Captain Paul Cuffe, Yeoman: A Biography with Dr. Jeffrey Fortin
January 9, 2025 @ 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm
$15 – $20
Thursday, January 9th, 2025
Richard I. Burnham Resource | 82 Touro Street, Newport
Admission $15-$20 per person
6:30pm to 7:30pm; doors open at 5:30pm for a complimentary reception
Paul Cuffe is best understood as a member of the Black founding fathers—a group of pre-eminent African Americans who built political and social institutions and led movements for change during the first decades of the United States. While he is known amongst scholars, his astounding life story deserves a much wider audience.
In this program, author Dr. Jeffrey Fortin will discuss the life of Captain Paul Cuffe during the Age of Sail. Fortin will examine how Captain Cuffe, and his Black crews, challenged systematic racism on both land and sea through trade, education, and social movements.
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Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad with Dr. Tim Walker
February 6, 2025 @ 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm
$15 – $20
Thursday, February 6th, 2025
Richard I. Burnham Resource Center | 82 Touro Street, Newport
Admission $15-$20 per person
6:30pm to 7:30pm; doors open at 5:30pm for a complimentary reception.
Sailing to Freedom highlights little-known stories of freedom-seeking by sea and describes the less-understood maritime side of the Underground Railroad.
This talk will reconsider and contextualize the importance of enslaved African Americans’ maritime and waterfront labor in southern ports, and how escapes were managed along the East Coast, moving from the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland to safe harbor in northern cities such as Philadelphia, New York, New Bedford, and Boston.
While scholarship on the Underground Railroad has focused almost exclusively on overland escape routes from the antebellum South, this new research expands our understanding of how freedom was achieved by sea and what this journey looked like for untold numbers of African Americans. With few exceptions, successful escapes from enslavement in the Deep South were achieved not overland, but by water.
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