Slavery and Segregation in Antebellum Massachusetts: The Law of Shaw

TICKETS:  $10 advance online tickets. Purchase tickets online via this link, or pay $15 cash at the door.

Only recently has the existence in antebellum Massachusetts of chattel slavery been widely acknowledged. 

Besides the early "freedom" suits prosecuted by enslaved people in Massachusetts, much of the state's law concerning the pernicious institution came from Supreme Judicial Court Justice Lemuel Shaw, from West Barnstable, was the most influential state-court justice of the 19th century. He decided several “fugitive-slave” cases as well as the Boston school-desegregation case that established “separate but equal”-- that case led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy decision, cementing that segregationist doctrine in American law until the 1950s.

Join us for a edifying and illuminating evening with guest speaker, Gregory Williams, to delve into this important topic.

Gregory Williams was a District Court judge for 15 years, retiring in 2015—for his last ten years, he was First Justice of the Edgartown District Court. A citizen of both the U.S. and Canada, he holds degrees from Western Maryland College (now McDaniel College) (B.A., English); Queen Mary College, University of London (M.A., English [20th-century British Literature], and Washington and Lee University School of Law (J.D.). He talks on such topics as Massachusetts historical crimes, notable Cape Cod figures, and the romantic-macabre.

He has served on the boards of several Cape non-profits,and is the immediate past-president of the Sturgis Library Board. His Facebook page, Gregory Williams Speaks, continues to signal his scheduled events, and also offers peeks at odd bits of history, art, and music.

TICKETS:  $10 advance online tickets. Purchase tickets online via this link, or pay $15 cash at the door.