Join us for a talk about the first Black woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court, and the first to serve as a federal judge. Constance Baker Motley was born in 1921 in New Haven. She graduated from Columbia Law School in 1946, and became an unsung civil rights hero. A prominent force for women’s equality and civil rights, the fierce attorney wrote the original complaint in the Brown v. Board of Education case. Her list of firsts continued well into her career; she was also the first Black woman to hold the position of state senator for New York.

Our speaker, Constance L. Royster, is Ms. Motley’s niece, and principal of Laurel Associates LLC. She is a recognized fundraising, education, non-profit, and organizational leader. Born and raised in New Haven, Ms. Royster is a Fellow of Jonathan Edwards College at Yale. She received her juris doctor from Rutgers University Law School and graduated with a B.A. cum laude from Yale University.

Join Jeffrey Fletcher from The Ruby & Calvin Fletcher African American Museum, Connecticut’s first African American museum, for a discussion on the vast collection of artifacts dating from the Atlantic slave trade to the Jim Crow South.

The exhibit is a collection of artifacts which reflect decades of turbulent times for African Americans in the United States during the period of slavery and the Civil Rights movement. It provides an up-close and personal view of events we may have only read about in history books or seen in movies.

This program can be attended in-person, or virtually with a Zoom connection.

Descendants of the enslaved Africans on an illegal ship that arrived in Alabama in 1860 seek justice and healing when the craft's remains are discovered.

“The question is, who owns the rights to the violence of the past? Is it the victim or the perpetrator? ”— Tamara Lanier

FREE RENTY tells the story of Tamara Lanier, an African American woman determined to force Harvard University to cede possession of daguerreotypes of her great-great-great grandfather, an enslaved man named Renty. The daguerreotypes were commissioned in 1850 by a Harvard professor to “prove” the superiority of the white race. The film focuses on Lanier and tracks her lawsuit against Harvard, and features attorney Benjamin Crump, author Ta-Nehisi Coates, and scholars Ariella Azoulay and Tina Campt.

Available at Guilford Free Library on DVD or via streaming on Kanopy

In this talk, Cornelia Bewersdorf will explain how Connecticut approached abolition through legislative regulation and how manumission laws discouraged masters from freeing their enslaved servants. Her research encompassed three centuries of laws and statutes, and her findings are organized into six categories: Fugitive Laws, Manumission Laws, Slave Codes, Gradual Abolition Laws, Slave Trade Limitation, and the Final Abolition in 1848.

Cornelia Bewersdorf is a trained German lawyer, a Guilford resident, and a member of the society Witness to History: Slavery in Guilford. She studied the laws of slavery in Connecticut during a Master class in American Legal History at UCONN law school.

Please join us for a webinar with Dr. Nancy Steenburg, adjunct instructor in history at the University of Connecticut, Avery Point. Dr. Steenburg will discuss Venture Smith’s life as an enslaved person and how his life’s story and his pathway to freedom were both important examples for other enslaved people in the colony and the State of Connecticut and for white people who questioned the wisdom of abolishing slavery in the State.

In this talk, Jared Hardesty will discuss his book, Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds, focusing on how and why he wrote the book. He also will explore the lives of enslaved people in New England and larger issues such as the importance of slavery to the colonization of the region and to agriculture and industry, New England’s deep connections to Caribbean plantation societies, and the significance of emancipation movements in the era of the American Revolution.

Anti-slavery wasn’t formalized on the Yale campus until sometime in the late 1850s, despite the fact that a few important abolitionists did have Yale connections.

In this talk, Bennett Parten will discuss the university’s relationship to slavery and abolitionism, and show how campus debate evolved in the lead-up to the Civil War.

Ken Minkema — Executive Editor of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale — will talk about how slavery was initially viewed as “ordained by the bible” and rationalized because of its “civilizing” and “Christianizing” effect on people from Africa. He will discuss how those views changed in one generation, as slavery became morally unacceptable and was deemed a sin. Emblematic of that change is the family of the Reverend Jonathan Edwards Sr., the fire-and- brimstone Puritan preacher and theologian who wrote “Sinners in the hands of an angry god.” Edwards Sr. possessed several slaves while his son, the Reverend Jonathan Edwards Jr., rejected the practice. As the younger Edwards lectured his parishioners, “You cannot sin at so cheap a rate as our fathers.” Times had changed.

Hear Tamara Lanier explain how buying a salad at an ice cream store and a promise to her dying mother led to discovering that Harvard University possessed images of her enslaved great, great, great grandfather, Renty Taylor, and his daughter, Delia. Learn how oral history, research and luck led to that discovery and how that discovery has led to a landmark lawsuit against Harvard over who owns the record of past injustices and whether past injustices are relevant in determining ownership.

Robert Pierce Forbes, author of The Missouri Compromise and its Aftermath and editor of the forthcoming Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition talked about Connecticut’s deep connection to slavery: as a slaveholding colony and state, and more centrally, as a provisioner to the slave plantations in the West Indies and the American South. The landscape of slave-era Connecticut is still visible today, and nowhere more dramatically than in the salt marshes of Guilford. But Connecticut and Guilford also played a crucial role in the struggle to end the cruel institution—a legacy we can and should build on today.

The “Witness to History: Slavery in Guilford” Series co-hosted by the Guilford Free Library continued with a talk by Superintendent Paul Freeman on Equity & Social Justice in Guilford Public Schools.

Superintendent of Schools Paul Freeman discussed recent efforts focused on the Board of Education’s adopted initiative to ”further develop a culture, and instructional practices, that foster equity and social justice in our school community.” Work with students, teachers and school leaders was discussed.

Click here for the event’s recording.

David W. Blight, the Pulitzer-Prize winning historian and Yale Professor, spoke about “How the Aftermath of the Civil War Helps Us Understand Trumpism” in the first talk of a three-part Series sponsored by Witness to History: Slavery in Guilford. No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America’s collective memory as the Civil War. In the war’s aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. Blight’s 2001 book “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory” explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America’s national reunion.

Click here for the event’s recording.