With some historical sleuthing, the graves were eventually found. While they’ve skipped a couple of years, members of the original New Paltz Study Group on Race that found the burial site, have now held 11 commemoration services.
In Deyo Hall, a multicultural group of blacks, whites and Hispanics met to talk about New York’s and New Paltz’s troubled past. Adorning the walls were pictures of the empty rooms, slave shackles and a slave viewing gallery at Senegal’s Goree Island — a major center and port of the slave trade.
One exhibit featured reproductions of newspaper advertisements from Kingston and other local towns calling for the return and capture of escaped slaves. Most bounty rewards were only $5 or $10.
A hush came over the each member of the crowd as they stopped at the exhibit displaying a real slave collar used in New Paltz.
“It creates a connection — like we have with the cemetery — because someone wore that collar,” Rodriguez told the audience.
With a movie about the 13th Amendment winning accolades and nominations at the Oscars, slavery and the sins of America’s past have been at the forefront of people’s mind this year. Also Jan. 1, 2013 was the 150 anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed Southern slaves during the Civil War.
The movie “Lincoln” and the Doris Kearns Goodwin book “Team of Rivals,” on which it is based, have helped dispel the myths surrounding emancipation. Whigs, and then later the Republicans, did not start out as staunch abolitionists — they merely wanted to keep slavery out of the expanding Western Territories. Half-measures and compromise with the slave-holding Democrats were the order of the day even after the Confederate States of America had formed.
New Paltz itself was home to one of America’s most famous freed slaves and abolitionists — Sojourner Truth.
New York officially abolished slavery in 1827, but it is possible that some slave holders illegally sold off their slaves in black market trades to Southern plantations even after that point, according to Professor Williams-Myers.
Odell Winfield, from the Sadie Peterson Delaney African Roots Library in Poughkeepsie, reminded his audience of how far America has come — but the long way it still has to go. People had gathered in Deyo Hall, which he noted was named after a Huguenot family that owned slaves.
Winfield spoke about the idea of the “New Jim Crow” — which is the idea that prisons utilize felons in much the way a plantation owner would a slave. Felons lack the right to vote, have a harder time finding employment once out of prison and have many of their rights stripped away by the courts.
“So the slave becomes the felon,” he said.
The library director urged his audience to think about the disparity of the current prison system. Where racial minorities might only be 10 percent of a county’s total population, it’s possible and even likely they could be 30 percent or 40 percent of the prison population, Winfield said.
He urged his audience to think about legal system and prison reforms. “What are the laws that keep people in bondage?” he said. “The battle is not over.”
The idea of “The New Jim Crow” comes from a book of the same name by the author Michelle Alexander. After reading the book, several citizens in Poughkeepsie — including Winfield — formed the group ENJAN, which stands for End New Jim Crow Action Network.
No, Rodriguez was not part of any group, as he well knows, as there was no “group” to find this graveyard. I found it, brought it to the Race and Racism committee along with new information about Sojourner Truth, and what is that saying about fathers and stolen credit? “Groups” came pouring in for self-acclaim after I showed up with information about the graveyard and today I STILL now more about it than anybody has mentioned? Funny, that? I also own the oldest European structures in southern Ulster, and it all sits on top of pre-historic cellar and trench. Once I uncovered the trench, that was it.
Oh, and the “Sojourner” bit?
You have never heard “There shall be one law unto the homeborn as it is to the stranger who sojourneth amongst you?” That is as old as Moses? Stop.
I guess you have to hear that line in Hebrew School first to have had it thunk.
Sojourner 2 Ruth; that is the code name.
The Cyrus Freer that lived in my house kept a diary about the black man who lived next door, I mean, the black man got a piece of land from a DuBois and got to build his house there on what is Mulberry Street. Then, when Carol Smith was working out Franklin printing and simultaneously sitting as Village Board Trustee, she had the little 1852 house torn down. I put photos of the house on the web a year or so ago. The folder at the assessor office has everything in it about that parcel except one document? That is missing a “Demolition Permit” from the Village Building Department. Trustee Smith didn’t bother with that formality, that was only for the neighbors.
View Bug is a photo site with a photo of the former slave house taken in 1998 or such? It is the first photo on the first page under “Most Viewed”. the photo of the former slave house that was torn down by a village “trustee” without a demolition permit from the village is the single “most viewed” photo. Who knew. The photos are under the name “sojourner”. There are other photos of the same site on the corner of Church and Mulberry that are what is there today, a swale for the drainage run off that is the buried branch of Tributary 13. Drainage is important to the discovery of lost site, my house’s site , the black man’s house’s site and the sites of the homes around the Huguenot Street black graveyard.
For the 4 years I stayed and graduated from New Paltz University visited the Huguenot cemetery several times and never once knew anything about the slave sometimes I find that a bit surprising to just find out about that now what a pity no recognition from the residence of the New Paltz community….so dissapointed