Thursday Night

Opening Plenary at the McNeil Center at University of Pennsylvania (6pm-7:30)

Researching, Representing, and Writing the History of Black Philadelphia

Chair: Herman Beavers, University of Pennsylvania

Kendra Field, Ten Million Names Project, The DuBois Forum, and Tufts University

Kerri K. Greenidge, Tufts University, author of The Grimekes: The Legacy of Slavery in An American Family

Michiko Quinones, 1838 Black Metropolis

Dolly L. Marshall, Historian for the City of Camden and Preservationist of Mount Peace Cemetery – a National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Site and Descendant of the Forten/Hegamin Families

Friday

The Library Company of Philadelphia

Session 1: Black Arts and Letters. The Contributions of Women 9:00-10:30

Maria Ryan, Florida State University, “Sarah Sanders’ Piano: Music in the Lives of the Women of the Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning Collection”

Melissa Flowers, University of Delaware, “Edmonia Lewis in Philadelphia: Black Travel and Networks of Affiliation”

Darby Witek, University of Delaware/American Antiquarian Society, “Copying that story of Mrs. H’s”: Reading Letitia Still, Caroline Anderson Still, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Black Philadelphia Women’s Work in Still’s Records

Nazera Sadiq Wright, University of Kentucky, “Frances E. W. Harper’s Library Card”

Session 2: Geography and Mobility 10:45-12:00

Derrick R. Spires, Cornell University, “Tracking Jarena Lee’s Life, Narratives, and Pinky Ring”

Brigitte Fielder, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “On Riding (and Not Riding) the Cars in Philadelphia”

Jennifer Putzi, The College of William & Mary, “Geographical and Textual Space in the Diaries of Sallie Venning and Meta Vaux Warrick”

Julie Winch, University of Massachusetts, Boston, “Jesse Ewing Glasgow, Eloquent Exile”

Lunch Break 12:00-1:00pm

Session 3: Living in the City, 1:00-2:15

Joan Bryant, Syracuse University, “On the Edge of the North: Kinship and the Geography of Philadelphia Freedom”

Cameron Saures, Penn State University, “Growing up on the Margins: Children of ‘the Shelter’ in Early Republican Philadelphia”

Hafeeza Anchrum, University of Pennsylvania, “Love, Loyalty, Labor & Life: The Women of Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Nurse Training School”

Jessica Leigh Hester, Johns Hopkins University, “Petition as Protest: Families Confronting Grave Robbing Through the Black Press and Board of Health”

Session 4: Black Family Descendants, 2:30-3:45

Chair: Carla L. Peterson, Library Company of Philadelphia, Trustee & University of Maryland, Moderator

Joyce Mosley: Bustill Family

Carole Kirshner; Wood-Webb Family

Beverly Brown, Elsa Julien Lora: Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning Family

Session 5: Politics and Public History, Then and Now, 4:00-5:30

Chair: Anyabwile Love, Writer, Filmmaker and Black Studies professor, Community College of Philadelphia

Andrew Maginn, Sewanee: The University of the South, “Mapping Black French Philadelphia in the Age of Emancipation (1790-1890)“

Megan Wierda, Université de Montréal, “The Measure of Citizenship: Antebellum Black Data Activists and the Fight Against Disenfranchisement in Pennsylvania”

Kelli Barnes, Independence National Historical Park, “The Fruits of a Long-Term Partnership: Co-Creating the (In)Visible Architects of Freedom: African Americans in Early Philadelphia Digital Archive”

Joi C. Weathers, Independent Writer, Literary Reading

Samantha de Vera, University of California, “The Colored Conventions and Philadelphia in the Classroom: New Approaches to Black History in the Age of AI”

Reception Friday Night 5:30pm at the Library Company of Philadelphia

Saturday Morning

The Library Company of Philadelphia

Session 6: The Neighborhood, 9:00am-10:30am

Donna Rilling, State University of New York at Stony Brook, “West Philadelphia’s Black Women Property Owners and Clandestine Antislavery”

Jay Cephas, Princeton University, “Built with Their Own Hands: The Architecture of Black Self-Help in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia”

Jordan Alexander Stein, Fordham University, “Sex Work and the City”

Students Session: 10:45-11:15am:

Karen Falcon, Jubilee students and alumni in grades 5 through 9. These students have created their own publishing company called Jubilee Voices Publishing House

Closing Plenary 11:30-12:45: Where Do We Go from Here?

Chair: Kathleen Brown, Interim Director, McNeil Center for Early American Studies and
David Boies Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

Deirdre Cooper-Owens, University of Connecticut and Former PAAH Director at LCP

Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University

Vanessa Northington Gamble, MD/PhD, George Washington University

Morgan Lloyd, 1838 Black Metropolis