On Friday night, October 15, I participated in a community discussion with about fifty people at the Maysles Institute on Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem. I was invited to be part of a panel commenting on the ninety-minute opening segment of a documentary film Then I'll Be Free To Travel Home produced and directed by documentary filmmaker Eric Tait. Tait uses the struggle to reclaim the African burial ground in lower Manhattan as a vehicle for discussing the history of slavery in New York City from the colonial era through the Civil War.
I was invited to be on the panel although almost everyone else who attended was Black and I am White and although everyone else was local and I am from distant Brooklyn. I am not sure which was the deeper chasm to bridge. The people there were interested in what I had to say because of my work editing the New York and Slavery: Complicity and Resistance curriculum, which received an award from the National Council for the Social Studies but has never been adopted by New York State. I am also the author of a book, New York and Slavery: Time to Teach the Truth (SUNY, 2008).
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