Lower Manhattan Slavery in New York Walking Tour 2009, Part 3

from the event description: Lower Manhattan Slavery in New York Walking Tour. At each site along the tour route, students from Law, Government, and Community Service High School will be performing and presenting historical information. Classes are encouraged to make posters and banners about slavery in New York to carry and display along the tour route.
• Distributed by African American History and United States History students from Law, Government and Community Service Magnet High School, Cambria Heights, Queens.
• Based on the New York and Slavery: Complicity and Resistance curriculum guide
• Other than at the colonial era African American Burial Ground, which was uncovered during excavations for a federal office building in 1991, these sites, and slavery in New York in general, have been erased from historical memory. There is not even an historical marker at the South Street Seaport in the financial district of Manhattan where enslaved Africans were traded in the 17th century and were illegal slaving expeditions were planned and financed up until the time of the American Civil War.
• For more information, contact Dr. Alan Singer, Department of Curriculum and Teaching, Hofstra University, at
516-463-5853 or catajs@hofstra.edu or Michael Pezone at zenmap@aol.com.
full page google map at mapchannels

Lower Manhattan Slavery in New York Walking Tour 2009, Part 2

from the event description: Lower Manhattan Slavery in New York Walking Tour. At each site along the tour route, students from Law, Government, and Community Service High School will be performing and presenting historical information. Classes are encouraged to make posters and banners about slavery in New York to carry and display along the tour route.
• Distributed by African American History and United States History students from Law, Government and Community Service Magnet High School, Cambria Heights, Queens.
• Based on the New York and Slavery: Complicity and Resistance curriculum guide
• Other than at the colonial era African American Burial Ground, which was uncovered during excavations for a federal office building in 1991, these sites, and slavery in New York in general, have been erased from historical memory. There is not even an historical marker at the South Street Seaport in the financial district of Manhattan where enslaved Africans were traded in the 17th century and were illegal slaving expeditions were planned and financed up until the time of the American Civil War.
• For more information, contact Dr. Alan Singer, Department of Curriculum and Teaching, Hofstra University, at
516-463-5853 or catajs@hofstra.edu or Michael Pezone at zenmap@aol.com.
full page google map at mapchannels

Lower Manhattan Slavery in New York Walking Tour 2009, Part 1

from the event description: Lower Manhattan Slavery in New York Walking Tour. At each site along the tour route, students from Law, Government, and Community Service High School will be performing and presenting historical information. Classes are encouraged to make posters and banners about slavery in New York to carry and display along the tour route.
• Distributed by African American History and United States History students from Law, Government and Community Service Magnet High School, Cambria Heights, Queens.
• Based on the New York and Slavery: Complicity and Resistance curriculum guide
• Other than at the colonial era African American Burial Ground, which was uncovered during excavations for a federal office building in 1991, these sites, and slavery in New York in general, have been erased from historical memory. There is not even an historical marker at the South Street Seaport in the financial district of Manhattan where enslaved Africans were traded in the 17th century and were illegal slaving expeditions were planned and financed up until the time of the American Civil War.
• For more information, contact Dr. Alan Singer, Department of Curriculum and Teaching, Hofstra University, at
516-463-5853 or catajs@hofstra.edu or Michael Pezone at zenmap@aol.com.
full page google map at mapchannels

Manhattan Slavery in New York Walking Tour Map

View The Full Screen Map

Visitors React To New York Divided

Visitors react to New York Divided exhibit at the New York Historical Society.
There are more of these kind of videos on youtube from a user named tellinglivesblog

Harriet Tubman Escapes

Part 2 in the Bentley Boyd comic series on Harriet Tubman. Here she crosses the river from Maryland to freedom in Pennsylvania The online archives are here
The book collections are well worth the price. I've gotten several. Here's the link to amazon.
It's tough coming up with soundtracks. Here I used Old Man river song by Paul Robeson

There's an old man called the Mississippi
That's the old man that I'd like to be
What does he care if the world has troubles
What does he care if the land ain't free
Ol' man river,
Dat ol' man river
He mus'know sumpin'
But don't say nuthin',
He jes'keeps rollin'
He keeps on rollin' along.
He don' plant taters/tators,
He don't plant cotton,
An' dem dat plants'em
is soon forgotten,
But ol'man river,
He jes keeps rollin'along.
You an'me, we sweat an' strain,
Body all achin' an' racket wid pain,
Tote dat barge!
Lif' dat bale!
Git a little drunk
An' you land in jail.
Ah gits weary
An' sick of tryin'
Ah'm tired of livin'
An' skeered of dyin',
But ol' man river,
He jes'keeps rolling' along.

From Slave Ship to Freedom Road

I used Paul Robeson's version of "Nobody Knows The Trouble I've Seen" as a soundtrack.
I realize the text is difficult to view. These are just the first few pages. It's a beautiful book.

Nobody knows the trouble that I've seen
Nobody knows my sorrow
Nobody knows the trouble that I've seen
Glory Hallelujah
Sometimes I'm up and sometimes I'm down
Oh Yes lord,
Sometimes I'm almost to the ground
O yes, Lord,
Nobody knows the trouble that I've seen
Nobody knows my sorrow
Nobody knows the trouble that I've seen
Glory Hallelujah

From Slave Ship to Freedom Road (Hardcover)
by Julius Lester (Author), Rod Brown (Author) "They took the sick and the dead and dropped them into the sea like empty wine barrels..." (more)
Slavery is a difficult concept to address with children, especially because many adults would prefer to forget that period of American history. In From Slave Ship to Freedom Road, award-winning author Julius Lester takes older children (and adults) on an intense, personal journey through the slave experience. As he gently explains the factual horrors of slave-ship conditions, auction blocks, plantation life, and the risks associated with escape, Lester consistently prods young readers with probing questions: "How would I feel if that happened to me?" "Would you risk going to jail to help someone you didn't know?" "You are free, but are you?" Lester also asks us to imagine the voices and feelings of the African Americans in the illustrations--another brilliant call for active participation.
Rod Brown's paintings are achingly vivid, so much so that a few may be too powerful for younger children. Certain depictions are difficult even for adults to bear: a lynched man with the bloody blows of a whip marking his back; slaves stacked seven-high in the hold of a ship, packed onto shelves with less room than the drawers of a morgue; and black bodies bobbing in the ocean. These are horrible images, but nonetheless historically accurate and important to remember. Brown took seven years to create these startling images, and his careful attention is reflected in the paintings' power and emotion. Children may be initially startled by From Slave Ship to Freedom Road, but they will also be engaged and enlightened. (Ages 10 to 13

Sweet Clara And The Freedom Quilt

I have many books with audio tapes as a result of more than 25 years of elementary classroom service. I decided to digitize some so as to make "ebook read alongs for ."
It's pretty time consuming and I didn't want to post one in its entirety so as to violate copy write laws. I thought I's start with this one for this site. However, in doing online research to provide additional resources I discovered that there's quite a controversy surrounding this book and the whole concept of freedom quilts.
Here's one source

From Meme to Monument: How the Underground Railroad Quilt Code Ended up on a Statue of Frederick Douglass by Leigh Fellner
Noted quilter, lecturer, writer and researcher Leigh Fellner presents an overview of a controversy which has evolved in the past eight years involving assertions that coded quilts were used to help escaping African-American slaves prior to the Civil War. For those not familiar with the myth or who want to know more, here are the facts ... and you can decide.
Ask anyone you know about quilts in American history, and odds are you will hear that in the first half of the 19th century, encoded quilts were used to help African-Americans escape north from slavery to freedom. You might be told no concrete evidence of an Underground Railroad Quilt Code has ever been found. But you are unlikely to hear that all the evidence argues against even the theory such a system either did exist, or needed to. The Quilt Code includes patterns known to have originated in the 20th century. It contains messages that either have nothing to do with escaping, tells fugitives to do things that would put them in danger, or are so obvious as to be insulting. Most fugitives headed south, not north; most traveled alone; few planned their escapes; and even fewer were assisted by the Underground Railroad. And neither quilts nor the circuitous route the Code describes appear in any first-person fugitive or Underground Railroad account, or indeed anywhere at all until the late 20th century.
The Code is so ahistorical that for years after the 1999 publication of Hidden in Plain View, much of the academic community dismissed it as harmless nonsense to which a scholarly response would only lend a sort of legitimacy. In the quilt world, some worried that doubting the story's veracity or the authors' scholarship would distress its proponents, who were often described as pleasant and well-meaning. One white quilter likely spoke for many when, mistakenly presuming both a widespread embrace of the Code by blacks and a dearth of recorded African-American history, she wrote me that "maybe they just need something to cling to". (In fact, most of those promoting the Code - and profiting from it - are white; Quilt Code Museum owner Teresa Kemp has complained that few of her visitors are African-American.)
Virtually uncontested, within a year of HIPV's publication the Quilt Code had become a common feature in teaching guides for Black History Month. In 2005, Ohio school board members commissioned a giant Code mural for their new high school. In 2007, the City of New York announced that over the objections of historians (including Douglass biographer David Blight, director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition) the Quit Code would be featured on a $15M, taxpayer-funded Central Park monument to abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. The project historian had simply assumed the Code was documented fact. (The design is under review; revision of the monument would require a complete overhaul.)
It is impossible to understand how the Code was so quickly transformed from meme into monument without knowing its historic context. It is often referred to as "old," but in five years of research, the earliest mention I have found of quilts-as-signals is in Hearts and Hands: , a feminist video about women and quilts: "They say quilts were hung on the clotheslines to signal a house was safe for runaway slaves." Neither the companion book nor the filmmakers' original notes mentions this. In 1989, folklorist Gladys-Marie Fry elaborated, adding color: "Quilts were used to send messages. On the Underground Railroad, those with the color black were hung on the line to indicate a place of refuge (safe house)..." Two years later, warning that many stories about quilts are the product of "overactive imaginations," quilt historian Cuesta Benberry related: "A story, as yet undocumented, tells of quilts in the "Jacob's Ladder" pattern (renamed "Underground Railroad") hung outside houses as a signal to passengers on the Underground Railroad that the homes were safe havens for the fearful travelers." Neither Fry nor Benberry gives a source, and quilt historian Barbara Brackman says no antebellum examples of the Underground Railroad pattern are known to exist.
As interest in African-American quilts surged in the late 20th century, Jonathan Holstein (who in 1971 curated the first museum exhibition of quilts) observed that a mixture of fact, myth and speculation was "function[ing] as a dangerous substitute for missing history," and had "led to some recent fiascos of scholarship." Two years later, using the very methodology Benberry had decried as "myopic," yet another folklorist - Maude Wahlman - claimed to find specific African "signs and symbols" that African-Americans had unwittingly stitched into their quilts. Wahlman (who claims, contrary to evidence, that Euro-American quilts are historically "pastel") gets her ideas about African textiles from modern examples that would have been unrecognizable to the Africans forcibly brought to America: one type was nonexistent before the 20th century; another is unique to a region whose people were never enslaved. Likewise, 90% of Wahlman's quilts date to after 1980; census records confirm quilt historian Julie Silber's hunch that the maker of one of the few older examples was white. Wahlman suggests quilts may have been used as escape signals, but gives no details. HIPV author Jacqueline Tobin would later write that without Signs & Symbols, her own book "could not have been written."
Among the many children's books linking quilts and the Underground Railroad is 1993's Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt, in which the title character escapes slavery using a quilt that is literally a map. Its author, Deborah Hopkinson, says she was inspired by a National Public Radio interview with art quilter Elizabeth Scott. But NPR says the quilter was never even interviewed for that report, and I have found no record that Scott has ever mentioned quilts being used in connection with escape.

The Emancipation Proclamation

There's hardly any Lincoln content on youtube. Here's a cartoon strip that mentions Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. It's part of the great collection from Bentley Boyd that was originally done for the . The online archives are here. The book collections are well worth the price. I've gotten several. Here's the link to amazon. I used Joan Baez as the soundtrack. Remember her! The last slide is the signature of Lincoln on the proclamation.

Harriet Tubman, Using A Powerpoint Template

Originally 3/5/07 from pseudo-intellectualism
This is an example of how I used a powerpoint template to make it easier for kids to concentrate on the content rather than on wacky ppoint procedures. I had set up the ppoint layout and had inserted the music and timing. For the titles I used the lyrics of the song. The students then had to insert the appropriate text. The text came from the themes that were elicited as we watched the movie together. I used inspiration for that (a sample of one for Eleanor Roosevelt above). The students also inserted whatever picture they wanted. For ease and control (and not have to be internet based) they copied and pasted images from the quicktime converted version of the movie that I had made. Here I converted the ppoint to a slide show so as to make use of youtube.(forget about trying to get ppoint to convert to a movie itself!) This ppoint was done a few years ago by Cree Mitchell, a really great kid. Depending on your connection and traffic on youtube's server the timing for the movie is inconsistent but I think onercan get the general idea

Harriet Tubman (Walter Robinson) sung by Holly Near

One night I dreamed I was in slavery, 'bout 1850 was the time
Sorrow was the only sign, there's nothing about to ease my mind
out of the night appeared a lady leading a distant pilgrim band
First mate, she cried point her hand, make room aboard for this young woman
Come on up, I've got a lifeline
Come on up to this train of mine
Come on up, I've got a lifeline
Come on up to this train of mine
They said her name was Harriet Tubman
And she drove for the Underground Railroad
Hundreds of miles, we traveled onward gathering slaves from town to town
Seeking all the lost and found and setting those free that once were bound
Somehow my heart was growing weaker, I fell by the wayside sinking sand
Firmly did this lady stand, she lifted me up and took my hand