NORTHAMPTON — Residents were given an opportunity to learn about their city’s role in the history of slavery in the United States, viewing short documentary films and discussing the topic of reparations on Tuesday at Edwards Church.

Though Northampton is well known as being an abolitionist stronghold before the Emancipation Proclamation, the truth can sometimes be more complex, said Ousmane Power-Greene, a professor at Clark University in Worcester and a member of the Northampton Reparations Study Commission.

To give an example, he noted how the city property known as Childs Park was once land owned by Henry Watson, a southern slave owner with more than 700 slaves from Greensboro, Alabama, whose daughter Julia had been a patron of the very Edwards Church where Tuesday’s meeting took place.

“This doesn’t take all that much to research, but it takes time to really think about the ways that the wealth that was generated from one of the largest slave owners in Alabama funded things here in Northampton,” Power-Greene said. “We really need to get into this history as we think about a process of acknowledging and then of course, repayment.”

Power-Greene, along with local educator Michael Lawrence-Riddell, hosted the event, titled “Cinematic Chronicles of Race and Resistance.” The documentary films presented were produced by Self-Evident Education, founded by Lawrence-Riddell and Power-Greene in 2019, and touched on the topics of literacy as a tool for slave liberation, the ways race and gender intersected during slavery, and the role Massachusetts, even as a free state, had on slavery.

“The history of our country has been obfuscated, it’s been mythologized, has been weaponized in a whole bunch of different ways, to the point where we don’t understand our history, so we can’t understands our present,” Lawrence-Riddell said. “I was trying to find these resources — they didn’t exist in my world, so I decided to start making them myself.”

The first of the two documentaries, titled “A Mother’s Bond,” told the story of Catherine Linda, a slave woman who, along with owner William Hodgson, traveled to Springfield in 1845. While there, she happened to meet David Ruggles, a prominent African American abolitionist living in Northampton at the time. Though Linda was given a chance to declare her freedom before a judge in Northampton, she ultimately declined to do so, with the documentary stating she would have had to leave her children, who were still enslaved, behind.

The second documentary, titled “If You Cross This Boundary,” told the story of William and Ellen Craft, an enslaved couple from Georgia who plotted a daring escape to freedom. Ellen, who was light-skinned, disguised herself as a disabled man, with William posing as her slave. The two then hopped on a train to Philadelphia, escaping to the free North before eventually settling in Boston.

But even there, they found themselves targeted by bounty hunters for runaway slaves, and eventually moved to England before returning after the end of the Civil War.

In a discussion following the screening, Lawrence-Riddell said he hoped by producing these documentaries, he could offer a alternative to viewpoints by online right-wing groups that have led to banning of certain topics such as critical race theory in several states’ schools.

“They are well funded, they are well organized and they’re engaged in this campaign of copying and pasting our original ideas and laws around race in America,” he said. “We don’t have $95 million, but what we do have is the belief in our souls that we are going to keep working to eradicate this poison from the soil and the soul of our country.”

Power-Greene called for more engagement in local communities, applying pressure on politicians and developing grassroots movements to expand political consciousness as three pillars needed to further the cause or reparations.

“Hopefully what the reparations movement has done and will continue to do will broaden out and bring more people in, and make them feel like they can do something, as opposed to sitting and reading another Instagram post, a way to really dig in despite the pushback that we’re facing.”

The city’s Reparations Study Commission, founded in 2023, released a preliminary report in December on how to address historic wrongs against Black residents and workers in the city. A key finding of the report was the existence of more than 240 historical property deeds, covering approximately 55 properties across Northampton, that contain language of racial exclusion for those properties.

Alexander MacDougall can be reached at amacdougall@gazettenet.com.