UPDATE: Canceled – Lunch and Learn: Sarah Harris: A Catalyst for Change in Antebellum Connecticut.

*Update: Please note that this event has been canceled. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope you will join us for another upcoming program.*

Sarah Harris is the first African American to have integrated an all-white school in America. She wanted ‘a little more learning.” So she went to a white teacher, Prudence Crandall, and asked for permission to attend her day school. We know much about Crandall and her fight for equality in Connecticut, but not a lot about her black students, such as Sarah Harris.

Dr. Ann-Marie Adams, a Scholar-in-Residence with the Connecticut Alliance for Better Communities, Inc., is the first to popularize this query about Harris. She will discuss the nexus of race, gender, and education in Connecticut, as well as the underpinnings of the contours and complexities of schooling in America. She will also look at those machinations and why those events allow for the obscurity of this historical event, which undergirds all school desegregation cases in America.

This talk is taken from her ground-breaking scholarship about the full arc of the African-American experience in Connecticut from the colonial period to the twentieth century. The monograph was published in 2010 and is available at Howard University Book Store. It will be reprinted in 2021.

Dr. Adams’ dissertation, earned with distinction, is currently being edited for a book publisher.

This program is free. To secure a spot, register HERE now. You’ll receive an email confirmation with the Zoom link,
and we’ll send you a reminder at 10:00 AM on the day of the program.

Biography:

Dr. Ann Marie Adams is an award-winning journalist and historian. She is the founder of The Hartford Guardian, the first nonprofit, nonpartisan, hyperlocal news publication in New England and the tristate area. The Hartford Guardian, a four-day news site, is published by the Connecticut Alliance for Better Communities, Inc. established in 2002. It received its 501 c 3 nonprofit status in 2005 and is a trusted source for news and research in Connecticut and beyond.

Dr. Adams lives in Hartford, Connecticut with her goldfish.