Conference Summary:

In August 2000 the ASPnet Transatlantic Slave Trade Education Project, Breaking the Silence, held its first meeting in the continental United States. The three-day symposium was hosted by the Deep South Regional Humanities Center and the Department of History of Tulane University.  New Orleans was selected as an appropriate site for a meeting whose organizing theme is the slave trade for two reasons: one, because as Walter Johnson has noted, although New Orleans was “a late addition” to the 400 year old history of the transatlantic slave trade, by the nineteenth century it was also North America’s largest slave market; two, because as Gwendolyn Midlo Hall has pointed out, New Orleans is “in spirit, the most African city in the United States.” People of African origins have left an indelible imprint upon the city, transforming its musical and folkloric cultures, enriching its religious and historic traditions, in the process making it arguably the most unique of North American cities.

Tulane University’s location at the crossroads of many cultures make it an especially appropriate venue for this symposium. The university has long been recognized in the national and international academic community as a major research institution. The university faculty have developed research and teaching fields with direct bearing on the history of slavery and diaspora studies: on the history of slavery & race relations, African American literature and music, the psychology of race, Francophone literature, postcolonial literature and theory, race and identity politics; they have conducted linguistic field research in African and diaspora languages, organized conferences, & led archaeological excavations.  Programmatic offerings in

African and African Diaspora languages, Atlantic World History, Latin American History, and Brazilian Studies illuminate the links between the peoples of Europe, Africa, South America and the Caribbean.

Tulane hosts the Amistad Research Center, an archival treasure comprising a library, archive and museum of ethnic history and culture. Its rich primary source collections center on African American history and culture, with special strength in the area of civil rights and race relations and dealings between the United States and Africa, and it holds the voluminous records of the American Missionary Association. The Stone Center’s Latin American Library has extensive holdings on Meso-America and Brazil, on the Anglophone, Francophone, and Dutch- speaking Caribbean, and on the history of the east coast of Central America. Afro-Latin culture and history form a major component of the Stone Centers’ Educational Materials Library. 

The Program:

The leadership of the UNESCO Associated Schools Project Network [ASPnet] defines the mission of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Project in terms of four primary goals: 

·        promotion of innovative methodologies

·        dissemination of knowledge about the slave trade as a means to eradicate racism

·        creation of opportunities for dialogue between the educational community and the academy

·         encouragement for the preservation of sites of memory.

In keeping with those objectives, the organizers set as the symposium’s overarching goal the promotion of educational excellence in the teaching of slavery and the slave trade. To that end, and in cooperation with the leadership of the TST Project, we developed a program that is regional, inter-regional, and international in scope. For its first meeting in the U.S. the Slave Trade Project brought together educators from four continents, 8 countries, and 6 states. The program was multidisciplinary, bringing to bear on the subject the insights of historians, art historians, psychologists, museum educators, performers, and preservationists drawn from the full range of humanistic institutions. It explored the state of teaching about the slave trade in current school curricula in the United Kingdom, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. It identified new scholarly resources available in archival and electronic form. It created numerous opportunities for dialogue between all the disparate parts of the humanistic community.

Three program areas were established, no single one of which is more critical to the achievement of the ASPnet Education Project’s multiple goals nor more aligned with the mission of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Education and Slave Routes Project than teacher training about slavery and the slave trade, the subject of the opening day of the symposium. Panelists included educators from the local school system, university professors, teacher trainers, and master teachers whose innovative methods can serve as useful models. Reluctance to turn back to the painful pages of the past is an almost universal problem noted by all panelists, this in spite of the fact that the bitter legacies of racial prejudice and endemic cultural and economic impoverishment still disfigure the present. In Africa, the region of the world most profoundly affected and where contemporary forms of slavery persist, the subject remains taboo. Professor Elisee Soumonni observed that African school curriculum is virtually silent on the subject. To the extent that it is discussed, it tends to be rooted in a western European perspective that privileges European expansion and the abolition movement while ignoring the violence of the trade and its exploitative aspects.

No matter in which direction the scholars compass pointed, the problem of denial loomed large on the educational and moral landscape. In her survey of education in Britain Professor Betty Wood noted that the transatlantic slave trade, slavery in the Americas, and a British multiculturalism dating back to the mid-sixteenth century do not have a recognized place in the curricula of most British schools. Whatever knowledge school leavers have of these historical themes has been gleaned largely from popular culture, local places of historical memory, and visits to such institutions as Liverpool's Maritime Museum and the Wilberforce Museum in Hull. Several British universities have departments that specialize in West African, North American, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies and offer courses in various aspects of the slave trade and the African diaspora in the Americas. Depending upon the choices they make, and the requirements stipulated by their departments, students who opt for a degree course in History are more likely to encounter fragments of the slave trade and the history of slavery in the Americas than they are a fully integrated course in these topics. For example, those studying early modern British history might encounter the anti-slavery movement of the late eighteenth century but graduate knowing little if anything about either West and West Central Africa or the Americas.

Since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, American universities have made great strides in research and teaching about slavery and the slave trade. In middle and high school curricula, however, those subjects remain more promise than product. Emotions of outrage over the unnamable horrors endured by their ancestors makes students reluctant to study what they perceive to be the obscene and shameful dimensions of the American past. In addressing this facet of the problem Clyde Robertson noted that teachers, even in North America’s “most African city,” often encounter outright hostility to the subject from students who are otherwise deeply moved by sympathy for victims of the holocaust.

Some scholars see this stubborn resistance to the study of the slave past as one of the most destructive psychological legacies of slavery, the roots of which are traceable to the slave system itself, which destroyed the notion of family and contributed to low black achievement motivation. William Cross, Jr. takes strong exception to that interpretation, arguing instead that the concept of the family emerged intact from the brutal slave era, a point strongly reinforced by recent historical studies, which find compelling evidence of the rapid reconstitution of the family in the quarters. Without the help of the military and with only minimal assistance from whites, enslaved people everywhere created churches and Sabbath schools indicating a keen awareness of the value of education. The one continuity Cross finds from the slave era is the dehumanization of blacks in the psychology of white oppressors, which in the post-slavery era finds expression in various forms of violence and in more subtle but no less destructive forms of discrimination.

To those who would argue that introducing contemporary morality into the discourse distorts the past and raises a host of difficult and divisive questions, Hilary Beckles responded with a call for full disclosure. Beckles deplored the fact that there has been no significant shift in the moral critique of slavery since the seventeenth century, when in fact Europeans did recognize the criminality of slavery. Since then, Beckles maintained, historians have denied, distorted or dismissed the ugly reality that slavery was a crime against humanity that demands redress and reconciliation.

 How to “break the silence?” All of the panelists agreed on the necessity of developing a systematic strategy to integrate the teaching of slavery and the slave trade into regular classroom curricula and to raise public awareness as the most effective means of combating the corrosive effects of racism. Among the broad strategic directions proposed by the panelists four key initiatives were stressed: 

·        Teacher training: Drawing on his twenty-five years of teacher education experience, Raynard Sanders stressed the importance of providing renewal incentives for teachers to give them continuing access to new research about the Middle Passage and the history of slavery. Some American universities now offer continuing education credits [CEUs] to encourage teachers to periodically replenish their store of knowledge. For their part, Sanders urged teachers to explore new extracurricular educational approaches that allow students to discover knowledge rather than merely receive it & to do all this in such a way as to recognize the connections between the past and the present.

·        New curricular offerings: Clyde Robertson also called on teachers to play an instrumental role in the development of new curricular offerings. Echoing a theme sounded by Professor Soumonni that Africa existed before the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Dr. Robertson emphasized the need to develop a new K-6 curriculum that introduces grade-school students to ancient Africa as a preliminary context for understanding the history of slavery. In terms of intellectual content, Professor Soumonni stressed the importance of keeping the human dimensions of slavery in the foreground, a point endorsed by Professor Jean-Michel Deveau in noting the connections between economic exploitation and the deprivation of human liberty. Both Sumonni and Deveau maintained that a proper grasp of the nature of slavery in Africa before and during the era of the slave trade requires a corresponding understanding of slavery in the Americas.

·        Innovative methodologies: The concluding event of the first day was a workshop conducted by Sabrina Mays-Montana, which demonstrated the importance of utilizing innovative methodologies which in their inventiveness and imagination enrich and inspire teachers and students alike in the practice of their own work and learning. Ms. Montana and a team of teachers representing the various creative arts conducted a participatory workshop to demonstrate how standard pedagogical techniques can be enriched by sensory learning, an approach that integrates reading, writing, math and science with drama, dance, instrumental and vocal music and visual art. Members of the audience were divided into groups and assigned to breakaway sessions to learn by doing how creative movement and art experiences can be successfully integrated into the academic curriculum to teach about African heritage and the slave experience.

·        Intercultural dialogue: Although inspired by the desire to preserve the memory of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, the mission of two model academic programs, Teachers to Africa and Kids-to-Afrika, extend far beyond that goal in their aim to transform the negative lessons learned from the past by stressing the unique contributions of Africans in the nation and the world. As Director of Teachers to Africa Cassandra Murphy described the four-week, teacher professional development and curriculum development seminar in South Africa for K-12 teachers.  The purpose of the seminar, provided through funding from the U.S. Department of Education's Fulbright Group Projects Abroad program and hosted by the Tulane-Xavier National Center for the Urban Community in conjunction with the New Orleans public school system's African Studies and Culture Department, was to develop curriculum units consistent with Louisiana education standards and benchmarks. The units based on the geography, history, culture, economy, and languages of the Xhosa, Ndebele, and Zulu ethnic groups will be used in classrooms to educate New Orleans' school students about the similarities and differences between South Africa and the American Deep South. The knowledge acquired, curricula developed and resource materials gathered will be used to promote international understanding and replace stereotypes and prejudices about African people and culture.

Comprehension of foreign cultures is notably wanting in the United States, which ranked second to last in a UNESCO nine-country study of 10-14 year olds’ understanding of cultures other than their own.  The mission of Debra Harley’s Kids-to-Afrika is to build bridges of cultural and historical understanding for youth by travel to Africa. As a preliminary to the field study experience, the KTA program give emphasis to academic enrichment, the aim of which is to connect traditional academic disciplines of language arts and social studies with technology instruction and experiential learning. In Africa American students engage with their African peers both as observers and participants. Host country students provide tours of their schools and hold assemblies where students discuss issues basic to the human experience.

Ms. Harley offered as testimony of the programs success the fact that in the four years of the programs existence 100% of the 47 student participants have attended college. Presentations by two former participants, Ashley Jones, a senior at New Orleans’ McDonough 35 Senior High School, and David Augustine, sophomore at Benjamin Franklin Senior High School, underscored how KTA works to simultaneously teach students about the past while it helps them to gain competency and develop leadership skills.

Outreach and Multimedia:

The key narrative refrain of symposium sessions dealing with public outreach and multimedia was the increasingly prominent role of museums, archives, and university based research centers for publicly preserving the memory of slavery and the slave trade. Presentations by representatives of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, the Amistad Research Center, and the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, described their work as major educational and outreach vehicles for the community and the nation. Founded on the premise that a true comprehension of the world we live in today requires a thorough understanding of the transatlantic slave trade and the African diaspora, fundamental building blocks of modern society, the Gilder Lehrman Center set as its primary mission the promotion of scholarship on the history of slavery and abolition. Acting on the belief that public history, in addition to formal classroom education, is a vital vehicle for telling those stories, the Center also set as its purpose the translation of that research into public knowledge.

For the Center, an important starting point is acknowledgment of the personal dimensions of slavery, which necessarily implies mediation between the concerns of scholars and those of the public, including the descendents of slaves and the descendents of slaveholders. Slavery, Robert Forbes stressed, was a system of institutionalized shame as well as a labor system and as such discussions of it are potentially explosive and painful. Techniques must be developed that convey the story in such a way as to foster understanding and compassion. Forbes used the example of the transatlantic slave trade to demonstrate how this might be accomplished.  Comparing it to UNESCO’s Slave Routes Project, Forbes suggested that the global story of the transatlantic slave trade is told most effectively by linking it to local stories. The Center’s roots in New Haven and Connecticut, the site of the Amistad incident and home to a rich history related to slavery and abolition, create a natural link between the local and the global and give an intimate meaning to the telling of the story.  Like the biblical story of Joseph, the story of slavery and the slave trade is also in part a family story. Thus, genealogy has a crucial role to play in telling the story of slavery and the slave trade. Herein lies an important link between centers committed to the dissemination of knowledge and archives dedicated to the preservation of that knowledge.

As sites for public education, archives have unique responsibility for documenting the richness and variety of sources available for the study and teaching of slavery and the slave trade. The Amistad Research Center is the world’s largest archive of African American history and culture. The Center’s rich primary source collections focus on civil rights and race relations and relations between the United States and Africa. It holds the voluminous records of the American Missionary Association, originally an abolitionist group which later established hundreds of schools, including the historically black colleges and universities of Fisk and Dillard, Talladega and Tougaloo, among others. In addition to providing reference and research assistance to researchers the Center is developing the Digital Humanities Project in cooperation with Louisiana State University and has to date scanned over 1500 documents.

The Center’s Education and Public Program initiatives are aimed at helping teachers incorporate the archival and visual materials available through the Center into classroom curriculum. Among the major initiatives described by Nikki Wilson are:

·        The development of educational materials in conjunction with art exhibits, including slides of images from the Center’s collections, and lesson plans

·        “Share the Word Program” in celebration of Black History Month, to encourage African American families to read and share their history with school-age children

·        Congo Square History Project, a collaboration with the Treme School of Writing, which employs primary source materials and secondary works to produce a monograph dealing with the historical significance of Congo Square

·        Production of poster packers to assist students in understanding and appreciating the visual arts as represented by African American artists

·        Collaborations with other institutions, two examples of which are the newly created partnership with Junebug Productions to produce a national oral history project and the AmistadMobile program

The Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University has a core faculty of 70 Latin Americanists plus 20 affiliate faculty, 30 of whom work in Mexico and Central America, 17 in the Caribbean. The Center’s Cuba Studies Institute launched the first and to date the largest, undergraduate program in Cuba and offers a new Brazilian Studies minor. The Stone Center is one of only four continuously funded Latin American National Resource Centers in the United States and the only Latin American National Resource Center in the Deep South region. This program provides grants to institutions of higher education or consortia of institutions of higher education to establish, strengthen, and operate comprehensive and undergraduate language and area/international studies centers that will be national resources for the study of modern foreign language, research in international studies and world affairs, outreach and consultative services on a local, regional and national basis.

The Stone Center’s Latin American Research Center [LARC] provides numerous services for teachers, among the most popular is a lending library with over 300 registered users nationwide. Afro-Latin culture and history form a major component of the Stone Centers’ Educational Materials Library, a lending collection of over 1700 titles; over 2900 items in documentary video, feature films on video, slide packets, instructional units, culture kits, games, another miscellaneous print materials, all of which are available for teacher and classroom use on a free-short term loan basis to any secondary school, college, or university in the United States. The LARC’s

Demonstrated on-line catalogue is available at: http://www.tulane.edu/~clas/CRCCatalogue

Borrowing policies are described at: http://www.tulane.edu/~clas/BorrowingInstructions.html

According to Valerie Marshall, Director of the LARC, the Center also sponsors summer professional development opportunities for teachers and maintains a Visitor Speakers Bureau for the convenience of local teachers:

Other Services and Events

Demonstrated curricular publications produced by LARC including:  Latin America:  Land of Diversity ($100) and La Tierra Mágica:  Una Exploración de América Latina ($80)

Both publications contain a unit on "African Influences in Latin America"

Web sites of Interest:

·        Demonstrated web sites for various African Studies and Latin American Studies Centers/Programs around the country which offer resources and service to educators

Museums are at the heart of the community engagement process. The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center was established specifically to sweep away the parapets of resistance through teaching of the history of slavery, resistance to slavery, and self-emancipation. The Freedom Center defines its mission in terms of service to “stakeholders,” among the most important of whom are teachers, informal educators such as church youth leaders, camp counselors, recreation center staff, youth program administrators, parents, and students.  In an effort to provide exciting and interactive formats for learning that encourage a high degree of personal identification with content and provide ongoing motivation to practice skills and succeed academically, the Freedom Center has focused on three educational packages. 

·        pre-and post-museum visit activities, with a teacher’s guide, to maximize the effectiveness of classroom visits to the museum. 

·        a traveling trunk or experience box, containing touchable artifacts, reproduction visuals, books, posters, and recordings which make it possible for museum staff to bring exhibits to the classroom, in cases where the classroom could not come to the museum.

·        a CD-ROM containing interactive simulations of Underground Railroad stories   to engage students in a personal and compelling way, as well as expand the perceptions that people commonly have of the Underground Railroad. Among the stories selected are those that show runaways going south and west as well as north. In order to demonstrate the Native American involvement in the runaway experience the story of the Black Seminoles is used as a lead-in narrative.  It relates how a group of approximately a thousand runaway slaves and descendants of runaway slaves stood together with an Indian nation to share a culture, resist white encroachment, and find strategies for escaping enslavement.  Under their leader John Horse, the Black Seminoles were on the run for decades, traversing terrain from South Carolina to Georgia to Florida to Oklahoma to Texas to Mexico and back again.  Periodically losing numbers of their members to slave catchers, war, disease, and starvation, the Black Seminoles, albeit at great cost, resisted slavery and the violence that accompanied it.  Participating in the simulation of the Black Seminole story, students complete activities in math, science, reading, writing, citizenship/civics, and the arts.  Through the activities, students gain access to action sequences in which they can directly participate.  The activities each meet five objectives:

Through successfully completing activity screens, students are able to gain access to the action sequences, and this structure provides motivation to work through academic exercises.  Students can participate directly in the sequences, role playing a character, solving historical puzzles, or electing to take some sort of action.  The next step in development of the CD-ROM is to identify a software firm and begin programming to create the animation in a dramatic, interactive, yet respectful, responsible, and historically accurate way.

Technology:

The Voyage of the Slave Ship Diligent in 1731-32, a slide-illustrated lecture created by Robert Harms, demonstrates how the simple technology can be used with documents, drawings, and maps of the period to explore the ideas, practices, and personalities that animated the slave trade.  The slide-lecture focuses in on the motives of the participants and asks how it was that otherwise ordinary people, both in Europe and in Africa, could get caught up in such an evil activity.  By following the voyage of a single ship, we get a series of rare glimpses into the dark underside of the emerging Atlantic World during a period of historical transformation.         

The slide-lecture tracks the 1731 voyage of The Diligent from the French port of Vannes and follows it on a 15-month slaving voyage to West Africa and the Caribbean.  It was an evil odyssey that would pack 256 captive Africans into the 69-foot ship to be transported to lives of forced labor on the sugar plantations of Martinique. Nine of them would die in transit.  The lecture voyage took place at a time when the Atlantic world was undergoing a transformation.  In Europe, the mercantilist economies of the seventeenth century were giving way to the private enterprise capitalism of the eighteenth century.  In West Africa, the trading states of the Guinea Coast were being overrun by militarized empires that were financed by profits from the slave trade. 

In the midst of all this, First Lieutenant Robert Durand, 26 years old, kept a detailed journal of the events that surrounded him and illustrated it with some eighty drawings.  But Durand was by no means an innocent observer.  He personally directed the purchase of the slaves on the West African coast, and he even purchased five captives for himself.  Before the voyage was over, both the King of France and the African King of Dahomey would be drawn in to its activities.