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Lesbians of color oral history panel |
Marching with the banner for
De Colores: Lesbians of Color Western MA, circa 1994. Photo courtesy of Marcel Walters. |
Join Erika Slocumb and members of Northampton's community of lesbians of color, Pippa Flemming and Marcel Walters, as they discuss the history of Northampton’s queer community and the historic organization, De Colores.
Historic Northampton will screen De Colores: Defining Kinship, Finding Peace, a short documentary film telling the story of the community created by Black lesbians who came to Northampton, Massachusetts, in the 1970s and 1980s to live, work, and love. Slocumb will then discuss Historic Northampton's recent Lesbians of Color Oral History project, followed by a panel discussion from participants in the project and an open Q&A with the community. Free and open to the public. Registration required. Limited to 60. |
Historian Erika Slocumb is project director of Collecting Oral Histories of Lesbian Women
of Color who lived in Northampton in the 1970s and 1980s. |
Erika Slocumb is the director of interpretation and visitor experience at the Stowe Center for Literary Activism. She is working together with her team to reinterpret the Stowe House Tour to include stories of the constellation of Black voices who influenced and inspired Stowe, as evidenced by "The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin." A scholar of Black history, Slocumb has worked on uncovering the history of Black people in Holyoke, Massachusetts, with the Wistariahurst Museum and most recently working at Historic New England on "Recovering New England’s Voices." Her research “Reliquary of Blackness” focuses on the use of archival research, oral histories, and community storytelling to retell, reshape, and reclaim history in spaces where Black stories have been obscured, specifically reclaiming the narratives of Blackness in museums and other repositories of history and culture. Slocumb is from Springfield, Massachusetts, and is the co-founder of the Western Mass Women’s Collective. She received her BA in Social Justice Education, her MS in Labor Studies, and she expects her PhD in African American Studies in the fall of 2026 — all from UMass Amherst.
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