Juneteenth: Erecting New Monuments

This year’s Juneteenth Freedom Program will feature public historian and artist Michelle Browder, the visionary behind the new The Mothers Of Gynecology Monument in Montgomery Alabama which opened in February of 2022. The Mothers of Gynecology immortalizes three of the women — known as Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey — who went under J. Marion Sims’s knife, a doctor known as “father of modern gynecology” who performed experimental surgeries on enslaved women in antebellum era Alabama. Browder, who has been leading local award-winning history tours (known as "More Than Tours") for the past ten years, will present on her decades long practice of intervening in dominant historical narratives and building alternative institutions.