Meet Elizabeth Keckley
Meet Elizabeth Keckley: Seamstress to Mary Todd Lincoln. In 1868, Elizabeth (Lizzy) Hobbs Keckley published her memoir Behind the Scenes or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House.
This revealing narrative reflected on Elizabeth’s fascinating story, detailing her life experiences from slavery to her successful career as First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker. Visit https://www.whitehousehistory.org/from-slavery-to-the-white-house-the-extraordinary-life-of-elizabeth-keckly
Meet Thomas Howland
Visit the Rhode Island Historical Society, https://www.rihs.org/faith-freedom-friday-thomas-howland/ to learn about Thomas Howland, the first African American elected in Rhode Island.
Free PBS Episode of “The Long Song”
For a Limited Time: Watch Episode 1 of PBS’s Brilliant “The Long Song”
This three-part miniseries based on Andrea Levy’s award-winning novel about the end of slavery in Jamaica follows July (Tamara Lawrance), an indomitable, young slave who works on a sugarcane plantation with her detestable mistress, Caroline Mortimer (Hayley Atwell). Their lives change with the arrival of a new overseer, Robert Goodwin (Jack Lowden) who sets out to improve life on the plantation. Visit https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/episodes/the-long-song-e1/#
MLK Videos
Listen to Our 2020 MLK Concert, Let Freedom Roll, Produced with The First Baptist Church in America and Wilson Consulting, LLC: https://vimeo.com/399947978/bd821cde57
Gloucester’s Writers Center Celebrates Black History Month
Amiri Baraka would have a great deal to say about our country at this moment in time. He was a dramatist, novelist, poet, activist and one of the most respected and widely published African-American writers.
The GWC was graced with his presence back in 2013 when he came to give the Charles Olson Lecture at the Cape Ann Museum. In tribute to the man and to Black History Month we are playing this 29 minute reading. Baraka which means “blessing’ in Arabic starts reading from his Low Coup poems based on the Haiku form that his grandmother passed on to him. The poet transforms them into tiny piercing daggers that carry biting commentary.
I was stung by the dark irony listening to these poems in a largely white audience. It gave his performance an edge. Here are a couple. European Jews say the devil speaks perfect German. Black Americans on the other hand say, he speaks pretty good English too.
The Gloucester Writers Center was founded to celebrate, preserve, and promote Gloucester’s rich literary legacy and to create space in the community for the voices of people of all ages and backgrounds to be heard through writing, dialogue, and the artistic process. As a working writers center in a working town, what we do is rooted in our belief that the word is not separate from the world. We encourage each other to write, speak, and learn about the world around us in order to participate.
Visit https://gloucesterwriters.org
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