sweetnpetite
Intellectual snob
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2003
- Posts
- 9,135
CINCINNATI--The light of a new morning breaks through a large window at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center here. The sun washes over a pre-Civil War slave pen that was preserved in a soybean field near Germantown, Ky., about an hour southeast of Cincinnati. The oak and poplar pen is the defining artifact of the museum, which opened last month. The two-story jail housed 32 slaves.
It existed in a shroud of darkness.
Now you can witness this slave warehouse from the street through a 25-foot tall window.
"We want the world to be able to see this," said Carl Westmoreland, senior advisor for Historic Preservation at the freedom center. Westmoreland led the team who restored the pen with a dignity it never knew.
Westmoreland, 67, is a descendent of slaves emancipated at Stone Mountain, Ga. He sat on a bench inside the pen and said, "If you're just passing by and never come in, it will make an impact. We will touch some future governor as a child. And hopefully she or he will make different public policy decisions than before. Hopefully some black gang-banger will understand that if his greatgrandparents went through something like this, then life is more precious than he has dismissively interpreted it. Americans have effectively denied this history happened -- black and white people. We've never had the public discussion. It would be like if you had a closed casket burial of Emmett Till. You would have had no public outrage."
The slave pen creates an appropriate thesis in which to experience the $110 million center. It says, "Look where we've been. Look where we are today."
And where are we going?
What the freedom center lacks in typical museum acquistions (there are only 200), it substitutes with ideas. The interactive "Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad" gallery leads visitors to the slave pen on the second floor of the museum. The bright yellow-and-green gallery is tailor made for children but is also appropriate for adults.
The term "Underground Railroad" was first used in 1830 and the railroad led more than 100,000 enslaved people to freedom. They traveled at night, often guided by the North Star. An interactive board teaches visitors about the system's secret passwords and codes, while a small house features typical hiding places along the route. Children are faced with the question: "Imagine someone is at the front door. Quick! Where would you hide?' And they can crawl under stairs or behind a false wall. [Underground Railroad homes were researched with the assistance of the National Parks Service.]
The center incorporates five different films that total 70 minutes. Chicagoan Oprah Winfrey donated $1 million to the center and narrated a portion of a film that focuses on Ripley, Ohio, a hotbed of abolitionist activity. Another film in the freedom seekers gallery deals with a young male slave who is conflicted with his quest for freedom on the Underground Railroad and separation from family. This teaches visitors that decisions are difficult and that consequences need to be weighed.
I was worn out after my two-hour walk through the freedom center. My head was filled with thought, reflection and guilt as I made the five-hour drive back to Chicago. I hadn't experienced anything this emotional since I walked through the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. I toured the museum on a Monday, when it is closed to the public. But as visitors leave the museum there is a "dialogue zone" (an enclosed conference area that can seat up to 30) where they can discuss the experience with other guests and occasionally under the leadership of Dr. Cathy McDaniels Wilson of Xavier University.
***
It takes time to process the viewing of children's shackles, a replica box that Henry Brown made where he mailed himself from slavery in Virginia to freedom in Pennsylvania, and the sterile slave pen. A tobacco farm was built on top of the pen in the early 1900s, which is why the original logs are in such good shape. The pen was protected from the elements. Westmoreland said that "99 percent" of what was found in the field is now in the freedom center. [Visitors enter the pen through a door where there used to be a fireplace.]
In March of 1998, Kentucky contractor Raymond Evers called the freedom center about the slave pen on his property. It took Westmoreland, his staff and regional and national barn experts a year and a half just to document the authenticity of it.
Westmoreland's research of the artifact opened the doors to looking at internal slave trade nationally. This is a story now told in the portion of the museum enveloping the pen. When slaves were transported from town to town, they had to walk. Visitors can learn about Route 68, which runs from Detroit to Nashville, Tenn. Isaac Franklin was America's largest slave dealer. In 1832 he built an 11,000-square-foot mansion on his 2,000-acre plantation (a k a Fairvue) in Gallatin, near Nashville. The plantation has become a private golf community called The Club at Fairvue Plantation. The 500-square-foot slave huts that housed two or more families are being converted into bed and breakfast accommodations for members only.
Originally a game trail, Route 68 became a road to freedom for fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. "Slave trade moved over a million people of African descent between 1790 and 1865 and (who were) sold another two or three times," Westmoreland said. "As we drove the American Indian off the land, we used black labor to clear it, plant it and build the houses for plantation owners. Then ordinary settlers would follow in the wake. There were thousands of buildings like this all over the country. There's one still existing at Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. -- a block or two from the White House. It's a house the National Trust of Historic Preservation owns, in which I've been a guest. They stored slaves in the basement."
Westmoreland is a trustee emeritus of the National Trust of Historic Preservation. Over the last 30 years, he has restored more than 2,000 historic properties in urban communities across America. He is a Cincinnati native. He learned valuable lessons from his parents. His father, Guy T. Carlton Westmoreland, was a certified public accountant who studied history. His mother, Bernice, grew up in the village of Wyoming, Ohio. She came from a mulatto family of domestic workers.
"When I was 4, we couldn't go to public places," Westmoreland said. "Other than state-owned parks, historic sites, county courthouses, things like that. So my Dad took my brother and I to see the history of this region. I learned the only way poor people can connect with history is to feel validated about the places from which they come. I was doing a series of shotgun houses in Jackson, Miss., when I came here."
Westmoreland began restoring antiques at age 13. He now lives in a house built in 1815 that he restored. He lives in the Mt. Auburn neighborhood of Cincinnati, a block south of President Taft's house. Westmoreland helped raise $9 million to restore the Taft House.
He commutes to the freedom center, which borders the Ohio River. When slaves on the Underground Railroad came across the river, Cincinnati was the first free port.
***
The Underground Railroad Freedom Center has been open only a few weeks. The slave pen has received the most attention. According to public relations coordinator Steve DeVillez, the center's second most popular feature is the theater where the "Brothers of the Borderland" film is showed. This 20-minute film traces the journey of a young slave who is coming from Kentucky into Ohio with the help of Underground Railroad conductors John Parker and John Rankin. [The Rankin House State Memorial is an hour east of Cincinnati on Route 52 in Ripley, Ohio. The Rankin House sheltered more than 2,000 runaway slaves.; (937) 392-1627. The museum named its library and family search center in honor of John Parker.]
Lights are dimmed in the ambient theater and fog rolls in off a replica waterfront. A gentle breeze crosses the theater. Fiberoptic lighting creates fireflies and stars in the sky. The mood doesn't set out to replicate history per se, but instead establishes the adrenalin that would surround such a journey. Down the way from the theater, an interactive kiosk pays tribute to "Freedom Heroes" who include Muhammad Ali, Bob Marley, Jackie Robinson and Sept. 11 "Let's Roll" airline passenger Todd Beamer. Next year a rotating display space will open featuring collaborative exhibits from Native Americans, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., or other pockets of freedom.
Most of the center's traditional museum artifacts are found in a section that moves from trans-Atlantic slave trade to reconstruction in 1776. Do not rush through this area. There are pewter basins, shackles and strings of beads from the wreck of the English slave ship Henrietta Marie that sank near Key West, Fla., in 1700 [from the collection of the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society in Key West.] Take time to look at the rare Auguste-Francois Biard anti-slavery painting done in 1840. The oil painting depicts a scene on the African coast where slaves are being bought and sold. Biard used foreboding tones and moods in a period style of romanticism. Painters of this era rarely touched on themes of slavery.
The section of the museum also features the 1867 painting "Margaret Garner," depicting a slave escape popularized in the Oprah Winfrey movie "Beloved" (that was set in the Cincinnati-Kentucky area). The Thomas Satterwhite Nobel painting was donated by Procter & Gamble, based in Cincinnati. The painting used to hang in their corporate halls. Procter & Gamble is one of several "Distinguished Founders" of the freedom center ($1,000,000 or more). So is Coca-Cola, which sponsors a billboard across the street from the museum. The billboard features a candle inside a Coca-Cola bottle. The billboard reads: "Never Lose Your Thirst For Freedom."
As a mainstream follower of African-American art, I had never seen "Face Vessels," produced in the mid-1800s by enslaved African-American potters in the old Edgefield district of South Carolina. The alkaline-glazed stoneware run about five inches high and are shaped like jugs. The pieces are not signed and it is not known if the faces are supposed to be spiritual, humorous or fearsome. Some scholars think the vessels had burial connonations. The freedom center also commissioned public art such as quilts and beautifully detailed handpainted washboards.
Archival material also includes guns that belonged to Ohio abolitionist John Brown as well as the rope he was hanged with after the 1859 raid at Harper's Ferry [now a historical park at the Potomac and Shendoah rivers in West Virginia and Virginia.] Brown was arrested and charged with inciting a slave insurrection, which was a big step toward the polarization of North and South on the eve of the Civil War.
***
It wasn't a museum piece that put the emotional ribbon around my visit to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. Kids post drawings and notes on a wall-size bulletin board in the "Reflect/Respond/Resolve" area, the concluding experience at the center. The thoughts of a child are not culturally distorted. Their aim is true. One child scrawled, "Come together under the fire of love and burn away all hate." Another child wrote, "Always question authority. Does your authority speak and act on peace?" This museum honors the freedom to ask such questions. You will depart with empowerment to shape the answers.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/travel/tra-news-detours19.html
It existed in a shroud of darkness.
Now you can witness this slave warehouse from the street through a 25-foot tall window.
"We want the world to be able to see this," said Carl Westmoreland, senior advisor for Historic Preservation at the freedom center. Westmoreland led the team who restored the pen with a dignity it never knew.
Westmoreland, 67, is a descendent of slaves emancipated at Stone Mountain, Ga. He sat on a bench inside the pen and said, "If you're just passing by and never come in, it will make an impact. We will touch some future governor as a child. And hopefully she or he will make different public policy decisions than before. Hopefully some black gang-banger will understand that if his greatgrandparents went through something like this, then life is more precious than he has dismissively interpreted it. Americans have effectively denied this history happened -- black and white people. We've never had the public discussion. It would be like if you had a closed casket burial of Emmett Till. You would have had no public outrage."
The slave pen creates an appropriate thesis in which to experience the $110 million center. It says, "Look where we've been. Look where we are today."
And where are we going?
What the freedom center lacks in typical museum acquistions (there are only 200), it substitutes with ideas. The interactive "Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad" gallery leads visitors to the slave pen on the second floor of the museum. The bright yellow-and-green gallery is tailor made for children but is also appropriate for adults.
The term "Underground Railroad" was first used in 1830 and the railroad led more than 100,000 enslaved people to freedom. They traveled at night, often guided by the North Star. An interactive board teaches visitors about the system's secret passwords and codes, while a small house features typical hiding places along the route. Children are faced with the question: "Imagine someone is at the front door. Quick! Where would you hide?' And they can crawl under stairs or behind a false wall. [Underground Railroad homes were researched with the assistance of the National Parks Service.]
The center incorporates five different films that total 70 minutes. Chicagoan Oprah Winfrey donated $1 million to the center and narrated a portion of a film that focuses on Ripley, Ohio, a hotbed of abolitionist activity. Another film in the freedom seekers gallery deals with a young male slave who is conflicted with his quest for freedom on the Underground Railroad and separation from family. This teaches visitors that decisions are difficult and that consequences need to be weighed.
I was worn out after my two-hour walk through the freedom center. My head was filled with thought, reflection and guilt as I made the five-hour drive back to Chicago. I hadn't experienced anything this emotional since I walked through the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. I toured the museum on a Monday, when it is closed to the public. But as visitors leave the museum there is a "dialogue zone" (an enclosed conference area that can seat up to 30) where they can discuss the experience with other guests and occasionally under the leadership of Dr. Cathy McDaniels Wilson of Xavier University.
***
It takes time to process the viewing of children's shackles, a replica box that Henry Brown made where he mailed himself from slavery in Virginia to freedom in Pennsylvania, and the sterile slave pen. A tobacco farm was built on top of the pen in the early 1900s, which is why the original logs are in such good shape. The pen was protected from the elements. Westmoreland said that "99 percent" of what was found in the field is now in the freedom center. [Visitors enter the pen through a door where there used to be a fireplace.]
In March of 1998, Kentucky contractor Raymond Evers called the freedom center about the slave pen on his property. It took Westmoreland, his staff and regional and national barn experts a year and a half just to document the authenticity of it.
Westmoreland's research of the artifact opened the doors to looking at internal slave trade nationally. This is a story now told in the portion of the museum enveloping the pen. When slaves were transported from town to town, they had to walk. Visitors can learn about Route 68, which runs from Detroit to Nashville, Tenn. Isaac Franklin was America's largest slave dealer. In 1832 he built an 11,000-square-foot mansion on his 2,000-acre plantation (a k a Fairvue) in Gallatin, near Nashville. The plantation has become a private golf community called The Club at Fairvue Plantation. The 500-square-foot slave huts that housed two or more families are being converted into bed and breakfast accommodations for members only.
Originally a game trail, Route 68 became a road to freedom for fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. "Slave trade moved over a million people of African descent between 1790 and 1865 and (who were) sold another two or three times," Westmoreland said. "As we drove the American Indian off the land, we used black labor to clear it, plant it and build the houses for plantation owners. Then ordinary settlers would follow in the wake. There were thousands of buildings like this all over the country. There's one still existing at Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. -- a block or two from the White House. It's a house the National Trust of Historic Preservation owns, in which I've been a guest. They stored slaves in the basement."
Westmoreland is a trustee emeritus of the National Trust of Historic Preservation. Over the last 30 years, he has restored more than 2,000 historic properties in urban communities across America. He is a Cincinnati native. He learned valuable lessons from his parents. His father, Guy T. Carlton Westmoreland, was a certified public accountant who studied history. His mother, Bernice, grew up in the village of Wyoming, Ohio. She came from a mulatto family of domestic workers.
"When I was 4, we couldn't go to public places," Westmoreland said. "Other than state-owned parks, historic sites, county courthouses, things like that. So my Dad took my brother and I to see the history of this region. I learned the only way poor people can connect with history is to feel validated about the places from which they come. I was doing a series of shotgun houses in Jackson, Miss., when I came here."
Westmoreland began restoring antiques at age 13. He now lives in a house built in 1815 that he restored. He lives in the Mt. Auburn neighborhood of Cincinnati, a block south of President Taft's house. Westmoreland helped raise $9 million to restore the Taft House.
He commutes to the freedom center, which borders the Ohio River. When slaves on the Underground Railroad came across the river, Cincinnati was the first free port.
***
The Underground Railroad Freedom Center has been open only a few weeks. The slave pen has received the most attention. According to public relations coordinator Steve DeVillez, the center's second most popular feature is the theater where the "Brothers of the Borderland" film is showed. This 20-minute film traces the journey of a young slave who is coming from Kentucky into Ohio with the help of Underground Railroad conductors John Parker and John Rankin. [The Rankin House State Memorial is an hour east of Cincinnati on Route 52 in Ripley, Ohio. The Rankin House sheltered more than 2,000 runaway slaves.; (937) 392-1627. The museum named its library and family search center in honor of John Parker.]
Lights are dimmed in the ambient theater and fog rolls in off a replica waterfront. A gentle breeze crosses the theater. Fiberoptic lighting creates fireflies and stars in the sky. The mood doesn't set out to replicate history per se, but instead establishes the adrenalin that would surround such a journey. Down the way from the theater, an interactive kiosk pays tribute to "Freedom Heroes" who include Muhammad Ali, Bob Marley, Jackie Robinson and Sept. 11 "Let's Roll" airline passenger Todd Beamer. Next year a rotating display space will open featuring collaborative exhibits from Native Americans, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., or other pockets of freedom.
Most of the center's traditional museum artifacts are found in a section that moves from trans-Atlantic slave trade to reconstruction in 1776. Do not rush through this area. There are pewter basins, shackles and strings of beads from the wreck of the English slave ship Henrietta Marie that sank near Key West, Fla., in 1700 [from the collection of the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society in Key West.] Take time to look at the rare Auguste-Francois Biard anti-slavery painting done in 1840. The oil painting depicts a scene on the African coast where slaves are being bought and sold. Biard used foreboding tones and moods in a period style of romanticism. Painters of this era rarely touched on themes of slavery.
The section of the museum also features the 1867 painting "Margaret Garner," depicting a slave escape popularized in the Oprah Winfrey movie "Beloved" (that was set in the Cincinnati-Kentucky area). The Thomas Satterwhite Nobel painting was donated by Procter & Gamble, based in Cincinnati. The painting used to hang in their corporate halls. Procter & Gamble is one of several "Distinguished Founders" of the freedom center ($1,000,000 or more). So is Coca-Cola, which sponsors a billboard across the street from the museum. The billboard features a candle inside a Coca-Cola bottle. The billboard reads: "Never Lose Your Thirst For Freedom."
As a mainstream follower of African-American art, I had never seen "Face Vessels," produced in the mid-1800s by enslaved African-American potters in the old Edgefield district of South Carolina. The alkaline-glazed stoneware run about five inches high and are shaped like jugs. The pieces are not signed and it is not known if the faces are supposed to be spiritual, humorous or fearsome. Some scholars think the vessels had burial connonations. The freedom center also commissioned public art such as quilts and beautifully detailed handpainted washboards.
Archival material also includes guns that belonged to Ohio abolitionist John Brown as well as the rope he was hanged with after the 1859 raid at Harper's Ferry [now a historical park at the Potomac and Shendoah rivers in West Virginia and Virginia.] Brown was arrested and charged with inciting a slave insurrection, which was a big step toward the polarization of North and South on the eve of the Civil War.
***
It wasn't a museum piece that put the emotional ribbon around my visit to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. Kids post drawings and notes on a wall-size bulletin board in the "Reflect/Respond/Resolve" area, the concluding experience at the center. The thoughts of a child are not culturally distorted. Their aim is true. One child scrawled, "Come together under the fire of love and burn away all hate." Another child wrote, "Always question authority. Does your authority speak and act on peace?" This museum honors the freedom to ask such questions. You will depart with empowerment to shape the answers.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/travel/tra-news-detours19.html
