Remembering Enslaved People and the Meaning of History

Jin Cole (c.1723-1808)

Cato (c. 1737-1825, son of Jin Cole)

Titus (1751)

Caesar (baptized 1741)

Adam (baptized 1735)

Peter (baptized 1735)

Unknown Name of a Girl (1757)

Phillis (age 9, 1741)

Humphrey (1742)

Caesar (baptized 1741)

Pompey (1736, husband of Rebecca)

Rebecca (wife of Pompey)

Ishmael (1749)

Caesar (1750)

Mesheck (baptized, 1747)

Unknown Name of a Woman (1749)

Lucy Terry Prince (1729-1821)

Caesar (baptized 1734)

Titus (baptized 1762)

 

Recently, Historic Deerfield held an event dedicating memorials to enslaved people who lived in Deerfield, MA during the eighteenth century. In partnership with the Witness Stones Project, an organization based in Connecticut that “works to restore the history and honor the humanity of the enslaved individuals who helped build our communities,” officials of the historical organization led a program marking the significance of the event, the initiative to publicly recognize the history of slavery at Deerfield, and their efforts to make that history more widely known. Central to the latter effort was the unveiling of brass plaques identifying enslaved people at locations on Old Main Street where they once lived.*

Racial chattel slavery was pervasive in Deerfield as it was across every North American colony from their founding, where initially English colonists, following the Spanish and Portuguese, enslaved Indigenous people and later Africans from the Caribbean and the African continent. To many who study enslavement and the African Diaspora, the history of slavery at Deerfield comes as no revelation. In fact this history has been documented in historical works dating back to at least the late nineteenth century.** But to many who are unaware, the efforts of Historic Deerfield and the Witness Stones Project are indeed important in making the history of slavery in New England more widely known at the local level and to broader audiences.

Link to PDF: Event Program and Witness Stones Memorials on Historic Deerfield Properties (1)

The memorialization of enslaved people at Deerfield raises a number of questions. One is, the mode of commemoration – 4 x 4 plaques in the ground. The plaques are conspicuously smaller and less visible than other historical markers of homes of white families across the village. One wonders how the seasonal changes will impact the memorials and how they will be maintained. The more significant question about the plaques are who was, or was not, consulted in conceptualizing them? Were people of African descent who practice traditional cultural practices of memorialization and remembrance of ancestors, or descendant communities, involved in this process? Why is the history being told now when the evidence has been in archives at Historic Deerfield for centuries and has been written about at least since the late nineteenth century? And significantly, how will this history impact how Historic Deerfield operates as an organization and how will it impact the community?***

Memorials to Peter and Adam who were enslaved at Deerfield.

 

Memorial plaques in context.

The event and memorials come at a time of renewed and contentious interest in the history of slavery and African American history in recent years. It raises a question about how the history of slavery in this country is remembered and its centrality to understanding the modern world. While institutions, cities, and organizations are acknowledging their historical ties to enslavement and responding in various ways, variations of the questions outlined above are relevant: why now, who is involved, and importantly to what end? What is the purpose of this work? It is now fashionable, for example, for universities to conduct historical research into their pasts and acknowledge the myriad connections they had to slavery. Some projects rightly include Indigenous dispossession, settler colonialism, and other forms of human exploitation to show how enslavement was intertwined with those processes. The most thorough projects in this ongoing work will show the ways in which colleges and universities have served as the intellectual arm of white supremacy and capitalism on a global scale, a history that reaches well into the twenty-first century. While such work is important and necessary, what universities do with that history is just as important. Simply publishing a report, press releases, and incorporating the history into the college’s narrative of diversity to boost its public image are insufficient. More insidiously, a question to be raised is whether leaders of institutions and organizations use these histories to laud their honesty and essentially profit from them, financially or otherwise. Such choices would align well with the neoliberal university. Indirectly, such solutions would further the exploitation of enslaved people. Using the history of enslaved people to the benefit of institutions that historically were complicit in and promoted their exploitation would further exploit enslaved people. Racial slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and racist ideas provided the social, political, and economic foundation of the U.S. and the modern world – and its universities. While changing over time, racist thought and ideology that underpinned slavery is pervasive today. The necessary remedy for universities is not to make existing hierarchies and institutions more diverse and inclusive but rather nothing short of radical transformation. While many institutions will not go to this necessary extent, pushing them to do so matters. As colleges address their pasts in the present, will they continue to replicate the logics of power, hierarchy, exploitation, and exclusivity that have produced the problems facing society and the world today? What does an institution implicated on multiple levels in centuries of human and environmental exploitation for the benefit of the few do in the present and future? The epistemic order that governs universities today is not suited to producing the solutions necessary to foster social transformation and human flourishing.

One area of consideration regarding institutional and university racial history is that such work should not simply absorb the history of enslaved people into existing narratives to tell more inclusive histories but instead should ask how was it that the university thrived on and enabled enslavement and Indigenous dispossession in the first place? How do those paradigms impact today? Does the university continue to be embedded in markets, economic systems, and intellectual traditions that exploit human life and the environment today? In other words, the appropriation of the history of slavery to serve liberal ends does not address the root of the problems millions of people living in the wake of enslavement face. It will not improve the dire situation of the human condition. A fundamental reimaging of higher learning is in order, one that centers people over profits, and indeed has been thought about and theorized by alternative intellectual traditions that have stood outside of academia. It is in those traditions that center collective learning and study, that can help foster a critical consciousness and lead to other ways of being and other ways of relation, that can help create a different world. Specific traditions in Black history and culture can help guide such learning and study. How we commemorate enslaved people and the kinds of histories we tell and remember matter. And attempts to do justice to African people who were enslaved at Deerfield, and indeed to all those who were enslaved, different ways of knowing, being, and relation are required to realize the kind of liberation they imagined and that has yet to be fulfilled.

 

* “Witness Stone Dedication at Historic Deerfield,” October 12, 2022.

**George Sheldon, History of Deerfield, Massachusetts, vol. 1 (Deerfield, MA 1895), vii, 298, 306, 308, 309, 310, 466, 548.

***Memorials to enslaved people have taken other forms such as that of the Whitney Plantation which was written about in another blog post on this website: Israel Trask and the 1811 German Coast Uprising – A Racial History of Amherst College.