- [Announcer] Funding provided by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and the Amistad Center for Art & Culture.

- I went in search of Black history.

I went in search of - Who were the first Black people who were here?

And how early were they here?

And what were their lives like, what did they do?

That led me to the story of enslavement in New England.

(gentle music) Maybe five years ago, I was walking around downtown New Haven one summer afternoon, and it occurred to me that there was very little that told me or in the built environment that showed me that it was once a colonial era city.

I made a list of the oldest houses in and around New Haven, and it turned out that the Pardee-Morris House was towards the top of the list.

And in the course of that research, there's a book about the history of East Haven that tells us that the Morris family enslaved Pink and Kaju and a group of other folks during the time of the American Revolution.

I found the inventory, his probate inventory, and on the probate inventory, it mentions things like three cows, five horses, two barns, one enslaved negro woman, and one Indian boy.

Enslaved people were considered property.

That's one of the major differences between indenture and enslavement.

Indenture, you are a servant for a period of time.

Enslavement, slavery, you are the person's property like a cow or a horse.

- Slavery in New England has been intentionally erased, the history of slavery in New England.

If you think about cemeteries and where you see some of the burials of the enslaved, they usually don't say "slave of," they say "servant of."

And so the story we tell is this is family slavery.

This person was a member of the family.

They helped to support the household.

So it comes off as very benign and not dehumanizing, when in fact, it was violent and dehumanizing.

If you look at Victorian era discussions of enslavement, it is absolutely nostalgic.

You know, you hear tales of how, yes, slavery was bad, but weren't race relations so much better during that era?

So we go from, you know, family slavery as a concept to nostalgia over slavery, to absolutely erasing it from the landscape.

But in doing that, not only are you erasing this very complex history, you're also erasing a lot of the achievements and a lot of the structure that was built by the enslaved in New England.

A lot of the wealth that was generated by the enslaved in New England, but it was very, very purposeful, the erasing of that history, because we're the North, not the South, we're not enslavers.

- You do hear in older histories of Connecticut to the extent they even mentioned slavery, that it was more benign.

You know, historians in the past, were just trying to make us feel a little better about ourselves.

And by that, I mean us white people, about our history.

Joshua Hempsted of New London, in his diary, he documents the sudden death in 1750 of Zeno, a girl age six or seven, apparently at the hands of her enslavers, she had died at two o'clock in the morning of wounds to her head and body, which he describes as a cruel whipping.

So you know, there was no way to talk about this institution in Connecticut as being more benign.

It was cruel, it was harsh, and that's it.

- When you just kind of scratch the surface of earlier colonial era history, slavery turns up very early in the first or second layer.

It's a very abridged history that we get.

All of these historical societies are founded across New England, across the State of Connecticut to uplift the history of the founding, to uplift the stories of the white people who came here first.

First supposedly and founded it, founded the colonies.

And that eclipses indigenous history, that eclipses the history of how any people of African descent came here, because that was what was most important to them, and that was also what was most important to their descendants.

- Well, let's start back at the beginning.

Let's start where most people might think about the beginning of Connecticut.

What would you imagine in your mind Connecticut looked like at that time?

And I'm gonna tell you, it's not what you think it was When in the early 1600s, the first European explorers and then settlers arrived in Connecticut, though it didn't have that name and it didn't have any boundaries.

What was here in fact was a thriving civilization of tens of thousands of people with a 10,000-year history and a dozen or so Algonquin-speaking peoples lived across the state, in communities that were organized with governance and land management and culture and all of the things that you would think are markers of a civilization.

So if we start there, I think that it's easier to understand how the founding of Connecticut and the arrival of the settlers and the first explorers and then the settlers was, resulted really in so much violence and disruption, really, is what characterizes the founding of not just Connecticut, but all of the American colonies.

The first devastating impact was disease.

This is one thing that most people do not know, but when these Europeans arrived here, they brought with them European diseases that the native peoples had no exposure to and no immunity to.

Second, they, of course, settlers brought with them this misconception that this was an empty wilderness for the taking.

And third was their belief among the settlers that the Puritan Christian religion was the way, the only way.

Fourth, they brought with them a more industrialized society that included firearms, a technology that didn't exist here, the concept of private land, money, and of course, capitalism and with its profit motive, and you know, kind of a personal profit ideology and all of which were markedly different from the local Native American lifeways.

So there was a lot of work to do.

Clearing those forests, building farms, always had to build a meeting house.

Every town was authorized by the general court or general assembly, had to have a meeting house.

And you know, building sawmills, grist mills, ships for transportation, etc.

So there was a labor shortage.

And so the colonists first relied on indentured, it's called indentured servants, but really indentured workers.

And an indentured worker would be English people who agreed to work for a limited period of time, may say seven years in exchange for room and board and sometimes, you know, and the work, in exchange for the work and then they would be freed and go on their way.

But there weren't enough indentured workers.

So meanwhile, the English and French colonies in the Caribbean, had introduced slavery of Africans to fuel the expansion of the sugar and cocoa and coffee production in the Caribbean islands in the West Indies.

And so at the end of the Pequot War in 1637, the captured Pequots, any of the captured Pequots, were enslaved as war prizes and traded in the West Indies for enslaved Africans and brought back to Connecticut.

So that's probably around the time the first Africans, enslaved Africans, end up in the colony.

(calm music) - So when I think about New England waterways and slavery, you know, you think about southern plantations and why enslaved people were brought in, and I think typically, the thinking is, people were just rounded up, put on boats and brought here.

But really, people were rounded up and put on boats because they had certain skill sets.

And so the waterways were really the area where that business took place.

The enslaved were brought in, the rum was going out to Africa and to the Caribbean.

So it truly was this triangular trade that we were absolutely a part of.

And we tend to, again, think of the south as the center of that.

But for a long time, it was Newport, Rhode Island, and it was Bristol, Rhode Island.

And so not only was New England complicit, New England was central to that slave trade.

There was a gradual emancipation act that was passed in 1784.

But all that law really did was it said that the children born to the enslaved would be free after 25 years.

Right?

So it didn't say slavery could no longer be practiced in the state.

It just said, you know, you would not be enslaved for life you know, if you were born after 1784, slavery didn't legally end in the state of Connecticut until 1848.

And while there weren't hundreds and hundreds of slaves in the state at that point, there were still six.

So it was still being practiced within the state.

- Around the time of the American Revolution, that's when slavery began to wane in the north.

Took a very long time.

It got stuck over compensation to slave owners for their economic loss.

And it never considered the lifetime of economic loss of the enslaved person.

(calm music) - I hope that the built environment will one day tell us more about the early people of African descent and the Indigenous people who were here.

How they were able to exercise agency to make decisions about their own lives, about their own families.

I think that's the difference that we can create for the future.

- My hope is that by reframing narratives, by validating and honoring Indigenous and Black perspectives, that people come to see history as complex, right?

It's not a story of hero and villains, it's a story of systems.

Slavery was a system and everyone was a part of it, right?

Whether actively or through complicity.

And I think to understand the state of the world, we have to get rid of thinking about it in terms of, you know, the history of slavery being about the bad things that White people did and Black people as victims.

It's way more complex than that.

And when you tell the story in that way, you're erasing achievements, accomplishments, joy, complexity, and you're not asking questions that need to be asked.

And so my hope is in telling the stories in this way, everyone who hears these stories feels empowered.

You're empowered to change things.

You're empowered to see the world in a different way.

And so rather than it being guilt, which is often what you hear, guilt accomplishes nothing, right?

But if you can empower through knowledge, you can really make great social change.

And so my hope is that there is no longer this disconnect between what happened then and how we live now, but we see very clearly how then is intimately connected to now.

(excited music)