Slavery

Life of Fugitive Slave Lavinia Bell to be Presented

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One hundred and fifty years ago, few knew about Lavinia Bell, a fugitive from slavery who trekked from a Texas plantation to Rouses Point, New York, in search of freedom in Canada. Now, for the first time, her experiences will be presented to the public in “Never Give Up: The Story of Lavinia Bell,” reenacted by Melissa Waddy-Thibodeaux at Plattsburgh State University’s Krinovitz Recital Hall. The presentation will begin at 7:00 PM on February 11, 2011. The event is free and open to the public.

Ms. Thibodeaux’s visit to Plattsburgh in February will be her first to the North Country. She has already earned national acclaim for her sensitive depictions of Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks. The North Country location of the premiere of Mrs. Bell’s story, in the region where her vision was at last realized, is as fitting as are the sponsoring organizations: the North Country Underground Railroad Historical Association, Plattsburgh State University, and Clinton Community College.

Ms. Thibodeaux will also offer performance workshops for university and college students during her stay in Plattsburgh. On February 12, she will cross into Canada
where, under the sponsorship of the Negro Community Center in Montreal, she will
introduce Mrs. Bell to a waiting audience.

To see Ms. Thibodeaux portray Harriet Tubman visit You Tube.

To learn more about this event, contact Don Papson at [email protected] or
(518) 561-0277.

Anniversary of John Browns Execution

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151 years ago this week, John Brown was executed and his body was returned to the Adirondacks. Had Brown escaped from Harpers Ferry rather than been captured he might well today be just a footnote, one of the tens of thousands that struggled to undermine the institution of slavery in America before the Civil War.

It’s often said that just one thing secured Brown’s place in the hearts of millions of Americans that came after him &#8211 his execution and martyrdom. There is another equally important reason Americans will celebrate the life of John Brown this week however &#8211 he was right slavery would end at a heavy price.

Last year, I wrote a series of posts following the last days of John Brown’s fight to end slavery. You can read the entire series here (start at the bottom).

New York Anti-Slavery Conference

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In farm fields, artisan workshops, private homes, and brothels then- in fields and orchards, restaurants, factories, private homes and sex-oriented businesses, now—American and foreign-born women, men and children are trafficked and enslaved across New York State.

As the Syracuse Post Standard recently reported, it is as close as the New York State Fair held every summer. According to the Post Standard, a restaurant vendor from Queens was charged earlier this month with allegedly trafficking workers from Mexico to work at the Fair, mistreating and barely paying them, if at all.

“We have both the past and the present to reckon with,” said Martha Swan, Director of the freedom education project John Brown Lives! “Although largely erased from official history and collective memory, New York “promoted, prolonged and profited from” slavery from the 1620s through the 1850s. It continues today, often hidden in plain sight.

“We have organized a two-day Anti-Slavery Convention to put slavery &#8220on the map&#8221 as a reality not solely of the South but of New York- and not as a relic but a legacy and crime against humanity still with us today.”

The Convention will be held in Lake Placid, NY, on December 3-4, 2010 and will feature experts on contemporary slavery and human trafficking, scholars, historians, victims advocates, lawyers, artists, and musicians joining with the general public to examine slavery and trafficking in New York State and ways to end it.

The Convention will include a full-day workshop for educators, teaching artists, and librarians at Heaven Hill Farm on Friday, December 3. Advance registration and a $55 fee are required. Call 518-962-4758 to register.

Later that evening at Lake Placid Center for the Arts, Dr. J.W. Wiley from SUNY Plattsburgh’s Center for Diversity, Pluralism & Inclusion will show film clips and lead a lively conversation on how film has shaped American’s perceptions of slavery and race. The event, from 7:00 – 9:00 p.m., is free and open to the public.

From 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, December 4, the Convention will continue at High Peaks Resort on Main Street in Lake Placid with keynote addresses and panel discussions ranging from historical slavery in New York State to up-to-the-minute reports and analysis on slavery and trafficking today.

Dr. Thomas Hopkins, descendent of Harpers Ferry Raider John A. Copeland, will help bring the Convention to a close with a candlelight wreath-laying ceremony at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site at 5:00 p.m..

Partners in the Convention with John Brown Lives! are John Brown Coming Home, the National Abolition Hall of Fame, SUNY Plattsburgh’s Center for Diversity, Pluralism & Inclusion, and the New York State Archives Partnership Trust.

The Anti-Slavery Convention is funded, in part, with support from the New York Council for the Humanities. For more information or a full schedule of events, call 518-962-4758 or go to www.johnbrowncominghome.org.

Adirondack Anti-Slavery Convention Planned

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During &#8220Slavery in New York? Slavery Today?&#8221, a two-day Convention being held Friday, December 3rd and Saturday, December 4th, experts on contemporary slavery and human trafficking will be joined by scholars, historians, victims advocates, lawyers, investigative reporters, musicians, and the general public to examine slavery and trafficking in New York State and ways to end it. Events will take place around the Lake Placid area.

New Yorkers have long regarded slavery as a southern institution. However, the 1991 discovery of the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan offered irrefutable evidence that New York was a veritable slave society for hundreds of years. Recent research and fresh scholarship have begun to mine a long-buried history. As New Yorkers begin to remember and commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, examining the State’s dual legacy of slavery and freedom will shed new light on the complex narrative of our past.

Although largely erased from official history and collective memory, New York “promoted, prolonged and profited from” slavery from the 1620s through the 1850s. Slave labor was here at the start of New Netherland and it continued throughout the British colonial period with such intensity that at times during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, New York City had a larger slave population than any other city in North America.

Around the world today, slavery is still alive and well, generating billions of dollars along the supply chain of labor and products that make much of our daily lives possible. Though a crime in nearly every country, roughly 27 million people are enslaved worldwide today, including nearly 55,000 people in the United States. In the State Department’s 2010 report on human trafficking across the globe, the U.S. was identified as a “source, transit and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically forced labor, debt bondage, and forced prostitution.”

According to the Washington, D.C.-based Free the Slaves, slaves are found in nearly all 50 states, from farm fields and orchards to hotels, restaurants, private homes, factories, sweatshops, brothels, and construction sites. Immigrant populations, both documented and undocumented, are especially vulnerable, but native-born Americans are not immune to being enslaved and trafficked. New York, along with California, Florida and Texas, ranks among the states with the greatest incidence of documented slavery in the country.

PARTICIPANTS

* Chandra Bhatnagar, ACLU Human Rights Project Staff Attorney and counsel for 500 Indian men trafficked into the U.S. as “guestworkers”-

* John Bowe, award-winning investigative journalist and author of Nobodies: Modern American Slavery and the New Global Economy–

* Florrie Burke, Co-Chair of Freedom Network (USA), expert on the treatment of trafficking victims and one of the first social services respondents to Deaf Mexicans forced to sell trinkets on the New York City subway in the mid-1990s-

* Mia Nagawiecki and Betsy Gibbons, New York Historical Society-

* Renan Salgado, Farmworker Legal Services of New York-

* Ron Soodalter, author of Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader and co-author with Kevin Bales of The Slave Next Door–

* Tina M. Stanford, Executive Director, New York State Office of Victims Services-

* Dr. Margaret Washington, Professor of History at Cornell University and Sojourner Truth biographer-

* Dr. Sherrill Wilson, urban anthropologist at forefront of effort to research, interpret and protect the African Burial Ground discovered in Lower Manhattan-

* Duane Vaughn, Executive Director of Wait House, an emergency shelter in Glens Falls for youth ages 16-21- and

* Dr. J.W. Wiley, Director of the Center for Diversity, Pluralism & Inclusion, SUNY Plattsburgh.

SCHEDULE

December 3:

8 am-3 pm Educators Workshop at Heaven Hill Farm

7 pm-9 pm Slavery, Film & the Shaping of an American Conscience at Lake Placid Center for the Arts

December 4:

8 am-5 pm Anti-Slavery Convention at High Peaks Resort

5 pm-6 pm Wreath-laying Ceremony at John Brown Farm State Historic Site

9 pm-? Closing Reception at Northwoods Inn

&#8220Slavery in New York? Slavery Today?&#8221 is co-sponsored by the freedom education project John Brown Lives!, John Brown Coming Home, the New York State Archives Partnership Trust, the National Abolition Hall of Fame, and the Center for Diversity, Pluralism & Inclusion at SUNY Plattsburgh. Participants include:

Slavery in New York, Slavery Today Event

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Teachers, librarians, local historians and teaching artists are invited to explore slavery in New York State, historically and today, with guest scholars, curriculum specialists, and front-line investigative reporters on Friday, December 3, 2010, from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. at Heaven Hill Farm, on Bear Cub Road in Lake Placid, New York.

This conversation on slavery and human trafficking in the Empire State, will include special guests:

Margaret Washington, Professor of History at Cornell University and award-winning author of Sojourner Truth’s America, a groundbreaking biography examining the harsh realities of Dutch New York slavery that helped forge one of the nation’s greatest and most widely admired reformers.

John Bowe, prize-winning journalist and author of Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the Global Economy, an eye-opening look at labor abuse and cases of outright slavery in the U.S. today.

Cost: $55 per person includes a box lunch, lesson plans, and other resource materials. Reduced rates are available at $100 for 2 people or $150 for 3 people per institution. Books and other teaching tools will be available for purchase.

SLAVERY IN NEW YORK? SLAVERY TODAY? is part of the Anti-Slavery Convention in the Adirondacks on December 3-5, 2010 and is a joint program of John Brown Lives! and Center for Diversity, Pluralism & Inclusion at SUNY Plattsburgh.

For information and to pre-register contact Martha Swan (518-962-4758 [email protected]) or Lindsay Pontius (518-962-8672 [email protected]).

Important Slavery Collection Goes Online

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The New-York Historical Society has announced the launch of a new online portal to nearly 12,000 pages of source materials documenting the history of slavery in the United States, the Atlantic slave trade and the abolitionist movement. Made readily accessible to the general public for the first time at www.nyhistory.org/slaverycollections, these documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries represent fourteen of the most important collections in the library’s Manuscript Department.

The collections include account books and ship manifests documenting the financial aspects of the slave trade- legal papers such as birth certificates and deeds of manumission- and political works and polemics. The materials range from writings by the abolitionists Granville Sharp, Lysander Spooner and Charles Sumner to the diary of a plantation manager and overseer of slaves in Cuba, Joseph Goodwin, and that of a former slave in Fishkill, New York, James F. Brown.

The site also provides access to the archives of abolitionist organizations such as the New-York Manumission Society and the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, as well as the records of the African Free School, which document the education of free blacks in early nineteenth-century New York.

“The creative use of digital technology is a key priority in making the Society a highly accessible world-class resource for all,” stated Jean Ashton, Executive Vice President of the Historical Society and Director of the Library. “This project is a landmark achievement in our efforts to offer scholars, educators and students anywhere in the world immediate access to materials from the Society’s museum and library collections.”

The project was completed with the support of a $190,000 appropriation secured by Senator Charles E. Schumer’s office to digitize the Historical Society’s library collections. “As more and more of our world goes online, we must make sure that our historical records keep up,” said Senator Schumer. “By digitizing thousands of pages of materials documenting the history of slavery in the United States, the New-York Historical Society will make this collection accessible to any American interested in our history.”

Over the past six years, the New-York Historical Society has showcased documents, art and artifacts relating to the abolitionist movement and the network known as the Underground Railroad by publishing the papers of the African Free School in print and on the web, and through the following exhibitions:

Grant and Lee in War and Peace

Lincoln and New York-

Alexander Hamilton

Slavery in New York

New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War-

French Founding Father: Lafayette’s Return to Washington’s America.

Established in 1804, the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS) comprises New York’s oldest museum and a nationally renowned research library. N-YHS collects, preserves and interprets American history and art- its mission is to make these collections accessible to the broadest public and increase understanding of American history through exhibitions, public programs and research that reveal the dynamism of history and its impact on the world today. N-YHS holdings cover four centuries of American history and comprise one of the world’s greatest collections of historical artifacts, American art and other materials documenting the history of the United States as seen through the prism of New York City and State.

Cazenovia Fugitive Slave Law Convention Event

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Final preparations are underway for the celebration of the 160th anniversary of the Cazenovia Fugitive Slave Law Convention. An interpretive plaque, to be installed for year-round public view at 9 Sullivan Street (home of the Cherry Valley Apartments) will be unveiled on the afternoon of Friday, August 20th—and an evening celebration performance will then be held at the Cazenovia College Catherine Cummings Theatre on Lincklaen Street.

An extremely rare daguerreotype (shown here) in the collection of the Madison County Historical Society, Oneida, provides the central backdrop for the 160th anniversary events.

Taken by Cazenovia photographer Ezra Greenleaf Weld on the second day of the Convention, which was held at the Sullivan Street location on August 22, 1850, several prominent local and national figures appear in the photograph, including: Peterboro abolitionist and Convention organizer Gerrit Smith- famed escaped slave and orator Frederick Douglass- and Mary and Emily Edmonson, escaped slaves who had been recaptured aboard the ill-fated flight of the “Pearl.” More than 2000 people, including as many as 50 fugitive slaves, attended what many historians believe was the nation’s largest anti-slavery protest.

In tribute to the many individuals who risked much to support the cause of abolitionism at the 1850 Cazenovia Convention, a magical evening, in word and song, will take place at the Catherine Cummings Theatre at 7:30 pm and will be hosted by master of ceremonies Honorable Hugh Humphreys. Frederick Douglass (portrayed by the nationally-acclaimed actor Fred Morsell) will be the guest orator for the evening, and music of the period will be provided by featured vocalist Max Smith and the vocal sounds of Elizabeth Bouk, Moana Fogg and Lowell Lingo, Jr. The evening program will be followed by a reception at the Theatre. The plaque unveiling will take place earlier that day at 4 pm on Sullivan Street.

With generous support from Patti and Sparky Christakos- Cazenovia College- the Upstate Institute of Colgate University- the Gorman Foundation- the Madison County Historical Society- the National Abolition Hall of Fame- and many other charitable donors, both the unveiling and evening presentation are free, and the public is encouraged to attend.

For more information on the commemorative events to be held on Friday, August 20th, please contact Commemorative Committee member Sarah Webster at 655-8632.

Frederick Douglasss 1843 Lecture to Highlight Tour

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One hundred and sixty-six summers ago&#8211 one year after fugitive slave Frederick Douglass lectured in Keeseville&#8211Albany Underground Railroad agent Abel Brown “took” the Burlington steamboat on Lake Champlain and reported, “Many a slave has enjoyed the indescribable pleasure of leaping from the liberty-loving Burlington.&#8221

Hundreds of fugitives from slavery escaped every year to New York City. They were forwarded to Albany and onto Champlain Canal packet boats. At Whitehall they boarded the Burlington. From Port Kent, they could make their way to Keeseville and Stephen Keese Smith’s farm in Peru. Smith hid fugitives from slavery in his barns and drove them in his uncle’s wagon to Champlain. Then Noadiah Moore took them across the border to Lacolle, Canada, and helped them find work. They were free, at last.

People opposed the abolitionists. Friends and neighbors turned against them. Brethren left their churches.

On August 14th, North Country Underground Railroad Historical Association’s President, Don Papson, will lead a guided tour, “Villages and Churches Divided.” The tour will begin with a 10 am orientation in Keeseville’s Ausable Valley Grange at 1749 Main Street. Stops will be made at abolition and UGRR sites where participants will read passages from historic documents. The trial of Rev. Andrew Witherspoon and the stirring words of Frederick Douglass will be relived. The last stop at 3 pm will be at a hidden room. Participants must apply early as the tour is limited to 20 people. The cost is $30 for members of NCUGRHA- $40 for non members. Each participant is asked to pack a lunch, wear walking shoes and bring an umbrella. To register, please contact Helen Nerska at 518-643-0938 or email [email protected]

“Villages and Churches Divided” is a 5th Annual Canal Splash! event. Canal Splash! celebates the history and culture of New York’s Canals.

CFP: Abolishing Slavery in the Atlantic World

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The Call for Proposals submission deadline has been extended to July 31, 2010 for Abolishing Slavery in the Atlantic World: The &#8216-Underground Railroad’ in the Americas, Africa, and Europe, The Tenth Anniversary Underground Railroad Public History Conference to be held April 8 &#8211 10, 2011. The event is being organized by Underground Railroad History Project of the Capital Region, and hosted by Russell Sage College, in Troy, New York.

Where there was slavery, there was resistance, escape, and rebellion. The Transatlantic Slave Trade (1400s to 1800s) was a global enterprise that transformed the four continents bordering the Atlantic, and that engendered the formation of a multifaceted and international Underground Railroad resistance movement. The broad geographic nature of this freedom struggle is the theme of the 2011 UGR Public History Conference. The organizers invite proposals that address capture, enslavement, and resistance within and across borders in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, historically and contemporarily, as well as proposals that address the preservation of the voices of the past and their relationship with us today.

Proposals should be submitted by July 30, 2010 Via postal mail to URHPCR, PO Box 10851, Albany NY 12201 or via email to [email protected] For more information, visit www.ugrworkshop.com or call 518-432-4432

John Brown Lives! Honors Juneteenth With Event

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June 19th commemorates “Juneteenth”, the oldest known celebration of the end of slavery in the United States, and is observed in more than 30 states. It is also known as Freedom Day, or Emancipation Day. Join us in honoring “Juneteenth” with an author reception for Scott Christianson, author of the critically acclaimed book Freeing Charles: The Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War (University of Illinois Press, 2010).

Scott will speak about the life and dramatic rescue of a captured fugitive slave from Virginia, Charles Nalle, who was liberated by Harriet Tubman and others in Troy, NY in 1860.

Of note, Freeing Charles has been featured in The New York Times Book Review and excerpted in The Wall Street Journal. An award-winning writer, scholar, and human rights activist, Christianson’s interest in American history, particularly slavery, dates back to his boyhood in upstate New York, when he discovered some of his ancestors’ Civil War letters.

This event will be held on The Rooftop Terrace of The Northwoods Inn on Main Street in Lake Placid and is co-sponsored by the Lake Placid Institute for the Arts & Humanities, John Brown Lives! and John Brown Coming Home.

The reception begins at 4:00 pm and is free and open to the public. The Northwoods Inn will open a cash bar during the author reception and offer an optional Adirondack-style BBQ on the terrace for $10 per person (tax and gratuity included) following the event. Freeing Charles will be available for purchase and Christianson will be on hand to sign copies of the book.

This year, June 19th follows on the release of a new U.S. State Department report released yesterday citing &#8211 for the first time &#8211 that despite the end of slavery, human trafficking is a serious problem in the United States.

Secretary Clinton (June 14, 2010): &#8220The 10th annual Trafficking in Persons Report outlines the continuing challenges across the globe, including in the United States. The Report, for the first time, includes a ranking of the United States based on the same standards to which we hold other countries. The United States takes its first-ever ranking not as a reprieve but as a responsibility to strengthen global efforts against modern slavery, including those within America. This human rights abuse is universal, and no one should claim immunity from its reach or from the responsibility to confront it.&#8221

The full report and announcement can be found online.

This is the first event in a series of anti-slavery conventions sponsored by John Brown Lives! and John Brown Coming Home.

For more information or to make reservations, call 518-962-4758 or 518-523-1312. Also visit http://www.lakeplacidinstitute.org/.