An Online Talk with Dr. Frances Jones-Sneed, Professor Emerita, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts

Thursday, January 27 at 7pm EST

Online via Zoom | Free & Open to All

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Berkshire County has been home to many prominent African Americans, including W.E.B. DuBois, James Van Der Zee, and Elizabeth Freeman, the first enslaved African American woman to successfully file a lawsuit for freedom in the state of Massachusetts. Her 1780 case set a precedent that led to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts a few years later.MCLA Professor Emerita Frances Jones-Sneed will tell Freeman’s story, its implications, and current efforts to share it widely, from a planned motion picture to a commemorative statue in Sheffield, joining one on view at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington DC.

Dr. Frances Jones-Sneedis professor emerita of history and former Director of Women Studies at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Jones-Sneed has taught and researched local history, with a focus on African-Americans, for over twenty-five years. She spearheaded a national conference on African American biography in September 2006, is co-director of the Upper Housatonic Valley African American Heritage Trail, a former board membeof Mass Humanities, and is presently a board member of the Samuel Harrison Society and Clinton Church Restoration. She was a 2008 NEH Summer Fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University and co-edited the book African American Heritage in the Upper Housatonic Valley.