CAMTalks: History Series - Three Forgotten Women: Kate Negro, Violet, and Nancy Gardner Prince
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Join us for A conversation with local researcher Lise Breen and Professor Kabria Baumgartner about African-descended women with ties to Cape Ann. Lise Breen will present sketches of three African-descended women with Gloucester ties. She will recount aspects of their lives as well as how they have been remembered and represented. Professor Baumgartner will share information about how to find and reinterpret this neglected history.
The three women are represented by three different types of sources. A brief mention in an Annisquam church book reveals that Kate, enslaved by the Annisquam minister, was asked to testify against him for fornication. Kate’s short response was parsed with finesse to evade the dangers faced by enslaved women. Violet, taken as an enslaved girl from Gloucester, served a Essex County minister and his family her entire life. A nineteenth century Supreme Court Justice’s reminiscence about Violet’s character is overdue for reinterpretation. Nancy Gardner Prince, born in 1799, published her own account of her family’s fraught history in Gloucester and her life as an abolitionist. Lise shows how local sources add to her powerful account give us a better understanding of her and the legacies of slavery on Cape Ann.
About the Speakers In the course of finding and interpreting evidence of African-descended individuals on Cape Ann, Lise Breen has identified Gloucester slave ship captains and investors, kidnappers and enslavers. Her essay, “Hidden City: Slavery and Gloucester’s Quadricentennial,” is published in Gloucester Encounters: Essays on the Cultural History of the City 1623-2023. Gloucester Cultural Initiative. Martin Ray, editor. Kabria Baumgartner researches and writes about the hidden, forgotten, and erased lived experiences of African-descended people in New England. She is the Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Northeastern University where she also serves as Associate Director of Public History. Her recent book, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America, tells the story of young Black women who fought for their educational rights. She co-curated and co-wrote an historical exhibit on the youth-led equal school rights movement, “Let None Be Excluded: The Origins of Equal School Rights in Salem,” now on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.