21. For a full schedule of events, visit https://sheffieldhistory.weebly.com/elizabeth-freeman-monument.html