Black history movie series
By From staff reports
Published in News on February 8, 2015 1:50 AM
MOUNT OLIVE -- Wayne County native Laurel C. Sneed will speak during the University of Mount Olive's African American History Month on Tuesday, Feb. 24, at 9:30 a.m. in Rodgers Chapel.
Ms. Sneed, an acclaimed educator and film producer, will present "Beyond 12 Years a Slave: The Influential Slave Narratives of Tar Heels Moses Roper, Harriet Jacobs and William H. Singleton."
The project is made possible by a grant from the North Carolina Humanities Council, a statewide nonprofit and affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Ms. Sneed is the executive director of the Apprend Foundation, a national history education foundation based in the Research Triangle Park.
She graduated from Goldsboro High School in 1967, received her undergraduate degree in 1971, and received her master's degree in educational media and instructional design from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 1973.
Since the early 1990s she has been teaching history to K-12 educators. Since 2003 Ms. Sneed and her husband, Charlie, have hosted the "Crafting Freedom" teacher workshops, which have brought more than 1,000 educators from 39 states to North Carolina to study black artisans.
Ms. Sneed is a strong history education advocate and encourages educators to teach slavery with slave narratives. She developed instructional material for the National Endowment for the Humanities on the slave narrative "Twelve Years a Slave," in concert with the release of the major motion picture by the same name in 2013.
"Twelve Years a Slave" won the Academy Award for the best picture of the year. It is the true story of Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York who was kidnapped, drugged and sold into slavery in Louisiana.
Ms. Sneed's lecture will feature clips from the motion picture, and from her own media productions based on the slave narratives of individuals enslaved in North Carolina.
For more information about this event, contact Joanne McKay by email at jmckay@umo.edu.
For more information, visit www.umo.edu.