A dialogue between two leading social historians, Adrienne Shadd and Karolyn Smardz Frost, discussing identity, race, gender, ethnicity, the discovery of missing histories and the Underground Railroad.

Adrienne Shadd is a researcher, writer, curator and editor living in Toronto. Her new book, Journey from Toll Gate to Parkway: African Canadians in Hamilton, will be published by Dundurn Press in 2009. Adrienne is the great, great grand-niece of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first African woman to publish and edit a newspaper in North America and who fled to Toronto in 1851 after the US Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act.

Karolyn Smardz Frost is a Toronto-born archaeologist and historian whose 1985 excavation of the Thornton and Lucie Blackburn site made history. I've Got a Home in Glory Land is the fruit of more than twenty years of historical detective work into this fugitive slave couple’s dramatic escape to Canada via the Underground Railroad – a book which won the 2007 Governor General’s literary award for non-fiction.

Friday, January 30, 2009
12 noon to 2 pm
Toronto City Hall, Members Lounge

Every year February is proclaimed in the City of Toronto as Black History Month to honour and celebrate the achievements of people of African heritage and acknowledge their contributions to the social, political, economic and cultural life of Toronto.

For more information email [email protected].

Bring your lunch. Light snacks will be available.

Presented by the City Manager’s Office, the City of Toronto Archives (City Clerk’s Office), Human Resources Division and the Black African Canadian Employees Steering Committee.