David Ruggles Center’s Annual Founders Day Symposium, “Black Lives in the Connecticut River Valley: Discovery to Documentation,” with Keynote Speaker, Dr. Ousmane Power-Greene (on ZOOM)

The David Ruggles Center for History and Education is proud to present its annual Founders Day Symposium. The NAEI was founded in Florence on April 8, 1842. A radical abolitionist utopian community, the NAEI attracted both David Ruggles and Sojourner Truth to join. The David Ruggles Center for History and Education was created on this date in 2008.

Meeting ID: 852 2702 8345
Passcode: 892719

Symposium Program: Black Lives in the Connecticut River Valley: Discovery to Documentation

Moderator, Tara Brewster, Vice President Business Development, Greenfield Savings Bank,

Introductory Remarks, Tom Goldscheider, MA Public Historian,

David Ruggles: Making Good Trouble in Northampton, Kim Gerald, Retired Educator

#Sayhername in the Archive: The Challenges and Triumphs of
Researching Black Women in the Connecticut River Valley, Dr. Ousmane Power-Greene, History Department, Clark University

Question and Answer Period

About the program:

With the emergence of #blacklivesmatter and #sayhername movements, scholars, teachers, and museum professionals have redoubled their efforts to search for stories about the experiences of African Americans from small New England towns to larger cities. Such research efforts have been coupled with grassroots movements to establish historical markers to recognize the Black experience publicly. Although African American scholars and civic organizations, such as the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, have done this for over a century, the new enthusiasm within small New England communities to recover this history signals an important opportunity to show that, indeed, Black lives do matter — especially in the Connecticut River Valley where Black people have never comprised a significant number of residents. Professor Ousmane Power-Greene’s talk will offer a Black historian’s perspective about the challenges and rewards of researching Black women in historical repositories over the past two decades. His talk will also share new initiatives he is involved with, such as the Documenting the Early History of Black Lives in the Pioneer Valleyproject, that have recently sought to institutionalize these efforts.

Dr. Power-Greene is an Associate Professor in the History Department and director of Africana Studies at Clark University in Worcester, MA. He completed his B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.Ed., M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst as well as an MFA from Columbia University. Professor Power-Greene’s book, Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement (NYU Press 2014), examines Black Americans’ efforts to agitate in opposition to the American Colonization Society’s project of racial deportation to Liberia. Also, he is co-editor with Ronald A. Johnson of a collection of essays titled In Search of Liberty: Nineteenth Century African American Internationalism (University of Georgia Press Spring 2021). His current monograph, An Uneasy Alliance: African Americans, Liberia, and the Colonization Movement, is currently under review at UNC Press. Over his career, his scholarship has been recognized with various fellowships, most notably the prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored scholar-in-residence program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. Dr. Power-Greene has been featured on numerous podcasts and radio programs, such as  “This Week in History” that airs weekly on ABC Radio in Australia, All Things Considered, andCSPAN Book TV. More recently, he appeared on NPR’s history podcast Throughline for an episode on the legacy of Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa movement. A sought-after lecturer, Dr. Power-Greene has been invited to present his scholarship in Germany, France, England, Ghana, and China, and, this past February 2022, at the American Academy in Rome. He reviews books for American Historical Review, Journal of American History, and Journal of Southern History, among others.