The African and African Diaspora Studies program at St. Mary’s College of Maryland will host its second annual fall symposium, “From Invisibility to Remembrance: Commemorating Slavery at St. Mary’s and Beyond,” on Wednesday, Oct. 2 beginning at 8 p.m. in Cole Cinema, Campus Center, and on Thursday, Oct. 3, beginning at 6 p.m. in the Boyden Gallery in Montgomery Hall. The symposium is free of charge and open to the public.
Opening events for the 2019 AADS Symposium begin at 8 p.m. in Cole Cinema when Ralph Gonsalves, prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, West Indies, delivers the keynote address. St. Mary’s College President Tuajuanda C. Jordan will make the introduction.
Following the keynote address, a roundtable discussion on slavery and the potential for reparations in the United States and the Caribbean will follow at 8:40 p.m. Ana Lucia Araujo, professor of history at Howard University and author of “Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History,” and Keri Leigh Merritt, author of “Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South,” will join Gonsalves for the roundtable discussion. The panel will be moderated by St. Mary’s College Professor of History Garrey Dennie.
On the Boyden Gallery in Montgomery Hall, on Thursday, Oct. 3 beginning at 6 p.m., the gallery exhibition “Environmental Justice as a Civil Right: A Selection of works from the National Pavilion of Antigua and Barbuda, 16th Venice Architecture Biennale” will be the setting for a roundtable discussion featuring students and faculty who participated in study tours to Antigua, Barbuda and St. Croix. A gallery exhibition reception will follow the roundtable discussion at 7 p.m. At 8 p.m., Karran Harper Royal, executive director of GU272, the Georgetown University Descendants Association and co-founder of Parents Across America, a national public schools advocacy organization, will present. Concluding the evening at 8:30 p.m., will be a roundtable discussion and audience question and answer session featuring Royal and St. Mary’s College faculty and students who worked on the artist selection of the campus commemoration project: A Commemorative to Enslaved Peoples of Southern Maryland.
St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the National Public Honors College, is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education through 2024-2025. St. Mary’s College is ranked one of the best public liberal arts schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Approximately 1,600 students attend the college, nestled on the St. Mary’s River in Southern Maryland.
