Reading Frederick Douglass Together

The Somerville Museum hosted their 5th annual reading of Frederick Douglass’ famous address, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” delivered to an AntiSlavery Society in 1852. We are part of a number of communities across the Commonwealth that read this address together and reflect on our past and present. The readings were followed with a discussion by our Project Scholar, Kyera Singleton. This year, we’re also joining forces with local organizations – The Somerville Community Growing Center, Community Action Agency of Somerville (CAAS), the City of Somerville’s Department of Racial and Social Justice, and Bow Market. This program is supported, and sponsored by Mass Humanities.

Kyera Singleton is the Executive Director of the Royal House and Slave Quarters in Medford, MA and a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in the Department of American Culture. Currently, she serves as an American Democracy Fellow at the Warren Center at Harvard University. Kyera has held academic fellowships from the Beinecke Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Emory University’s James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, and the American Association of University Women (AAUW). From 2018 through 2019, she served as the Humanity in Action Policy Fellow for the ACLU of Georgia. As a policy fellow, and under the mentorship of Andrew Young, she focused on mass incarceration, reproductive justice, and voting rights. She also created the ACLU-GA’s first podcast series, “Examining Justice,” in order to highlight the voices of both community activists and policy makers in the fight for racial, gender, and transformative justice. As a public history scholar, she recently served as an advisor on the Boston Art Commission’s Recontextualization subcommittee for the bronze Emancipation Group Statue. Kyera is also a member of the Board of Public Humanities Fellows at Brown University, which brings together a collection of museum leaders from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.