Speaking for Herself: Black Women’s Voices in Colonial New Haven Lunchtime Webinar

What do we know—and what can we learn—about the experiences, viewpoints, and feelings of enslaved and free Black women in New Haven in the 18th century? Writer and historian Hope McGrath will share extraordinary first-person accounts of two local women in the 1700s in a lunchtime webinar for the New Haven Museum (NHM), “Speaking for Herself: Black Women’s Voices in Colonial New Haven,” on Wednesday, February 12, 2025, at 12:30 p.m. Register here. The free NH250 event will be recorded and available via New Haven Museum YouTube and social media.
The program is the first in the new NHM webinar series, “Voices of Legacy: Lunchtime Conversations on Early Black Women.” During her webinar, McGrath will share two remarkable documents. The first is the Revolutionary War testimony of Rose Luke, a free Black woman who recounted her assault at the hands of British officers during the 1779 invasion of New Haven. The second is a moving descriptive from Judith Cocks, an enslaved mother, to James Hillhouse, penned in her own hand in 1795. In these documents, Black women tell in their own words what they experienced—giving us a new way to approach and understand signal events and people in New Haven history.