When History is Personal: Slavery and Its Legacies at Yale

Image above: Installation view of Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space, with exhibition design elements by Mickalene Thomas

REGISTRATION is available for attendance in-person or virtually via Zoom
In-person: https://yaleconnect.yale.edu/AfAm/rsvp_boot?id=2257236
Virtual: https://tinyurl.com/4cjhy9yr

Sponsored by the Yale University Art Gallery

Conversation generously cosponsored by the Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of the Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale, and the Gallery’s Martin A. Ryerson Lectureship Fund.
Reception following the program generously sponsored by the Office of the President and Belonging at Yale.

Welcome: Timeica E. Bethel-Macaire (Director of the Afro-American Cultural Center and Assistant Dean of Yale College)

Introductions: David W. Blight (Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center and Sterling Professor of History, Yale University), and

Keely Orgeman (Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery)

Speakers:

· Risë Nelson (Member of the Yale and Slavery Working Group and Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility, Yale Library)

In conversation with:

· Christopher M. Rabb (YC ’92; genealogist, family historian, and author), and

· Hope McGrath (Research Coordinator for Yale, New Haven, and Connecticut History, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

Join Christopher M. Rabb, B.A. 1992, genealogist, family historian, and author; Risë Nelson, member of the Yale and Slavery Working Group and Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility, Yale Library; and Hope McGrath, Research Coordinator for Yale, New Haven, and Connecticut History, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, for a conversation about how enslaved and free Black people have been remembered—and forgotten—in Yale’s history. Mr. Rabb’s ancestor, Christiana Taylor Livingston Williams Freeman, a Black abolitionist and an agent of the Underground Railroad, is featured in a portrait alongside a separate image of her daughters, Isadora and Mary Freeman, in the Yale University Art Gallery’s current exhibition Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space. The display of the daguerreotypes, which the Library of Congress lent to the exhibition, presents an opportunity to discuss the multiple legacies of slavery, the slave trade, and Black history at Yale.