Meet the Team

Laurel C. Sneed, Founder and Executive Director

Laurel C. Sneed is Executive Director of the Apprend Foundation, Inc. and also serves as the director of the Thomas Day Education Project (TDEP) which she co-founded with her husband, Charles D. Sneed. She is an educational media and multimedia producer and instructional designer whose work in industry and education has received national and international acclaim over the past thirty years. In the mid-1990s, Sneed began focusing exclusively on history education. In 2000, she designed a multimedia educational application Vietnam: Views and Voices, a multi-media web-based application for SAS In-School, a software company. It was one of three educational software programs of 2000 to be named "Software of the Year" by Technology and Learning. In 2003, another multimedia application, "Exploring the World of Thomas Day," that Sneed created and designed won national and international acclaim. It received an Award of Excellence from Technology and Learning and was named one of the top 25 educational software programs of 2003. Sneed is currently serving as lead instructional designer and executive producer of the "Crafting Freedom Materials Project" a web-based resource for teachers that contains lesson plans, web videos, slide shows, and other materials on ten nineteenth-century African American artisans, entrepreneurs, and artists. She is also the executive producer of The Thin Edge of Freedom: The Life and Times of Thomas Day, a documentary film about Thomas Day and other free African Americans in the 19th century and lead investigator on a digital humanities research project exploring the use of mobile technology for a highway history tour.

Charles D. Sneed, Co-Founder and Financial Manager

Charles D. Sneed is the co-founder of the Thomas Day Education Project. He earned a Masters degree from North Carolina Central University in Family and Consumer Science and has taught at the elementary and secondary levels. Prior to co-founding the Thomas Day Education Project, he had an extensive career in sales and marketing and was also an award-winning journalist for several years. He has worn many hats for the Apprend Foundation: he coordinated workshops and seminars for Let It Shine and the Crafting Freedom workshops; recruited and registered applicants; and he has also served as a lesson plan developer and advisor on the Crafting Freedom Materials Project. Since its inception, he has overseen internal fiscal management on all grants that TDEP and the Apprend Foundation have been awarded.

William Andrews, Scholar Advisor

William L. Andrews is the E. Maynard Adams Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Senior Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is series editor of North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920 a complete digitized library of autobiographies and biographies of North American slaves and ex-slaves, funded by the NEH. He serves as scholar advisor to the Crafting Freedom Materials Project.

Ira Berlin, Scholar Advisor

Ira Berlin is a Distinguished Professor of history at the University of Maryland who has written extensively on American history and the larger Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially the history of slavery. His first book, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1975) won the Best First Book Prize awarded by the National Historical Society and remains a major work on the subject of free blacks. Berlin is the founding editor of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, which he directed until 1991. He is a long time advisor to the Thomas Day Education Project and serves as a scholar advisor on the documentary film, The Thin Edge of Freedom: The Life and Times of Thomas Day.

Elizabeth F. Buford, Board of Directors

Elizabeth F. Buford served as Assistant Secretary at the Department of Cultural Resources during the second administration (1993-2001) of North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt. Buford also served as Director of the North Carolina Museum of History during 2004–2007 when the museum was the sponsor of the Crafting Freedom workshops. In the capacity of museum director, she spearheaded the publication of the first major book on Thomas Day to be published by the University of North Carolina Press in the spring of 2010.

Melvin P. Ely, Scholar Advisor

Melvin P. Ely is a professor of history and black studies at the College of William and Mary. His most recent book, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil Waris about a free African American community in Prince Edward County, Virginia and their interactions and relationships with both the enslaved and white population in Southside Virginia. It won the Bancroft prize, one of the highest honors given to books in the field of history. He serves as a scholar advisor on the documentary film, The Thin Edge of Freedom: The Life and Times of Thomas Day.

Marcie Cohen Ferris, Board of Directors

Marcie Cohen Ferris is the Associate Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She also serves as an associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of American Studies at the University. Since 2008, Ferris has served as the department’s coordinator of Southern Studies. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from George Washington University (2003). Prior to this time, she focused on developing public history educational programs, exhibits, and teaching resource. She is a widely respected scholar of Southern material culture with a special focus on Southern food ways. Ferris teaches about Thomas Day’s life and work in the Southern Material Culture course she designed for the American Studies curriculum at UNC.

Yvonne J. Fisher, Board of Directors

Yvonne J. Fisher is an accountant who formerly worked as the financial officer for the North Carolina Central University Foundation (NCCUF). Since retirement, she has joined the Apprend Foundation’s board and serves as Treasurer of the organization. She is also an active member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, whose chapters in North Carolina contributed funds for the establishment of a major Thomas Day furniture collection at the North Carolina Museum of History in the early 1970s.

Vanessa Richmond Graves, Board of Directors

Vanessa Richmond Graves is a veteran K-12 teacher with 30+ years of experience. She became involved with TDEP, over a decade ago, as a "Thomas Day fellow" in the first series of teacher workshops offered in three North Carolina counties. She is a long-time teacher trainer with the North Carolina Teachers' Academy and board member of the Thomas Day House/Union Tavern, Inc., the organization that restored Thomas Day's workshop and home into a hands-on furniture museum. She has been a valued teacher mentor and presenter for TDEP workshops since 2003.

Dante James, Director, The Thin Edge of Freedom: The Life and Times of Thomas Day

Dante James is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker who refined his craft at Blackside, an African American documentary production company based in Boston during the 1980s and 1990s. Blackside produced such legendary films as Eyes on the Prize, This Far By Faith, The Great Depression, Malcolm X, and War on Poverty. Today, James continues to use the medium of film to tell stories about individual African Americans and the diverse African American historical experience. He was the producer of the PBS series, Slavery and the Making of America for which he won an Emmy. In addition, he independently produced a short multiple-award winning film, The Doll, adapted from the short story by the 19th century African American writer, Charles Chesnutt. James also recently produced Harlem in Paris. He serves as director and script consultant on the film, The Thin Edge of Freedom: The Life and Times of Thomas Day.

Danielle Kelly, Coordinator and Instructional Designer

Danielle Kelly is the Coordinator and an Instructional Designer for the Crafting Freedom Materials Project, developing language arts and social studies lesson plans for elementary and middle grades. Kelly is also the Coordinator and a Collaborator for Crafting Freedom Along NC 86: Discovering Hidden History with Mobile Technology. She has an M. A. in antebellum United States history with an emphasis in race and slavery. She has served as a graduate teaching assistant for four courses in Pepperdine University's Humanities series. Kelly was also the Web Content Specialist for Pepperdine’s portal project and she has nearly a decade of experience in website planning and content management.

Daniel Kelo, Technology Consultant

Daniel Kelo is the technology consultant for Crafting Freedom Along NC 86: Discovering Hidden History with Mobile Technology. He has 20 years of experience in application development and has developed web applications since the advent of the web. He has also been a professional musician and audio producer/engineer for more than 25 years and currently operates a studio providing audio production and post-production services. He specializes in the integration of technological solutions supporting audio and video delivery via the web and continues to keep abreast of new and emerging technologies.

Patricia King Butler, Board of Directors

Patricia King Butler has served as Director of the Liberty Partnerships Program at Long Island University for over 15 years. In this role she has fostered programs that serve academically at-risk youth by providing academic, cultural and social enrichment activities and college preparation throughout Brooklyn, New York. She is also the co-founder of Camp Umoja, a cultural arts enrichment camp based in New Jersey that explores African/African American history and culture through the arts, historical site visits, and research. Butler was a Thomas Day Fellow in 2005 which she considers a transformative event in both her personal and professional life as an educator.

Beverly J. McNeill, Chair, Board of Directors and Teacher Consultant

Beverly J. McNeill is a veteran K-12 teacher with 30+ years of experience. She too became involved with TDEP, over a decade ago, as a "Thomas Day fellow" in the first series of teacher workshops conducted in three counties. She has been a teacher mentor for TDEP ever since. McNeill has developed lesson plans for the Crafting Freedom Project and has mentored hundreds of teachers in sessions she has facilitated on how to integrate African American history and culture into one’s year-round teaching. She serves as the chairperson of the board of directors of the Apprend Foundation.

Lewis Nelson, Teacher Consultant

Lewis Nelson is a veteran middle school social studies teacher. He received a Masters of Arts in history from the College of William and Mary, and is currently teaching social studies at Southern Middle School in Person County, North Carolina. Nelson is a long-time teacher-mentor with Let It Shine and the Crafting Freedom workshops. He has also served as a lesson plan developer on the Crafting Freedom Materials Project and a field tester and evaluator of the CD-ROM, Exploring the World of Thomas Day and other materials.

Leah Potter, Scholar Advisor

Leah Potter is the Co-Director of Teaching American History (TAH) Programs at the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, City University of New York Graduate Center. Potter has over a decade of experience as a history educator and media producer. She is a consulting partner on Mission America, an educational video game funded by the Corporation of Public Broadcasting's American History and Civics Initiative. Potter is also producing an online database of primary source materials, classroom activities, and strategies for k-12 students and teachers. She serves as a collaborator on Crafting Freedom on NC 86: Discovering Hidden History with Mobile Technology.

James L. Roark, Scholar Advisor

James L. Roark is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of American History at Emory University where he has taught for over twenty years. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards including being the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, 2001-2002. He is the author of numerous books on the history of the American South, including Black Master: A Free Family of Color in the Old South, which he co-wrote with Michael Johnson. He is an advisor on the documentary film, The Thin Edge of Freedom: The Life and Times of Thomas Day.

Patricia Dane Rogers, Board of Directors

Patricia Rogers is a former Washington Post reporter and columnist with a focus on design, architecture and the decorative arts. Now an independent writer, she published the first major national newspaper article about Thomas Day in The Post in 1997, "Carved in History, Thomas Day: A Success in an Unlikely Time and Place." The story's lead was her discovery and identification of Day's Bible. She has been researching him ever since. Rogers co-authored the publication, "The Hidden History of Thomas Day" with Laurel Sneed and was a presenter at a symposium on the topic sponsored by the North Carolina Humanities Council in Yanceyville, North Carolina in the summer of 2009.

Sarah Russell, Scholar Advisor and Teacher Consultant

Sarah Russell has been an instructor in the Humanities department at the North Carolina School of Science and Math for the past seven years. She attended graduate school at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she specialized in southern history and slavery in the Americas. Dr. Ira Berlin served as the chair of her doctoral dissertation titled "Cultural Conflicts and Common Interests: the Making of the Sugar Planter Class in Louisiana, 1795 to 1853" completed in 2000. She serves the Apprend Foundation as a presenter for the Crafting Freedom workshops, and as a scholar advisor as well as a lesson plan developer for the Crafting Freedom Materials Project.

Stephen Stept, Scriptwriter, The Thin Edge of Freedom: The Life and Times of Thomas Day

Stephen Stept is a documentary filmmaker whose works frequently address historical subjects. He has been a principal of three major television projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities: A Vision of Empire: Henry Luce and Time-Life’s America, which he produced, wrote and directed for PBS’s American Masters series; Darrow, a feature-length dramatic biography of Clarence Darrow, starring Kevin Spacey, which Stept conceived, co-produced and co-wrote for PBS’s American Playhouse (this teleplay for Darrow was a Humanitas Prize finalist). Stept is the scriptwriter on the film The Thin Edge of Freedom: The Life and Times of Thomas Day, American. Prominent credits as a producer-writer include: Destination America, a four-part PBS series on immigration for David Grubin Productions; The Revolution, a 13-hour series on the American Revolution for the History Channel, on which he was also Series Producer; and Hoover Dam for the PBS series American Experience.

Donna Thompson, Scholar Advisor

Donna Thompson is the Project Director for Faculty Development Programs at the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, City University of New York Graduate Center. Thompson has twenty years of experience working with interdisciplinary humanities and intercultural learning educators in the United States and abroad. She directs the Making Connections American Studies Program for New York City public school teachers, established in 1989, as well as the NEH-funded Picturing United States. History project, an on-line resource for teaching United States history with visual evidence. Thompson is pursuing a doctoral degree in American history at Drew University.

John M. Vlach, Scholar Advisor

John M. Vlach is Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at The George Washington University where he also serves as Director of the University's Folklife Program. His scholarship, for over thirty years, has focused on material culture produced by people of the African Diaspora. He is the author of the seminal study, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts as well as nine other important texts on African American architecture, folk art, and other topics. He has served as a scholar consultant to the Thomas Day Education Project and Apprend Foundation's project since the early 1990's and is an advisor both on the film, The Thin Edge of Freedom: The Life and Times of Thomas Day, American and Crafting Freedom Along Highway 86.

Michele Ware, Board of Directors and Scholar Advisor

Michele Ware is Associate Dean, College of Liberal Arts at North Carolina Central University (NCCU) and also an associate professor in the Department of English. She has won numerous awards for excellence in teaching at the university and has been a lecturer and served as assistant director of the Crafting Freedom workshops. She is currently serving as a lesson plan developer and scholar advisor on the Crafting Freedom Materials Project.

Christine Williams, Teacher Consultant

Christine Williams Christine Williams is a veteran social studies teacher with Wake County Public Schools where she serves as a Teacher Mentor, Testing Coordinator, and Positive Behavior Support Coach, and a member of the Leadership Team. Williams has more than 30 years of experience working with at-risk students and was a three-year participant in Wake County's "Conversations on Diversity Project." Williams became a Thomas Day Fellow in 2007 and since has served as a developer and field tester of lesson plans for the Crafting Freedom Project.

Peter Wood, Scholar Advisor

Peter H. Wood is professor emeritus at Duke University where he taught American history for over 30 years. Wood graduated from Harvard College in 1964 and spent two years at Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship. His first book, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (Knopf, 1974) was nominated for the National Book Award and won the Beveridge Prize of the American Historical Association. Wood is co-author, with Elizabeth Fenn, of Natives and Newcomers (UNC Press, 1983), a brief history of early North Carolina which won the American Historical Association's Robinson Prize. He has been a scholar advisor to the Thomas Day Education Project since it's inception and has been a presenter at Let It Shine and Crafting Freedom workshops. He also serves as an advisor on research the Apprend foundation has sponsored and on the script The Thin Edge of Freedom: The Life and Times of Thomas Day.

All content (c) 2009 by the Apprend Foundation.