Their Kindred Earth: Photographs by William Earle Williams

Evocative new photographs of Connecticut by celebrated photographer William Earle Williams provide insight to the stories of Black American history

Their Kindred Earth gathers images of Black Connecticut’s historic sites by celebrated photographer William Earle Williams. A series of texts illuminate how these sites connect to the larger national and international narrative of Black American history. Over the past forty years artist William Earle Williams (born 1950) has made sites of African American history more visible through his exquisite photographs. Mentored in the 1970s by the famed photographer Walker Evans, who had a home in Lyme, Williams attended the Yale School of Art at Evans’s suggestion. From that Connecticut inception, Williams embarked on a decades-long journey to identify and photograph places across the country that hold histories of the slave trade, the Underground Railroad, and emancipation. Many remain unmarked and largely overlooked in a society that has long ignored Black history.

New archival research has yielded revelations about how we understand our local history. In this book, Williams’ photographs bring visibility and pay tribute to the unrecognized people who contributed to Connecticut culture and its landscape. The book includes photographs from New London, Old Lyme, Farmington, Middletown, Norwich, New Haven, Hartford, Canterbury, Brooklyn (CT), New Jersey, and Manhattan, as well as sites of importance to Black figures in the state, such as Frederick Douglass and David Ruggles. It features essays by Frank Mitchell, Jennifer Stettler Parsons, Carolyn Wakeman, and a dialogue between William Earle Williams and Deborah Willis.

CHERYL FINLEY is the author of Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (2018), winner of the Historians of British Art Book Prize, 1600-1800, and My Soul Has Grown Deep: Black Art from the American South (2018). FRANK MITCHELL is The Amistad Center for Art & Culture’s Curator at Large and Curatorial Adviser for the Toni N. and Wendell C. Harp Historical Museum at New Haven’s Dixwell Q House. JENNIFER STETTLER PARSONS is Curator of Exhibitions at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut. CAROLYN WAKEMAN is the author of Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution (2003); and Forgotten Voices: The Hidden History of a New England Meetinghouse (Wesleyan, 2019). WILLIAM EARLE WILLIAMS is the Audrey A. and John L. Dusseau Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Fine Arts at Haverford College. His photographs have been widely shown and are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art, among others. He has been honored with a grant from the Ford Foundation and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts. DEBORAH WILLIS is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is the director of NYU’s Center for Black Visual Culture/Institute of African American Affairs and the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, among others.