Dr. Frances Jones-Sneed gave a lecture on "Being Black and Free: Before and after the Emancipation Proclamation in Berkshire County, Massachusetts" in connection with the "Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation" exhibition on March 7, 2024, at the Williams College Museum of Art. Frances Jones-Sneed, Ph.D. is an emeritus professor of history at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) in North Adams, Massachusetts. She has taught and researched local history for over thirty years. She has directed three National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants on African American Biography. She spearheaded a national conference on African American Biography and is co-director of the Upper Housatonic African American Heritage Trail. She was an NEH Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University and is currently working on a monograph about W.E.B. Du Bois and editing the autobiography of the Rev. Samuel Harrison a nineteenth-century African American minister from Pittsfield, Massachusetts.