Royall House Benefit Features Literary Historian Lois Brown

Prominent literary historian Lois Brown will be the featured speaker at the annual “Giving Voice” program to benefit the Royall House and Slave Quarters on Saturday, June 8, 2013, from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. on the museum grounds at 15 George Street, Medford, Massachusetts.

Tickets are $35 for members and $45 for non-members and will be available at the door. Event sponsorships start at $25 and donations are fully tax-deductible. For more information on ticketing or sponsorships, visit www.royallhouse.org or call Royall House and Slave Quarters Executive Director Tom Lincoln at 781-396-9032. Members of the news media who would like to attend should contact Mr. Lincoln at 781-396-9032 or director@royallhouse.org for a ticket and reserved seat.

Lois Brown is a professor in the African American Studies Program and the Department of English at Wesleyan University.  Her talk—“Marked with the furrows of time”: Belinda, the Royalls, and Accounts of Freedom—will take as its starting-point the petition for financial support presented to the Massachusetts legislature after the Revolutionary War by Belinda, a woman who had been enslaved for more than fifty years by the Royall family. In recent years, Belinda’s petition has become recognized as a landmark in the history of African American emancipation and been widely cited in debates over reparations for slavery.

“As her commentary in The Abolitionists, the American Experience documentary series on PBS, clearly demonstrated, Lois Brown has the ability to bring historical figures to life,” says Peter Gittleman, Co-President of the Board of the Royall House and Slave Quarters. “Her work resonates strongly with our efforts at the Royall House and Slave Quarters to interpret northern colonial slavery and its immediate aftermath. Our organization’s mission is to explore the meanings of freedom and independence, and Belinda’s story exemplifies the complexity of those concepts for formerly enslaved individuals. ”

Dr. Brown’s scholarship and research focus on African American and New England literary history and culture. In addition to scholarly essays on memory, race, and antislavery literature and practice, she is the author of Pauline Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution and the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Literary Renaissance.  She has held several prestigious research fellowships, has curated exhibitions at Boston’s Museum of African American History and at the Boston Public Library.

“Giving Voice” is one of the many public programs sponsored each year by the Royall House and Slave Quarters. In addition to Dr. Brown’s talk, the afternoon will also feature music, house tours, museum exhibits, and refreshments.

About the Royall House and Slave Quarters: In the eighteenth century, the Royall House and Slave Quarters property was home to the Massachusetts colony’s largest slaveholding family and the enslaved Africans who made their lavish way of life possible. Architecture, household goods, and archaeological artifacts bear witness to the intertwined stories of wealth and bondage, set against the backdrop of America’s quest for independence. The Slave Quarters is believed to be the only remaining such structure in the northern United States, and the Royall House is among the finest colonial-era mansions in New England.

For more information, please visit RoyallHouse.org or email Director@RoyallHouse.org. 

– Information and photo from Tom Lincoln, Director