Last week I attended a really terrific conference on slavery at The University of Virginia. Much of the conference and many of the talks were centered around the African American community in Charlottesville today. There was a church service on Thursday evening and then a memorial at the African American graveyard, which is just outside the University cemetery. I could have listened to the church choir all evening, for sure. But the graveyard service was of particular meaning to me. I'm not sure I've ever been in a cemetery after dark (surprising, isn't it, given how much I love cemeteries). This was to commemorate the sixty-seven African Americans buried next to and just outside the wall of the University cemetery. Deborah McDowell read a poem that had been commissioned for the occasion. Then we went off for a candle-light service where the choir sang, among other songs, the old spiritual keep your lamps trimmed and burning.
Little aside here: One of my favorite historians of slavery told me that there's a well-founded rumor about a ghost of a slave who haunts the UVA campus. I'm no expert on the supernatural, but I think that ghosts are usually hanging around because there's some injustice they want to correct -- or because they've been done wrong. That's what the UVA student literary magazine suggested in the late 1850s about a native American whose spirit haunted the white community, anyway. I need to dig out the old Poe reader to review the circumstances of hauntings; I think he's the expert on that. Plus, LeAnna Croom now informs me of what I should have been aware but wasn't: that the 1992 horror movie The Candyman is about a slave who was tortured to death by his owner and who, before he died, threatened to come back to exact revenge. I should have remembered this because I like that film (not the least because it features a University of Chicago anthropologist!). So I perhaps should have been more worried than I was on approaching the cemetery. At any rate no ghosts appeared that evening; only a really moving ceremony.
The next day there was a lot of talk of the study of slavery at other schools -- James Campbell, who set all of this in motion with the Brown Slavery and Justice Committee about a dozen years ago spoke, as did Leslie Harris of Emory, Terry Meyers of William and Mary, Josh Rothman of the University of Alabama, and Craig Wilder of MIT. And then there was a panel that focused on the lives of enslaved people in Charlottesville and at The University. Scott French, who wrote a fabulous book on the Nat Turner rebellion, the physical anthropologist Benjamin Ford, University historian Ervin Jordan, and historian Gayle Schulman, spoke about slavery and the lives of enslaved people in Charlottesville. I changed the focus in my talk from the enslaved people to the ideas of the faculty, students, and alumni on slavery -- mostly about the proslavery ideas but I also spoke about some of the anti-slavery ideas in circulation on that campus and about the pro-Union ideas as well as the pro-secession ideas. And in the afternoon we heard a great deal more about the contemporary resonances of these issues, with anthropologists Autumn Barrett, Kelley Deetz, and Lynne Rainville, and student activist Chelsa Stokes, and then we concluded with a facilitated reflection by Susan Allen.
You can watch the Friday proceedings on youtubte (except my talk, which was in a different location). Here's a podcast of my talk. The Charlottesville Daily Progress has a story about the conference here.
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