Community Connections
LEAP for Education
LEAP is a local non-profit that empowers underserved students to achieve social and economic mobility by cultivating personal, academic and career growth.
Their facility was too small to support socially-distanced activities, so we opened our doors to them in October 2020. Since then. the Hall has been proud to provide a place for LEAP to hold peer mentoring meetings, graduation, and more.
Learn more at leap4ed.org.
LEAP students celebrate graduation in the ballroom
Salem United, Inc. Exhibit:
Unmasking & Evolution of “Negro” Election Day and The Black Vote
Salem United President Doreen Wade
Unmasking & Evolution of “Negro” Election Day and the Black Vote was hosted at Hamilton Hall during the summer of 2021.
The exhibit, which was organized by local nonprofit Salem United, Inc., included more than twenty paintings, displays, and banners. Visitors learned how the first black voting system evolved into Salem's 281-year-old “Black Picnic Day” celebration. Guests learned how West African slaves pioneered Black self-governance, and how white America used voting suppression methods to constrain elections.
Salem United, Inc. was founded in 2015 by three black women: mother and daughter Lorraine and Doreen Wade, and their colleague Su Almeida. The Wades have traced their family history back to the 1600’s in Massachusetts. President Doreen Wade has taken a powerful interest in preserving the history of Black self-governance in New England. This exhibit is the fruit of her research efforts.
Suffrage100MA
Hamilton Hall and Suffrage100MA proudly unveiled a historic women’s suffrage marker honoring the legacy of extraordinary activists, the Remond Family, June 23, 2022. The marker celebrates the Remonds’ suffrage and abolition work and is one of five Massachusetts marker sites on the National Votes for Women Trail. The project was funded through a grant by the William G. Pomeroy Foundation®, sponsored by the National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites (NCWHS)’s National Votes for Women Trail (NVWT), and coordinated in MA by Suffrage100MA.
