Slavery and Freedom in Northampton

and in the Colonial North:

A Four-Part Lecture Series

This four-part lecture series will examine slavery in Northampton and place it

in the context of the larger narrative of slavery and freedom in the North.

Slavery and Freedom in Northampton

Thursday, January 16, 2025

7 pm on Zoom

Dr. Ousmane Power-Greene, Clark University and David Ruggles Center

Dylan Gaffney, Forbes Library

Dr. Elizabeth M. Sharpe, Historic Northampton

For the last five years researchers at Historic Northampton and Forbes Library have been uncovering stories of slavery and freedom in Northampton. These investigations have revealed that perhaps as many as fifty enslaved people lived in Northampton between 1654, when Northampton was settled by the English, until 1783, when slavery was abolished in Massachusetts.

As elsewhere in the North, slavery in Northampton was inextricably linked to local commerce, local and regional family networks, and the global economy. Among the narratives of Northampton’s enslaved people—who were Indigenous, African, and African American—are stories of a few individuals who were able to take control over their lives, gain freedom, start families, manage careers, and acquire property.

Presenters Dylan Gaffney, Elizabeth Sharpe, and Ousmane Power-Greene will discuss what we presently know about enslaved lives in Northampton and conclude with questions that remain unanswered and avenues for future research.

Learn More & Register

Click here to learn more about the

Northampton Slavery Research Project

Upcoming Lecturers in the Series

More information and registration will be forthcoming.

Thursday, January 30, 2025 at 7 pm

Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara

Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara is professor of history in and chair of the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A historian of colonial North America and the early American Republic, her research focuses on the experiences of Black people in French and British North America in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Her first book Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU Press, 2016), examines how the business of slavery—economic activity that was directly related to the maintenance of slaveholding in the Americas, specifically the buying and selling of people, food, and goods—shaped the experience of slavery, the process of emancipation, and the realities of black freedom in Rhode Island from the colonial period through the American Civil War.

Tuesday, February 18, 2025 at 7 pm

Dr. Jennifer DeClue

Dr. Jennifer DeClue is Associate Professor in The Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. She is a queer studies scholar who specializes in Black feminism, gender and chattel slavery, queer of color critique, film studies, popular culture, and the avant-garde.

As a fellow of the Slavery North Initiative, she is currently writing a book titled, Enslaved in New England: Black Women and the Afterlife of Northern Bondage. 

Date to be Announced

Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson

Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson is a Provost Professor of Art History at University of Massachusetts Amherst and the founding Director of the Slavery North Initiative which supports research and research creation on the study of Canadian Slavery and slavery in the American North. Prior this appointment in 2022, she was a Professor of Art History and a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at NSCAD University in Halifax, Canada (2020-2022) where she founded the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery, the first-ever research center focused on the overlooked 200-year history of Canadian participation in Transatlantic Slavery. 

Graphic Silhouette of Hannah, her baby, and Mingo (Design Division, 2025).

In 1692, Hannah was unmarried and enslaved in Northampton. She bore a child, and in court she named Mingo as the father. The court called their act a “heinous crime against the light of nature” and sentenced both Hannah and Mingo to 15 lashes. Their baby was born into slavery. The court decided that Samuel Parsons (Mingo’s enslaver) and Timothy Baker (Hannah’s enslaver) would be “joint + equal in charge of the child” until the child was nine years old. At age nine, either Parsons or Baker could buy out the other for the value of the child or they could arrange to jointly own him. In this case, the child’s wages if hired out, or the child’s value if sold, would be “divided betwixt them.”

In partnership with the

Northampton Reparations Study Commission

HISTORIC NORTHAMPTON

46 Bridge Street Northampton, MA 01060

info@historicnorthampton.org | 413-584-6011

www.historicnorthampton.org