Margaret "Peggy" Trotter Dammond Preacely

Early Years & Family Life | Civic Engagement | Professional Career | Family Lineage

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Early Years & Family Life

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Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised in Harlem, New York, Peggy is a great-great-granddaughter of abolitionists William and Ellen Craft and the grandniece of journalist and  equal rights leader William Monroe Trotter. Peggy grew up immersed in the stories and values of her ancestors. Her mother, Ellen Kinloch Craft Dammond, intentionally passed down the family’s history, teaching her that these were “wonderful stories that needed to be kept alive in the family.” 

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Peggy briefly  attended Boston University, where she advocated for access to equal education in the Black community of Roxbury and was a leader in one of the first  Freedom School “stay-outs” protesting defacto segregation in the Boston Public School system. She and her brother Henry Craft Dammond,   worked against the Vietnam War by counseling conscientious objectors and assisting young men seeking alternatives to the draft. Her commitment to justice evolved into a sustained career in public health, reflecting her belief that health equity is a civil rights issue.

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Peggy earned a B.A, in Broadcast Communications Arts:, Radio and Television, from San Francisco State University in 1975  and  received her Master’s Degree  in Public Health from California State University Long Beach in 1994. She has spent more than six  decades working in health education, community service  and  social justice advocacy in New York, Boston, San Francisco and Southern California  Peggy  was briefly married  to community activist and social worker Noel A. Day ( 1936-1995),  and has two grown  children, Christopher Trotter Day and Shanti Marielle Craft Moore Day from that union. In 1982 Peggy moved to Southern California and married Earnest C. Preacely a community leader, organizer and business entrepreneur. Between them they have nine grandchildren and eight great grandchildren.

Civic Engagement

From an early age, Peggy understood history not as distant or abstract, but as a living responsibility, one that shaped her sense of purpose and moral obligation to future generations.As a teenager in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Peggy made the deliberate decision to join the Civil Rights Movement. She became an early member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), working alongside leaders such as John Lewis, Angeline Butler,  Ella Baker, Rev. Charles Sherrod, Rev  James M. Lawson and Julian Bond during the movement’s most dangerous and formative years. 

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She was an “early” Freedom Rider on  the Eastern Shore of Maryland testing the new anti-discrimination inter-state commerce laws during a period when such actions carried serious personal risk. In December of 1961 she was jailed for five days for   participating in an interracial “sit-in”   in Crisfield, Maryland. The following year,at age 19, she traveled to the deep South and worked as a voter registration field worker in The Albany Georgia Freedom Movement in rural  South West Georgia, and endured two  weeks of incarceration for her activism. While organizing in the South, she lived with sharecropping families who risked their lives to shelter and support SNCC workers, gaining firsthand insight into the courage and sacrifices of grassroots Black communities which was  barely 100 miles from where her ancestors William and Ellen Craft had once been enslaved in Macon, Georgia.

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The Albany  Georgia  Voter Registration g Campaign helped lay the strategic groundwork for The SNCC Mississippi Freedom Summer, which brought hundreds of Black and white college students from all over the country to register Black voters in rural and urban counties. During the summer of 1964, four  students, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner  were brutally murdered, but the murder of these activists sparked national outrage and an extensive federal investigation that helped passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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 Peggy also participated in  the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, witnessing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech as part of a mass mobilization that reshaped the nation’s conscience. After returning to the North, Peggy continued her activism through civil rights, community organizing, Black oral  history education and women’s health issues.

Professional Career

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Peggy’s professional contributions include co-founding the San Francisco  Black Women’s Health Project, Marketing Director for the Berkeley Co-op Credit Union, Project Director for the City of Long Beach California Department of Health and Human Services, and teaching community health courses at California State Universities. Throughout her career, she has  focused on ensuring access to accurate information, preventive care, and culturally responsive services for underserved communities, particularly women and youth of colorn addition to her work in public health, Peggy is a nationally recognized speaker, poet  and performer who blends historical narrative, poetry, and multimedia storytelling to bring the past into dialogue with the present. Drawing from both her family’s history and her own lived experience, she has presented at schools, churches, museums, and conferences across the country, using art, oral history, and storytelling as tools for education, healing, and intergenerational connection. 

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She recently published her first book of  collected poetry, an intergenerational venture with her youngest granddaughter Kayelynn Craft Day-Lyons, entitled, “History in my Pocket…Spirit in my Mouth”.

Family Lineage

Peggy has devoted her life to honoring, extending, and activating her family’s enduring legacy of resistance and public service. Peggy remains deeply engaged in community life through the Holman United Methodist Church of Los Angeles, through her service on the Monticello Getting Word Advisory Committee, which preserves and amplifies the stories of descendants of formerly enslaved families at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. In recognition of her lifelong commitment to justice and humanitarian service, she received the Rosa Parks Humanitarian Award from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Southern California in 2015.

Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely understands her life’s work not only as a continuation of her ancestors’ fight for freedom, but as a living bridge to the future, one rooted in courage, care, and the responsibility to ensure that history is remembered, honored, and transformed into action for generations yet to come.

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