A Name, A Voice, A Life: Exhibiting the Stories of 17th-19th Century Black Newporters

“A Name, A Voice, A Life,” the NHS exhibit, was up from May until November 2024 at NHS headquarters on Touro Street. In their article about the “A Name, A Voice, A Life” exhibit, co-curators Kaela Bleho and Zoe Hume detail the vitality and resilience of Newport’s historic Black community. The lives and voices of Black residents, enslaved and free, have been notably absent from the historical record. As Bleho and Hume explain, the exhibit evolved out of a massive multi-year effort to uncover the names and lives of Newport’s Black residents, to disentangle their narratives from traditional, often biased sources, and to claim the fundamental centrality of the Black community in Newport’s history. Zoe Hume is a doctoral candidate in the Museum Education and Visitor- Centered Curation program at Florida State University. Her research interests and professional practice center activism, belonging, and difficult histories in memory work. She was a Buchanan Burnham Fellow with the NHS in 2021. Since then, she has worked closely with the staff at NHS creating biographies for the ongoing Voices From the Archives project. Kaela Bleho has worked in the museum field for over ten years, both as a digital specialist and a researcher. She joined the staff at Newport Historical Society in 2019, where she is Collections and Digital Access Manager and project lead on the Voices initiative. Kaela has a master’s degree in Archaeology from University College London (2015), and a bachelor’s in Anthropology from McGill University (2014).