CAMTalks: History Series - Three Forgotten Women: Kate Negro, Violet, and Nancy Gardner Prince
Saturday, February 18
2:00 p.m.
with Lise Breen and Kabria Baumgartner
CAM Auditorium, 27 Pleasant Street, Gloucester, MA
Free for members, $10 for non-members
Livestreamed on Facebook and Vimeo
Join us for a conversation with local researcher Lise Breen and Professor Kabria Baumgartner about African-descended women with ties to Cape Ann. Lise Breen will present sketches of three African-descended women with Gloucester ties. She will recount aspects of their lives as well as how they have been remembered and represented. Professor Baumgartner will share information about how to find and reinterpret this neglected history and other important stories like them.
The three women in this talk are represented by three different types of archival source material. Kate’s story can be found as a brief mention in an Annisquam church books while Violet is described in a nineteenth century Supreme Court Justice’s reminiscence, both of which need to be considered based on the information and perspectives that are and are not included. Nancy Gardner Prince, born in 1799, published her own account of her family’s fraught history in Gloucester and her life as an abolitionist. Breen shows how local sources add to Prince’s powerful account to give us a better understanding of Prince herself and of the legacies of slavery on Cape Ann.
About the Speakers
In the course of finding and interpreting evidence of African-descended individuals on Cape Ann, Lise Breen has identified Gloucester slave ship captains and investors, kidnappers and enslavers. Her essay, “Hidden City: Slavery and Gloucester’s Quadricentennial,” is published in Gloucester Encounters: Essays on the Cultural History of the City 1623-2023. Gloucester Cultural Initiative. Martin Ray, editor.
Kabria Baumgartner researches and writes about the hidden, forgotten, and erased lived experiences of African-descended people in New England. She is the Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Northeastern University where she also serves as Associate Director of Public History. Her recent book, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America, tells the story of young Black women who fought for their educational rights. She co-curated and co-wrote an historical exhibit on the youth-led equal school rights movement, “Let None Be Excluded: The Origins of Equal School Rights in Salem,” now on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.