Deborah Shapiro
Deborah Dickson Shapiro received her B.A. in History from Connecticut College in 1972, and after attending the Marshall Wythe School of Law of the College of William and Mary, she received her Juris Doctor from the University of Connecticut in 1976. She semi-retired from the practice of law in 2009 to assume the position of Executive Director of the Middlesex County Historical Society. Her last project there was to guide the mounting of the national award-winning exhibit, A Vanished Port: Middletown & the Caribbean, 1750-1824, the story of Middletown’s role in the West Indies sugar and slave trades. At the beginning of 2019, Debby retired as director of MCHS and was appointed as the Municipal Historian for the City of Middletown by Mayor Daniel Drew and reappointed by Mayor Ben Florsheim. In that capacity, she applied to UNESCO to have Middletown named a Site of Memory because several ships are documented as arriving from Africa with their human cargo. The Middletown Middle Passage Ceremony was held on September 28, 2019 which culminated in the unveiling of a plaque of remembrance. She is currently a part of the team from the historical society that is researching and writing a nomination of the Beman Triangle to the National Register of Historic Places.
John Mills
Originally from San Diego, John Mills is a technologist by trade, but an equity advocate and independent scholar by passion. The descendant of both southern and northern enslaved, John focuses on unearthing little-known people and stories of this country’s history in slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. John presents research through the lens and perspective of a descendant, with intent to inspire understanding and empathy, a means to inspire good, God-fearing people, now armed with information, to look into whether they may be unwittingly aligning to biases resulting from the reverberating effects of a past time. John is a member of the Connecticut Freedom Trail and a member of the Webb Deane Stevens Museum Council. John is also working with an international team funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in an effort to deliver transformational impact on digital methods in cultural institutions...a means to decolonize museums. Finally, John is working with the state of Connecticut, business leaders and scholars in Middletown, CT to honor and memorialize a former enslaved individual by the name of Prince Mortimer.
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