We are celebrating our fifth year publishing about suffrage centennials. When we started, people looked at us with skeptical expressions on their faces. Their reactions back then? Suffrage sounded boring. It’s a different ball game now that the word has been spread around and the planning for 2020 increases by the passing day.
We support the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial opening by 2020, the nation’s suffrage centennial. We are determined that 2023 doesn’t come and go without the Equal Rights Amendment being passed. In 2023 it’s the centennial of women working for equal rights under the U.S. Constitution. Are we going to allow this to happen? The year 2020 is when American women will have been voting for 100 years. Will 2020 come and go without a woman hitting her head on a glass ceiling? Stay tuned.
IN OTHER NEWS:
On Thursday, November 15, 2018 at 7 PM, there will be a staged reading of “Possessing Harriet,” a new play by Kyle Bass, commissioned by the Onondaga Historical Association and directed by Tazewell Thompson. (For more information on the history, http://www.urbancny.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Fair-Fugitive-HH-article-1.pdf.) POSSESSING HARRIET will have its world premiere production at Syracuse Stage on October 17 through November 4, 2018, https://syracusestage.org/showinfo.php?id=83)
In 1839, Harriet Powell, a young, mixed-race, enslaved woman slips away from a hotel in Syracuse, New York, and escapes from the Southerner who owns her. With the aid of a mysterious free black man named Thomas Leonard, Harriet finds temporary safe harbor in an attic room at the home of impassioned abolitionist Gerrit Smith. With the slave catchers in pursuit, Harriet spends the hours before her nighttime departure on the dangerous journey to Canada in the company of Smith’s young cousin Elizabeth Cady, an outspoken advocate for women’s equality. Confronted with new and difficult ideas about race, identity, and equality, and with confusion, fear, and desperation multiplying, Harriet is forced to the precipice of radical self-re-imagination and a reckoning with the heartrending cost of freedom.
This reading of “Possessing Harriet” is a featured public event of the annual Researching NY Conference, cosponsored by the UAlbany History Department and the NYS Archives Partnership Trust with support from Humanities NY. There is additional support from the NYS Museum, NYS Writers Institute, the UAlbany Graduate Program in Public History, the Department of Africana Studies, and the Department of Music and Theatre.
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