Dr. Alexandria Russell, Executive Director of the Boston' Women's Heritage Trail, will highlight African American women memorials drawing from her book, Black Women Legacies: Public History Sites Seen & Unseen. Local communities have been fervent memorializers of African American achievement in the United States for centuries, and Dr. Russell reveals how they established a national infrastructure of named memorials during the Jim Crow era. She will also discuss how local advocacy has shaped the public history landscape in Massachusetts and beyond through commemorations of women like Phillis Wheatley and Harriet Tubman. The centennial celebration of the founding of Negro History Week (now Black History Month) by Carter G. Woodson in 1926 and America 250 commemorations are timely reminders of the importance of documenting and disseminating the African American experience for current and future generations.
Dr. Alexandria Russell is the Executive Director of the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail and a non-resident W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. She is the founder of Black Women Legacies, a nonprofit organization that supports digitally mapping historic and contemporary memorials of Black women across the globe on a free website. She earned Bachelor’s degrees in Political Science and Secondary Education from College of Charleston and her Ph.D. in History from University of South Carolina.As a historian, memorializer, and public history practitioner, Dr. Alexandria Russell is committed to ethical research practices that recover obscure histories and create accessible pathways for bringing diverse histories to people of all backgrounds
Copies of her book will be available for sale at the North Andover Historical Society's 1646 Bookstore during the event.
This program is Free and is presented by the North Andover African American History Committee, and is supported by a grant from the North Andover Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
