She Was There
Free with RSVP • Capacity limited to 75
Curated by the Roxbury International Film Festival, this program connects two extraordinary women across centuries:
Elizabeth Freeman (Mumbet), who bravely sued for—and won—her freedom in 1781, helping to end slavery in Massachusetts.
Fannie Lou Hamer, a force of the Civil Rights Movement whose moral courage reshaped voting rights advocacy in the 1960s.
Following the screening, journalist Tina Martin McDuffie moderates a conversation with:
Joy Elaine Davenport, filmmaker
Dr. Noelle N. Trent, CEO/President, Museum of African American History
Kyera Singleton, Executive Director, Royall House & Slave Quarters
Guests are invited to explore the West End Museum’s permanent exhibition Rise, Fall, Rebirth: Stories of the West End, including interactive biographies of Black women abolitionists and a neighborhood Black History scavenger hunt.
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This program is presented in partnership by Boston Lyric Opera, Castle of our Skins, Everyone250, MA250, Museum of African American History, Roxbury International Film Festival, and West End Museum.
Kyera Singleton
Kyera Singleton is the Executive Director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters. She holds a PhD from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in the Department of American Culture. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow for the Slavery, Colonialism, and their Legacies Project at Tufts University. Between 2021-2023, Kyera Singleton was an American Democracy Fellow, in the Charles Warren Center, at Harvard University. She has held prestigious 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).
As a public history scholar, Kyera is one of the co-curators of the Boston Slavery Exhibit in Faneuil Hall. She was a member of the Table of Voices Cohort at the Museum of Fine Arts-Boston for the Hear Me Now Exhibit: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina. She has been appointed to serve on the City of Boston’s Commemoration Commission and the Special Commission on the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution for Massachusetts. She also served as an advisor on the Boston Art Commission’s Recontextualization Subcommittee for the Bronze Emancipation Group Statue.
Outside of Boston, she served as a member of the Board of Public Humanities Fellows at Brown University, which brought together a collection of museum leaders from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. While living in Atlanta, she was the Humanity in Action Policy Fellow for the ACLU of Georgia. As a policy fellow, she focused on mass incarceration, reproductive justice, and voting rights. She 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.
In October of 2023, she received a Women of Courage and Conviction Award from the National Council of Negro Women and an Official Citation from the Massachusetts’ State Senate for her work in documenting the history of slavery. She is a board member for Mass Humanities and serves on the advisory team for JustFlix, a youth focused storytelling organization in Medford, MA.
Joy Davenport
Joy Davenport is a multimedia director, producer, editor, and composer who specializes in crafting layered, emotional narratives from archival sources. Her directorial debut, "Fannie Lou Hamer's America," premiered nationally on PBS in February 2022 and received the International Documentary Association's award for best TV Feature Documentary. She is based out of Chicago, Illinois, where she lives with her best friend, a tortoiseshell cat named Zucchini."
Tina McDuffie
Tina McDuffie is an award-winning journalist and educator with decades of experience in broadcast news and community storytelling. She currently serves as an Associate Professor of the Practice in Broadcast Journalism at Boston University, where she prepares the next generation of journalists to report with accuracy, integrity, and cultural awareness.
In addition to her academic work, McDuffie serves as host of Local, USA, a national public affairs program on the WORLD Channel, produced at GBH in Boston. The series highlights impactful local storytelling and independent journalism from across the country.
At Boston University, McDuffie plays a key role in student media through her work with BUTV10, the university’s student-run television station. She mentors aspiring reporters, producers, and anchors, helping them develop professional newsroom skills and produce meaningful local coverage.
She also created a partnership between Boston University and Boston Neighborhood Network (BNN), Boston’s community television station. Through this collaboration, students gain hands-on experience covering stories across Boston’s 26 neighborhoods while learning the real-world demands of broadcast journalism.
Throughout her career, McDuffie has remained committed to elevating diverse voices and strengthening community-centered journalism, bridging the gap between the classroom and the newsroom.