Black Historic Sites in Conversation: Dyckman Farmhouse Museum

Join us online on February 20 to discover how a museum, a shelter, and community are working towards reparative justice through remembrance, space and time.

Since 2015, the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum has worked to raise awareness about this significant historic burial site. Now, in collaboration with the Bowery Residents' Committee—an organization dedicated to supporting the city’s unhoused community—the descendant community, and other stakeholders, they are taking vital steps to bring this history to light.

Join Dyckman Farmhouse Museum Alliance, Director Melissa Kiewiet, and New York African Burial Ground project consultant & expert Peggy King Jorde for an opportunity to learn about the ongoing project to memorialize the burial site, engage with the community, and return the ancestral remains removed from the site in 1903. They will discuss the importance of this memorialization and how it will serve as a space for repair, remembrance, and connection for the descendants and the broader New York community.

About the speakers:

Melissa Kiewiet (they/she) is the Executive Director of the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum Alliance. Kiewiet began their career with the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum in March of 2018 as a Development and Community Engagement Fellow, and served as the Director of Development and Community Engagement for the DFMA from July of 2021 to February of 2023. During this time, they were instrumental in raising funds to conduct historical research and provide crucial programming and services to the Inwood community. They are passionate about museums as drivers for social change and as community anchors.

Kiewiet earned their Bachelors’ degree in History from Maryville College in Maryville, Tennessee. They are a graduate of the Cooperstown Graduate Program at the State University of New York College at Oneonta where they earned their Masters degree in Museum Studies. They have worked in various development departments in the arts and culture sector prior to their current position and serve on the board of Maryville College Alumni Association and the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums. They also serve as a steering committee member for the Northern Slavery Collective and maintain a membership with the Cooperstown Graduate Association.

Peggy King Jorde is a Harvard Loeb Fellow and principal of KING JORDE Culturals. Combining more than 30 years of experience in historic preservation and project planning, development, design, and management for cultural, civic, and heritage projects. King Jorde’s multidisciplinary practice collaborates with marginalized communities, civic authorities, design professionals, developers, and creatives on projects for public art, cultural and sacred sites, and events.

Ms. King Jorde was a pivotal leading figure in the struggle to protect an African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan. Later, New York Mayor David N. Dinkins named her his Special Adviser on the New York African Burial Ground Project. She subsequently left the mayor’s office to serve as the project consultant and Director of Memorialization, leading the design competition which realized the African Burial Ground National Monument and Interpretive Center.

Peggy is a film producer and participant in the British documentary, A Story of Bones. The film had its world premiere at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival in New York. It chronicles the fight to memorialize an African Burial Ground on the island of St. Helena, a British territory in the south Atlantic. The burial ground for thousands of enslaved Africans is considered a significant trace of the Transatlantic slave trade’s Middle Passage. She was a keynote presenter for the United Nations’ Slavery Remembrance and a recent appointee to the St. Eustatius Cultural Heritage Implementation Committee, consulting on an African Burial Ground preservation project on the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Eustatius. In addition to consulting on sites in Georgia, New Jersey, and the New York metropolitan area, King Jorde is a project consultant for the Memorialization of the Inwood African Burial Ground and Lenape Ceremonial Site in New York City.

____

Black Historic Sites in Conversation is a series of virtual talks in collaboration with different Black heritage sites & cultural centers in the greater NYC area, about the ongoing work of preserving, interpreting, and celebrating Black history and historical figures.

This program is funded in part by Humanities New York with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Host or Publisher Lewis Latimer House Museum