February is Black History Month and the Melrose Public Library has a few different ways residents can celebrate this month, from great books from the Children’s Department about the history of the Black community and its influential figures to an engaging talk centered around the antislavery efforts of women in Massachusetts.

Children’s Room Offerings and More

The Melrose Public Library children’s room has a display of books with Black characters, about Black people, and by Black authors for Black History Month. You can find a list of children's books on the library website. In addition, the children’s room features an interactive Black History Month Display Board: Who's who? Who are these influential black figures?

In addition, the Melrose Public Library has many books on its shelves that are either written by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) authors or highlight themes and promote messages of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The library was able to grow its offerings centered, having purchased 74 new books centered on DEI last year through DEI funding.

Please contact the Melrose Public Library with any questions about their offerings by calling (781) 665-2313.

A Virtual Talk: Abolition's Foot Soldiers—Female Anti-Slavery Societies in Antebellum Massachusetts

Through a partnership between Melrose Public Library and Reading Public Library, Dr. Jamie Crumley, a research fellow for Old North Illuminated, will be presenting a virtual talk, Abolition's Foot Soldiers: Female Anti-Slavery Societies in Antebellum Massachusetts, centered on the anti-slavery efforts of women in Massachusetts at on Wednesday, February 15, at 7 p.m.. To register, visit https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/8016745012787/WN_fYenD9JpQrWBk8N1kFYVSA.

During the talk, Dr. Crumley, an intellectual historian of race, gender, power, and religion in the 19th Century United States, will demonstrate that the efforts of the anti-slavery women in Massachusetts showed feminist contours of antebellum abolitionism and how the successes and failures of this movement can be considered in the present day.

For at least the past three decades, scholars have argued that slavery's abolition would not have happened without interracial collaboration between politically minded women. From 1830-1865, an interracial and transnational group of women insisted that the struggles for women's liberation and abolition were linked.

They rooted their activism in their shared passion for religion, writing, reading, and teaching. They defended their activism from those who called their actions unbecoming for women by saying that their efforts were part of their duty as women and mothers. The abolitionist mother did not want her child to bear witness to the atrocities of slavery and therefore would do what she could to end it. In this talk, Dr. Jaimie Crumley will show that the efforts of the anti-slavery women in Massachusetts demonstrate the distinctively feminist contours of antebellum abolitionism. Further, she will assert that learning from the successes and failures of antebellum female anti-slavery societies can inform contemporary feminist organizing.

This program is co-sponsored by the Reading Public Library and the Reckonings Project.

About Dr. Jamie Crumley

Jaimie D. Crumley, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah. She is the 2022-2023 Research Fellow at Old North Illuminated in Boston, MA. Jaimie studies race, gender, and religion in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Northeastern United States. Her dissertation, "Tried as by Fire: Free African American Women's Abolitionist Theologies," situates eighteenth and nineteenth-century Black women as proto-Black feminist abolitionists who rooted their politics in Biblical theology. Jaimie has received research fellowships from the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA, the Institute for Citizen's and Scholars, the Boston Athenaeum, and the American Congregational Library. To learn more about Dr. Cromley, visit https://www.oldnorth.com/blog/welcome-to-illuminating-the-unseen/

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