Presented by Saint Albans Museum this event is part of the series SAM Talks. These talks are free and open to the public.

THE SPEAKER

Dr. Pamela Walker is an Assistant Professor of African American History at the University of Vermont. Dr. Walker centers her research on ordinary people participating in history. She teaches classes on African American History, Black Women’s History, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement, and the U.S. South. She received her doctorate in African American and Women’s History from Rutgers University – New Brunswick. She is currently working on a book titled Signed, Sealed, Delivered: How Black and White Mothers Used the Box Project and the Postal System to Fight Hunger and Feed the Mississippi Freedom Movement.

THE TALK

The “Box Project” was a 1960s direct-action campaign in which white women in New England, including many Vermonters, sent packages with material goods to black families in the South experiencing poverty and racism. This was a way for older women, typically married and more physically rooted, to still participate and contribute to the social and economic movements of the Civil Rights era without traveling there like many young people did. In her book, Dr. Walker explores the effect that this aid had on both senders in New England, and receivers in Mississippi, tracking a unique women-led aid movement from origin to finish. By focusing on this type of everyday history, Walker seeks to engage with people who participated without being “self-proclaimed activists.”