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

(pensive music) - When I was growing up, I heard stories of exceptionalists from an African American perspective.

And there was like a handful of like I could tell you 'em, the Martin Luther Kings, the Rosa Parks, the Harriet Tubmans, like there was a couple, a few here and there, but I didn't...

I considered those, the one in a millions.

I didn't get the million side of the story.

And when I started learning about my own ancestors, like my own great, great-grandfather, his name was Ned Mills, he was enslaved in Texas, he was freed on Juneteenth.

When I started learning about his life and his story, I realized he was the common story.

I didn't know a lot about the common story.

And once I learned about the common story, and within my own family, I could also align it to who my grandfather was, who I knew, and he knew his grandfather, and I could align his struggles to how that came about.

And I could also paint the picture to how my father raised me and like the impacts of all of this that kind of resonated through generations.

So when I analyze this information, I tend to present the information using my own context.

And I started realizing that most of the stories I read are presented from a context of a white American or a non-African American person who wrote all of this historical documentation.

It's not really from a perspective like my own, who has this impacted experience of being African American in this country.

(pensive music) (Dennis sighs) (paper rustling) (faucet hissing) (pensive music) (footsteps rustling) - The Witness Stones Project is an educational project where we work with teachers and students to restore the history and honor the humanity of enslaved individuals who helped build our communities.

And we do it through research, education, and civic engagement.

And we go to town to town and work with communities, historical societies, churches, to help tell the story.

historical societies, churches, to help tell the story.

(pensive music) A friend of mine, he went to Germany, did some work with folks who were doing restorative and reparation work, and came back and said, "Could we remember enslaved people the way the Germans remember Jews who were kidnapped and murdered during the Holocaust?"

And the project is called the Stolpersteine project and he showed me what a memorial looks like.

And that kind of clicked in my head that if the final thing is to put a memorial in the ground, what do we have to do beforehand And my joke is, if you bring a sore knee to a surgeon, he's gonna want to operate or she's gonna want to operate.

You bring an idea to a middle school teacher, they're gonna wanna make an educational unit.

So probably within two weeks, the information fell into place in my head to say, "Now I know how I can bring this information into my eighth grade classroom."

(pensive music) I'll just say there's stories (chuckles) in every town we go to, you know, there's a story we found with Dick Bristol in New Haven.

I wasn't looking for that story, but it was a literally a slip of paper that fell out between two other papers at the Sterling Library at Yale, just offering Dick Bristol his freedom if he sails around the world on the Neptune.

It's like a crazy story that came from this serendipitous slip of paper when I was looking for a project in Hamden for Judge Bristol who enslaved somebody else.

-So, Dick Bristol was originally a slave in Hamden.

He got sold to a man named Daniel Green.

Daniel Green wanted to go on this expedition.

The expedition was a four year voyage to the Falkland Islands to hunt for whales.

So he went on the ship, after about a year he was like, "I can't do this anymore."

So he saw the ship, it was only about a football field away.

He didn't know how to swim, but he jumped off the ship and he tried to swim over there.

We don't know what happened after that.

The ship that he tried to get to, we think it was going to Nantucket, Massachusetts, but even at the time, Massachusetts would've been better than Connecticut.

- Having these moments with the students, having this time with the primary source documents not only allowed me to teach that to my students, but allowed me to confront that misunderstanding I had within my own education.

- I think that it's a shame that our school is one of the few schools that get to do things like this.

I think that this should be even I shouldn't say required, but I think this should be a common thing across all schools, across America and across schools everywhere.

I think that while it was awesome that our school did this I think that all schools should have this opportunity and be able to do the same thing.

- One of the comments that was so powerful to me at the end of this is when we laid the stone for Dick Bristol, our mayor came up to me and he said, "I wanna see this street lined with Witness Stones."

Like, let's tell all of these stories and let's have all of these students learn these amazing people's stories.

So we'll see where it goes from here.

but I'm really excited for the future.

- On behalf of The Country School class of 2024, welcome to this Witness Stones installation ceremony to honor the life and contributions of Tome, a man who was enslaved here at the Deacon John Grave House.

I've heard about the Witness Stone Project before, so it's kind of like this big lead up thing in eighth grade 'cause it's a very important part of it.

So I was pretty excited.

I was also kind of relieved that we were actually going to talk about this stuff like that, finally, I found somewhere that would, you know, not just be like, "Oh, it was really bad.

Okay, moving on."

By 1700, there were around 30 thousand enlsaved people in the colonies, 500 of them living in Connecticut.

Unfortunately, these numbers grew exponentially throughout the 18th century.

- [Abby] Being able to focus on one specific person makes it feel a lot more real because when you're talking about a bunch of people, obviously, it's very important to know and it's very sad.

But I feel like you really get more of a sense of it when you're focusing on one person and learning about their personal experience.

- Tome's life was a significant part of history and the Guilford Community, and it shows us what enslaved people had to go through every day.

His story deserves to be told.

(students clapping) - I was a little bit scared because learning about hard history is difficult and learning what people went through in this time and how terrible it was for Tome.

But as I started researching, I just wanted to learn more and more and more.

And it was hard to learn about him, but it was good in the end.

- He was just treated like an animal.

And by doing this, we are really just telling people that he was a person.

- This engagement, what we're doing here is not one that offers absolution or redemption or even closure, right?

That there's no atonement that can meet the scale of loss.

There's another line of questioning that emerges from the context of that brutality, and that to me, encapsulates the mighty dead, right?

That there is the fact of their death and also the richness of their life.

That, in some ways, (pensive music) I hate to say the phrase conquers death, but in some ways extends beyond the enclosures of death.

- I grew up in Massachusetts saying slavery was in the South, racism was in the South, segregation was in the South.

The South needs to fix it.

What happens if it was here, and racism is here and segregation is here?

Then maybe our kids will do a better job fixing it than we have.

(pensive music) (tense contemplative music)