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

(gentle music) (playful music) - 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 is 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 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.

(somber music) - 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 first the explorers and then the settlers 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, maybe 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 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.

(gentle 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 the slavery could no longer be practiced in the state.

It just said, you know, you would not be enslaved for life 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.

(gentle 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.

(gentle music) - In Ashford, Connecticut, which is where I grew up, was an all white town except for us.

And as a child, I used to hate history.

The only real connection I had was skin color to something beyond, you know what I knew, Africa.

And I remember studying every year it seemed like the Civil War would come up and there would be pictures of little picaninnies outside of a little house.

And that was me.

That was the representation of me to my classmates.

I was the living slave.

You know, that discomfort, that feeling, of, you know, representing something that I didn't feel that was representative of me, but that's what was seen.

I was always, you know, kind of disturbed by the fact that my connection to slavery, and that's all I was, like, the only contribution somehow I made to this country was free labor.

I did not have a context for understanding the richness of my history or the fact that I had relatives that fought in the Revolutionary War, not to mention the Civil War and every other, just about every other war we've had.

But I didn't have that context.

(melancholic music) I was home from door knocking one day and sitting on the back porch, and my husband came out with this odd look on his face and he said, "There's a man on the phone that knows a bit too much about you, and I want you to talk to him."

And so I was like, "What?"

So I took the phone and it turned out to be a middle school teacher from Guilford who was so excited.

And, you know, he was as excited as I was and he was giving me all of this information about people that I had no knowledge of my history in Guilford.

And it turned out that this was Dennis Culliton who at the time was Adams Middle School teacher.

And he had been researching this for some time.

So I was like the living end to some years of research that he had been doing.

He had originally learned of, I believe it was either Montros or Pompeii in a document he read about old Guilford, there was some reference.

I believe it was Harriet Beecher Stowe's father's biography where he referenced a fiddler or you know, an enslaved person.

And Dennis hadn't been aware that there was slavery right here in Guilford.

And so he began researching that and he worked his way as researchers do through all of the documentation, until he finally came up with the obituary of a Tuskegee airman who was in this line who died in 2002.

That turned out to be my father, Lieutenant Colonel Bertram Wilson.

He found his obituary and he was excited enough about that, but he hadn't expected to find a living heir or living relative.

Montros and Phillis were two enslaved teenagers who were brought to Guilford by David Naughty in 1727.

They came through Boston, they were imported, which I thought was an odd word, but it turned out that that simply meant he avoided paying taxes because they came in through Boston and he was bringing them to Guilford.

He purchased two teenagers who didn't know each other.

In fact, Montros, we think, had come more recently from Africa than Phillis.

We believe that Phillis, who already had a Christian name was in the Caribbean before coming to Boston, both brought to Mr. Naughty who picked them up and took them back to Guilford.

He and his wife Ruth, lived not too far from here, a block or so from here, I think where the bank is now in a house.

They brought these two teenagers back.

Three years later, they were married and began to have children all living in that house.

When the children reached the age of 20, they were generally indentured out to neighbors.

- Well, it's one thing, it's not abstract, these are our ancestors, but the fact that they were property, the fact that they lacked agency, the fact that they were traded.

- Yeah.

Like furniture.

- And loaned out.

And loaned out like furniture or cars.

But in a place in America, in Connecticut, where in the North where very few people associate, you know, when you say the word "slavery," you automatically think the South.

You don't necessarily think of, you know, New York and Wall Street, which I think at the time, was one of the, I think Wall Street was actually the biggest slave market.

- It was.

- You know.

- How it started off.

- And so when it comes to Connecticut, were you at all surprised about?

- Oh, very much so.

I mean, I did not grow up, in fact, one of the most impressive things for me is the fact that I could grow up here in an educated community and all of, you know, the schools that you would expect that you learn whatever you needed to learn.

And I learned nothing of myself.

I learned nothing about, you know, enslavement in the Northeast.

I certainly had no idea that I had 11 generations or 10 generations of ancestors going back to 1727.

I guess it wouldn't be 10, but lose track with these generation levels.

But that Phillis and Montros came here in 1727, long before we had, you know, a constitution or effectively, you know, there was an America.

How could I be here and not know this?

I mean, I knew something of relatives in Guilford, but not anything as concretely as I do now until Dennis Culliton happened into my life.

(gentle music) Naughty died only about 10 years after bringing this couple or what wasn't a couple but the two teenagers to his home.

He left a will when he died.

And in that will, he freed Montros and Phillis and their children and all those afterwards.

That was the intent.

They were to be freed, however, after Mrs. Naughty died.

And she lived for 30 more years.

So they were promised freedom, but they didn't all obtain it.

Hyland House is where my aunt, Candace lived for about 20 years.

She was indentured to the Parmelee family.

Candace as a 20 or 22-year-old was sort of running the house because the Parmelees were very old at that point.

And she lived here for nearly 20 years.

And the fact that there's mention of her now, but for so many years, no one knew.

That wasn't a part of the Hyland House story, but it really is a huge part of it.

Candace was both enslaved and indentured because by Mr. Naughty's will, she would've been freed but Mrs. Naughty decided to continue the indenture and for 12 pounds a year, each of the children was rented out in effect.

So she was rented, if you will, to the Parmelees.

They were able to pass her on to their children.

And so she was here for 20 years.

She is a part of this house.

And when I walk around here, I feel her, I connect to her.

(somber music) What suffered was my self-esteem.

What suffered was my ability to understand who I was as an American and to claim that.

I mean, I did it in ways, but how much stronger would I have been had I known this as a child?

Had I not had to hide my face in shame during stories of the Civil War?

As though my life began there when in fact, it was, you know, so many generations before.

Everything in school had always taught me that somehow, I was like here, by default, I mean somehow Black people were Americans, "but" You know, we were brought here and left here.

And you know, there was that sort of a feeling.

I never had the sense that not only were we here before there was an America, but that many of us fought for America's freedom before we, you know, had our own, - My pride in my family came from my grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel Bertram W. Wilson or granddaddy as I called him.

For me, knowing that that history and that pride, it goes so much further than just World War II or anything else, particularly as an African American.

You read about history, you read about American history, and you don't necessarily feel as connected because there's always gonna be this asterisk.

There's always gonna be this notion that because you were owned, because you were "imported", that your roots aren't really planted in this soil here, and that you're not really from any of this.

And so when you're able to look back at your lineage and understand that, you think differently about patriotism and what it means to actually be a part of the fabric of this country.

Now that we understand who it is we are and what do we do with this, and what's the importance of knowing who you are, it shouldn't be just shame and anger.

It also should be a sense of ownership that this is my country as well - And triumph.

Because to think of where, you know, people have come, where we are, compared to where we were forced to begin.

There's a lot of triumph in that story.

And when you don't tell the story of enslavement, you miss that triumph.

You miss that growth.

And I certainly don't mean to take the line that somehow there was some value in slavery.

That's not what I'm saying.

- None.

- But what I am saying is that you have a different sense of yourself when you understand how far back your history goes.

You have a different sense of ownership of this country.

You have a different sense of responsibility for this country and for telling the story and for helping people understand that this, America belongs to all of us.

We all own this country.

We all built it.

(lively music) - I think it's always important to know the full story.

Whenever we trace back in history, we find remnants of the past that we have to piece ideas together.

(lively orchestra music) But as we recover and discover more music, we realize that it's actually more to that story.

(lively orchestra music) - It's so cool to be able to play, like, history and what could be known as the first music ever written by a Black composer who was in Connecticut.

We didn't always have all these white composers.

And there's also so many composers of color who also made like so many great works that were like not looked at and overshadowed 'cause of the situation at the time.

(lively orchestra music) - People need to know that we were here.

People need to know what our contributions to the history of this nation were.

I think that when people imagine the past, they often imagine a past where we weren't there or we were just sort of operating in the background and doing the drudgery work.

But I think that we were much more in the foreground and made many contributions that people have yet to know.

(lively orchestra music) - It also informs the younger generations of specifically Black string players that this legacy existed way before we even imagined.

It's important for that fact, I think as a testimony of this high art thing we call violin actually being in Black hands back then already writing music.

(gentle orchestra music) I am not alone, somebody else was in love with the violin because Sawney Freeman, he could have picked any other instrument, but he picked the violin.

So it's important to know that people even then followed their passion when it was clearly not the norm.

(gentle orchestra music) - The whole economy of this area was based on trade with the West Indies.

So while there might only have been a handful of slaves in what's now known as Saybrook, say, a dozen in 1800, ultimately, almost all the lifeblood and the cash to run this community came from slave labor.

You know, knowing that there was slavery here, trying to communicate that to people in the broader community.

We've been partnering with the Witness Stones project to make formerly enslaved people in our community visible and to honor their lives.

- And what work have you done on this project?

- I've researched a couple of people.

One person who was named Violet, who is a member of this church, and she was enslaved by another member of this church named Captain Noah Scoville.

And then we've also investigated other people of color in the town, including a person named Sawney Freeman, who was a musician and a composer.

Sawney was born into Samuel Selden's house.

Samuel Selden was a major landowner in Lyme on the other side of the river.

And he was a colonel in the Revolutionary War.

He was imprisoned in New York in 1776 and he died there.

And his estate inventory includes the name of two Black children, Sawn and Chloe.

That was in 1777.

So that's the earliest reference that we have for who we think is Sawney Freeman.

Sawney was later emancipated by Colonel Selden's son, who was also Samuel.

And that was in 1793.

He moved to East Haddam where he had a family with a person named Clarissa Mason, who was born a free Black person in that town.

What we also know about Sawney is that he was a musician.

There was an ad in the Connecticut Journal in New Haven that advertised something called the Musician's Pocket Companion, written by Sawney Freeman, a free man of color from Connecticut.

Sawney continued to live in the town through the late 1820s.

And he died, I believe in 1828 and is buried just about a mile from here.

- Talk about the manuscript music that we have of Sawney.

- It's in the Trinity College Library, and it's in a copy book that belonged to a person named Gurdon Trumbull who is from Stonington.

- The two things that we're looking at here is one, a copy book, a manuscript copy book, dating from the early 1800, 1817, to be precise on which Gurdon Trumbull has written his name and where he lived at the time, Stonington, Connecticut.

The paper, as you can see, is quite fragile-looking.

It's browned quite a bit, so it clearly has seen some wear.

You know, as you can see, it is all done by hand in a very clear, I think, dark ink.

And you have tunes, the names of tunes up at the top, and then the composer of them where they're identified to the side.

- How many tunes?

- A total of 74 tunes, I believe in total that Trumbull compiled.

So they're tunes by a number of different people.

13 of them seem to be identified as by Sawney Freeman.

So that's about almost 20% of the total is by, well, this free Black early composer.

(lively orchestra music) I had not been aware that it contained music by a free Black man.

That was utterly new to me.

Geoff told me, there are these tunes in here by this man, Sawney Freeman, who lived in the area.

And I was very excited.

I thought, you know, this is a really kind of special thing.

Two female musicologists, Kate Keller and Carolyn Rabson back in 1977, received funding from the NEH to compile an Index of American Music.

So in their index, they list Sawney Freeman as the composer of these 13 compositions that are in here.

I don't know if they knew that he was a free Black man.

I mean, certainly his last name gives some clue that it might have been someone who had been formerly enslaved and was then freed.

But all of us, you know, kind of are indebted to them for compiling this index of American popular music that researchers continue to use to this day.

- And it was through that index that Geoff found- - Found Sawney Freedman.

- Realized that the music was actually here.

- Exactly, exactly, yeah.

- The first time I saw the copy of the manuscript and it looked just like Renaissance music.

When you have the music reading in just one line, which invites to use your own imagination and fill it up because that's what they would've done back then, just like in the Renaissance time.

Being able to touch with my own hands, this, you know, manuscript, it's exactly, not that we need proof, but it's very redeeming.

The fact that it exists and that we're able to bring it to light.

- When we do even get glimpses of the voices of enslaved people, they're almost always filtered through white people.

You know, we are really privileged to hear his voice across over 200 years after all those years of silence.

(lively violin music) (both laughing) (gentle music) - I didn't have anyone in my family to pass down the history of quilt making, but I have family members that passed down photographs in our history.

And so with Venture Smith's side of the family, which is on my paternal grandfather's side, I always wanted to make sure that the history would be passed down to my daughter and grandson too.

And so quilt making has been a positive reinforcement of telling the story.

Sometimes, that people don't want to hear.

The images that are in the cloth make it easier to start conversations or have continuous conversations about family history and slavery in the United States and many other causes that affected pretty much Black people living in the United States since slavery.

(gentle music) Venture Smith was a person that was kidnapped when he was a young child from the coast of Africa in the early 1700s.

And he was supposedly, according to his narrative, the son of a prince of the Dukandarra tribe in Guinea, West Africa specifically.

Venture's narrative recounts the story of his life living in Africa, going through the doors of no return, traveling across the Atlantic Ocean, stopping in Barbados and eventually winding up in Rhode Island first and dropped off with his new enslaver.

And then eventually he was purchased and brought to Connecticut.

Last person that he was enslaved by, Captain Oliver Smith, allowed him to purchase his freedom.

And from there, he managed to purchase the freedom of his children and other slaves actually asked him to purchase their freedom.

And so he purchased other slaves in Connecticut.

He was determined to live his life as a free man and at all costs.

And he actually stood his ground, which is a phrase that a lot of people use now, and they're in fear, when a Black person says, "I'm gonna stand my ground or stand for who I am."

That feels like a threat to a lot of people.

And Venture Smith, to me, did not feel - he already was enslaved, so it was like, "What's the worst that can happen to me?"

(gentle music) So this is a piece that I dedicated to Venture Smith, and this is the first 26 acres that was known that he had purchased in Stonington, Connecticut.

And the rock tied down with hemp is actually symbolic of Venture's rock that was originally used as the marker for Venture's property line.

But you can see that this is also a map quilt because it's symbolic of the actual shape of Venture's land.

And then there's a footpath underneath the rock.

And that's my way of saying I'm following in his footsteps.

I think my greatest like 'aha moment' was going to Venture's land during my childhood.

As a child, my family would go fishing and boating at Barn Island Wildlife Sanctuary.

Actually, my grandfather and uncle would put the boats in the water on that very piece of land.

We would go to Fisher's Island and have picnics until one year, we were told we were no longer welcome on Fisher's Island.

And this was in the '60s, So things have changed.

I always say that Venture is like the beacon of hope for anyone else looking for their family history.

There are so many people that are descendant of slaves in the United States that don't have the history to go back to.

And so when I talk about Venture and all that he's done, I'm also like giving hope for other people.

I just look at Venture as his story is an amazing story for other people to learn from and to start digging and finding their own family history.

(gentle music) - Good afternoon, this beautiful fall day and the rain came yesterday so we don't have to worry about it.

Welcome to the 27th Annual Venture Smith Day, a Connecticut Freedom Trail celebration.

- The first time I came and the grave had been exhumed and was just there, cleaned up the headstone.

I put my hand on the headstone and I fell to my knees and cried uncontrollably.

I had never felt anything like that before.

(people chattering) Our family is one of the original native African American families in Connecticut.

And just, I wanna continue that.

I want our family to embrace that history.

I want our young family members to embrace that history and continue to keep alive the memory of Venture Smith.

- My dad used to tell stories, but I didn't believe him.

Like the way he talked about Venture was almost like he was a mythical figure.

And so I had been hearing about him lifting rocks and this big strong guy, like I didn't really think that he was real.

So when I was a child, and then as we got older, we started coming here.

Like we've been coming here for, I'm gonna say maybe 20 years.

I faithfully have come.

(gentle music) We actually went to Africa, we went to Ghana where Venture was captured and enslaved and then brought to Newport.

So it was very emotional because, you know, I was there with my family, my family members to be able to...

I had some of my dad's ashes and at one point when we were at the fort, we walked through the door of no return, excuse me.

(sniffs) And I was able to bring my father's ashes back to Africa.

So it was very moving, needless to say.

It was a wonderful experience.

I sometimes, I guess right now, it's hard for me to put it into words, but it really helped me to understand who I was and who I am and where I came from.

When I can talk to people about where I actually have come from, where I come from, I have a lot of friends and coworkers that are African American and a lot of them have never done their DNA, have no interest in you know, finding out where they come from.

And when I talk to people about where I come from, they're amazed.

And so it's actually sparked in some of my friends, the desire to kinda do some research on their own to see, you know, maybe if they can find where they come from, because we come from somewhere.

And when you have that, when you actually can say, "This is where I am from," it changes you inside.

It does something deep, deep, deep inside that makes you, I feel I belong.

I feel like I matter that, you know, I came from somewhere.

- Watch your step.

This is an area which was enclosed at one point, we believe, and it was called the Hidden Room.

There was some conjecture that enslaved people slept here, but we also know that these steps are here, which are known as the Stepney Stairs.

Stepney was one of the people enslaved in this house.

And for generations, the Grave family called them the Stepney stairs after Stepney.

He was a young man, probably a boy when he first appears in the account book.

So there's a marker for him here as well.

He was the first person who was researched in this house.

And this slides, which is a new slider obviously, but here, we can see the Stepney stairs and you can certainly see these like very steep and rickety stairs, which, you know, when the house was first built, it was only, you know, this one over one.

Now there's an official attic.

And that happened during, probably during Stepney's youth.

So he would've used these stairs.

And we do have, in the 1726 inventory of John Grave II, we see listings for Negro man's bedding and Negro woman's bedding.

We see the woman's name in the will when she's left to his widow, but we do not see the man's name.

So we assume if Tome was the man, we assume he was gone by then.

It's fascinating so much we'll never know, but certainly questions we keep asking.

- 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.

By 1700, there were around 30,000 enslaved people in the colonies, 500 of them living in Connecticut.

Unfortunately, these numbers grew exponentially throughout the 18th century until slavery was outed in Connecticut.

Tome was in enslaved person in Connecticut in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

He was enslaved by the Graves, a prominent family in East Guilford, modern day Madison, who owned, worked and rented Tome out.

At the time, the Grave family was extremely wealthy and they lived in this house for about five generations through the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

(light music) - 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 and work with communities, historical societies, churches, to help tell the story.

A friend of mine, he went to Germany, did some work with folks who were doing restorative and reparation work in Germany, 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 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 wanna operate.

You bring an idea to a middle school teacher, they're gonna want to 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."

(light music) There's stories 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 was a slave owner in New Haven, and Daniel Green wanted to go on this expedition.

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

After about a year, he was like, "I can't do this anymore."

So we saw this 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 really not only allowed me to teach that to my students, but allowed me to confront that misunderstanding I had within my own education.

- Our school is one of the few schools that get to do things like this.

I think that all schools should have this opportunity and be able to do the same thing.

(gentle music) - When I was growing up, I'd heard stories of exceptionalists from an African American perspective and there was like a handful of them.

Like I could tell you the Martin Luther Kings there's the Rosa Parks, the Harriet Tubmans, like there was a couple, a few here and there, but I considered those the one in the millions.

Like 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 start 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.

- We know that Tome was here, that he walked this land as a living, breathing person.

That he couldn't be a slave because slavery is a condition, not an identity.

It illustrates how one is being viewed, but not who they are beyond that gaze.

These documents do not have a monopoly on truth, do not have a monopoly on reality, right?

And really important for younger folks, especially for children who were learning about slavery and the legacy and after lives of slavery, to resist this idea that people were property, right?

People were people who were treated as property, right?

But the project of dehumanization was never one that was actually completed because there were so many ways in which enslaved Africans, enslaved Black people in this country, insisted upon and asserted their humanity, right?

So as we're talking about this and learning about this, making sure that we don't lose sight of that, that we don't concede reality to the colonial archive to the slave holders.

- There's so many things that we don't know about him.

We only know the facts.

We don't know like who he was as a person and what he enjoyed doing and stuff like that.

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 it 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.

So many people, they shy away from it 'cause they don't want to admit that it actually happened.

But this stuff did happen.

It was awful.

It did happen.

It was real.

- I knew that there was slavery here and I knew that it wasn't just in the South.

But I feel like 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.

- I love the fact that the kids are taught to look beyond what is said in black and white.

These records that enslavers created and had no interest in or need to do anything more than reflect the value of their property.

And so this project asks them to look beyond that.

Bringing imagination and creativity to it makes it so much more real.

- I think something that I've noticed in working with predominantly white classrooms, predominantly white students, that that the guilt is never the resting place for their critical engagement.

And what it prompts is this line of questioning, right?

Well, why did people believe this?

Why was this acceptable?

There's this kind of incredulousness at the thought that this is how the world functioned.

And with that, an intention to shift that today.

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

The South needs to fix it.

What happens if it was here?

And racism's here and segregation's here?

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

(light music)