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Exhibition Review
"Stony the Road They Trod: Forced Migration of African Americans in the Slave South, 1790–1865." Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0185, and Southern Historical Collection, Manuscripts Department, Louis Round Wilson Library, 4th Floor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-6024.
Temporary exhibition, Jan. 2–Feb. 28, 2002. 1,000 sq. ft.
at Duke University and 100 sq. ft. at University of North Carolina. Edward
E. Baptist, curator; Elizabeth B. Dunn and Laura Clark Brown, organizers;
Molly Renda, exhibition and catalog design.
Stony the Road They Trod: Forced Migration of African Americans
in the Slave South, 1790–1865. By Edward E. Baptist. (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Libraries, 2002. 32 pp.)
Lectures; round table discussion on African American family history
and genealogy.
| As
historians work in archives, we are often overtaken by the desire
to show someone else the fascinating document we have just discovered,
not to wait months or years to mention it in a paragraph or footnote,
but to show it to a person right then so he or she too might experience
the blend of emotional response and intellectual revelation it evokes.
The historian Edward E. Baptist took that impulse further. The result
is the first collaborative exhibition drawing on the vast resources
of both Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections
Library and the University of North Carolina's Southern Historical
Collection. The topic of the exhibition, the forced migration of
African Americans in the slave South between 1790 and 1865, is one
that the holdings of these two archives are well able to bring to
life for visitors through a variety of documents and photographs.
One of the strengths of the exhibit was that it showed just how
many kinds of archival material contain crucial information about
the domestic slave trade. These items included letters from slave
traders describing the arduous journey south, a few poignant letters
from transported slaves to their families at home, business papers
such as lists of slaves and bills of sale, and several photographs
and paintings. |
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