Draft:Peggy Dammond Preacely

Activist, artist, and singer Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely is a former Freedom Rider and working member of Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Early Life
Peggy was born in Pittsburg and raised in Harlem. She was born November 6, 1942 to Ellen Craft Dammond. Her mother was the descendent of Civil War Union soldiers, and famous fugitive slaves William and Ellen Craft. In the late 1950's and early 1960's Peggy joined thousands of other Black and White students in the north and south to fight for civil rights. She joined the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at the young age of 19. She participated in marches and sit-ins in North Carolina and Maryland. Peggy attended non-violent workshops taught by a variety of Civil Rights activists such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. James Lawson, James Farmer, Myles Horton, Ella Baker and Dorothy Cotton. As a SNCC worker in the 1960's she was active in the field helping with voter registration. Peggy spent time in jail multiple times during her time with SNCC. She was arrested during the Albany Movement and spent three weeks in jail with sharecroppers. She was also sent to jail in 1961 in Baltimore, Maryland.

Education
In the 1940s, Peggy and her younger brother attended the Dalton School, a white private school in New York City. There, she found a community of social reformists who inspired her to become more active in social justice issues. Dalton School introduced her to activism, and started the fire under her that she needed to get out there and make a change. Dalton School’s liberal base gave Peggy a foundation and she began joining activist groups in the 1950s. In 1962, Peggy was a student at Hunter College and Boston University. At Boston University, she began fundraising for SNCC, participated in anti-Vietnam war protests, and helped draft the original Freedom School curriculum. From her time in university, she became an activist, poet, oral historian, a public health professional, and a public speaker. She went on to earn a master’s degree in Public Health and continued working on projects to better the health of women and inner-city youth in California.

In Boston, Dammond was known for her work writing curricula for Freedom Schools set up for African American children.

Later Life
In the Fall of 1963, Peggy moved back to the North and while at Boston University got married to her first husband Noel. She, her first husband, and her brother helped young men go to Canada to avoid the draft to the Vietnam war in a form of protest. Over the years Peggy has continued her work with social causes. She helped co-found the San Francisco Women's Health Center, The Black Women Organized for Action Health Consortium and by developing health education materials youth and women without health insurance through the Black Women's Health Project in California. She taught Culture and Health for the California State University Nursing Program and Community Health Education for California State University in Long Beach. In 1964, Peggy took her activism abroad. She travelled to the USSR as a part of a peace tour sponsored by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Throughout the 1980's and 1990's Peggy went around co-lecturing with her mother on Black history, until her mother died in 2007. Peggy continues that tradition with her daughter Shanti and son Chris and her grandchildren in the Los Angeles area.

teaching in Boston

Organizations

 * Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
 * Freedom Riders
 * Southern Christian Leadership Conference
 * Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
 * Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
 * National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

TV/Film

 * SCAD's "A Thousand Miles and Counting" A short documentary on Peggy's great-great-grandparents who escaped slavery.
 * "William Monroe Trotter Limited Series" (in development)
 * "1000 Miles" (a pre-production feature film)

Publications

 * Featured in Hands on The Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts of Women in SNCC
 * Featured in Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

Poems

 * SHERROD There Are Those Like John
 * She.Her.Hers.
 * Telling
 * Bob Moses...One of Us
 * The Vote