Lunch & Learn: Echoes from the Attic: Stories of Slavery and Freedom-Making in Newport, Rhode Island

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2026
12:00p.m.-1:00p.m.

VIRTUAL EVENT
Georgia Trust Members: $5.00
Non-Members: $10.00

Dr. Akeia de Barros Gomes, Director of The Edward W. Kane & Martha J. Wallace Center for Black History at the Newport Historical Society, will share insights into converting the oldest documented home in Newport, Rhode Island—once a site of enslavement—to a Center for Black history. She will share information on the bundle discovered under attic floorboards that highlights the maintenance of African spirituality in the Northeast. We will explore how the Center tells stories of the lives of the enslaved in the household and freedom-making in Newport’s Black community through the present.

BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Akeia de Barros Gomes is the Director of the Edward W. Kane and Martha J. Wallace Center for Black History at the Newport Historical Society, an Instructor for the Mystic Seaport Museum Munson Fellowship graduate program and is Founding Faculty and an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Humanities at Brown University. She was lead curator for the 2024 Mystic Seaport Museum exhibition, Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty and the Sea a multi-year Mellon Foundation-funded project that recovers the history of the founding and development of the Dawnland (New England) through Dawnland Indigenous, African, and African-descended maritime narratives. Akeia taught as professor of American Studies and Professor of Psychology and Human Development at Wheelock College from 2008 to 2017.  She has done extensive anthropological and archaeological studies for Native American tribal nations as well as work in the US Virgin Islands, New Orleans, Rhode Island, Belize, and Benin.  She received her BA in anthropology/archaeology at Salve Regina University and her MA and PhD in anthropology/archaeology at the University of Connecticut.