Missing in History: discovering the presence of enslaved Africans in our community

Summary and excerpts of a presentation given at the Huguenot Historical Society by Susan Stessin-Cohn, Professor of Education and History at SUNY New Paltz and Vassar College, November 3, 2002.

Susan Stessin-Cohn became interested in the presence of African Americans while working on an archeological dig on Huguenot Street in New Paltz managed by Joseph Diamond, professor of archeology at SUNY New Paltz. At that time, both Stessin and Diamond were serving on the New Paltz Burial Ground Task Force, which was trying to determine the location of a cemetery that was reported to hold hundreds of African Americans. In addition to Diamond, others involved in locating the burial ground project included historians, archivists, librarians, museum professionals, government officials, a geophysicist, and representatives from the Black community.

During the course of this project, which culminated in the erection of a memorial sign on the burial ground site, Stessin explained, that she began to look for ways that she could approach the subject from other angles, asking herself the question "what could I do as educator." The answer to this question came in the form of a fourth grade school curriculum on slavery that used primary source documents as major teaching tools, as opposed to a textbook-based curriculum. Later in her presentation, she noted that archivists and historians have one job, which is looking at the history and representing it, but as an educator, there is a whole other part of this, which is translating it to kids. Funded by a grant by the Mid-Hudson Valley Teacher's Center, Stessin explained that she spent the next five months delving into as many documents as she could with the help of archivists and librarians from the town's two local history centers, the Huguenot Historical Society and the Haviland-Heidgerd Historical Collection at the Elting Memorial Library.

In developing the curriculum, Stessin noted "it was very painful for me to create this curriculum. For me, even though I teach social studies at SUNY, I thought I knew history, but I didn't really know historyÖand looking back at what different classrooms were doing at that point, it was horrific [because the standard fourth and fifth grade social studies textbooks rarely contained more than a sentence or two about slavery]." Stessin then acknowledged A.J. Williams-Myers, professor of Black Studies at SUNY New Paltz, for his advice and editing work in relation to the development of the curriculum. Stessin then related a quote that provided her with the insight to develop her curriculum:

'You think that just because it already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable. Oh, no! The past is cloaked in a multi-colored taffeta and every time we look at it we can see a different hue.'

According to Stessin, "and that's kind of how I look at this whole thing. I had seen what I thought was local history, and then I saw a whole other history once I started looking at the documentsÖand now I was looking at a fourth grade curriculum, and I had to find out what was appropriateÖhow far could I go with fourth graders, you can't omit it but you don't want to give them too much because it's so powerful, so you have to figure out what's right, and I have to say, that some of this curriculum, I think, is better for seventh and eight graders. There are parts of it, I think, that I, probably after piloting it, I'd use with older students because some of the kids were just 'zonked', and that's not the point of this, you want to open their minds, but you don't want to paralyze them, and some of the kids really got stuck. I also have to say that when you do a curriculum that entails slavery, and that's something that I wrote in the introduction [to the curriculum] that the Colonial Period was embedded in slavery, and slavery was embedded in the Colonial Period.

She later related that "history has to be inclusive of everybody, and if you present it as an isolated history, it doesn't work either. So for me, because as I piloted it, I had to just take it as it was, sort of full-dose, undiluted, when if I did it as part of a three month study on the Colonial Period, I think it would have been easier for the kids to deal with some of the issues.

Stessin discussed her methods of helping kids to understand primary documents. She used the KWL method extensively in this curriculum. The KWL method requires the students to create lists in the three following categories: 1) what they believe they know, 2) what they want to know, and 3) after the course is complete, what they felt they learned from their work. Stessin emphasized the fact that after the completion of the curriculum, the students realized that some of what they thought they knew was wrong, and that they felt afterwards that they had a much better understanding of the subject.

Stessin used dozens of different activities in her curriculum, ninety-five percent of which focused on DBQ's, or document-based questions. She noted that "what I started with was an activity where students got to figure out what a primary document wasÖit was just a way to understand what primary sources are, and how valuable they are, and what kinds of clues they give you about the past. She also stated "the strength of this whole curriculum lies in its focus on primary sources, where I don't get to translate what happens to the kids, they get to see it for themselvesÖwhen a child reads a sentence out of a textbook, you will never get [an exclamation]. It never will happen, but when they read something like they've read in this curriculumÖthe kids were just spellbound."

Stessin discussed one activity, a 'jigsaw' activity, in detail. This activity involved students working in several groups to translate a legal document of Hugo Freer, one of the original founders of New Paltz. Stessin noted that "kids love transcribingÖI especially don't tell them what this document is because the power of it is that they discover what it is for themselves. Stessin described the reactions of the children when they discovered that "because Hugo Freer felt he was a good Christian man, he gave his daughter a gift, and this gift was this little boy named Tobias." Stessin urged educators that "just to talk about slavery isn't enoughÖbut when something like this happens - they go through a half an hour or forty-five minutes transcribing them, and then getting together and realizing what it is and then you talk about it - the kids are blown away by it, the kids are blown away, because it really conveys some of the horror of this whole system.

Stessin then discussed how the kids came to accept the truth even though they didn't like it. Why do kids love fairy tales, she asked, "[Because] they need to see the good and the bad, good overcoming evil, and when they see something like this, it doesn't make sense to them. And kids wonder 'how did this happen?' They don't understand. I still don't understand, and I think that all of us are still incredibly troubled with how this ever happened. It's still happening.

In the next activity, the class transcribed the last will and testament of another New Paltz founder, Jean Hasbrouck. In this will, Hasbrouck stipulated that a baby born to his slave Molly must stay with the mother until the child was one year old. Susan exclaimed, "and that was it for the kids." She then proceeded to read one letter written by a fourth grade student in reaction to this will.

"I don't think that slaveowners were bad or evil. I just think they were confused. They saw other people doing it and they thought of their slaves as cattle, just blocking out the idea that their slaves were still human. We have evidence of this is true in the will of Jean Hasbrouck where it says that the slave Molly will be given away and her first born daughter will be separated when she's one year old. Forcing a family to separate is wrong no matter what."

However, Stessin recalled, not all of the kids reacted in the same way. "One boy wrote that 'this was the mindset of the time. I'm not going to pass judgment on it, it's just the way it was and it was wrong, but why are we spending so much time dealing with negative history. It happened, let's just get on with it."

Stessin answered this question by prompting a class discussion on the questions: 'what is history, and why do we study history.' She also had the class discuss their thoughts about a quote by John Steinbeck (paraphrased as) 'you don't know who you are until you see your past.' Stessin asked the class if anything may have been left behind from slavery that is still relevant today. "One African American boy in the class said "we're not all equal" and everybody turned around and thought about it - and you could see the gears moving - and all of a sudden they started realizing where some of this comes fromÖwhy people are treated a certain way, and we talked about how we need to know who we are nowÖ. [In order to] step forward, we have to look back."

The curriculum also included a section on Pinkster, a combined religious and secular celebration with origins in medieval Europe that featured a procession of flowers. In the American colonies, the African Americans enthusiastically celebrated Pinkster and used the occasion to perform African music and dances. Stessin included this section on Pinkster because she felt that she "had to try to bring some happiness to this curriculum." The class made Pinkster posters and learned about the various Dutch, African and other traditions that combined to make this an important and much enjoyed holiday in Colonial New York.

The last section of the curriculum that Stessin described in her presentation was a 'mini-unit' Sojourner Truth, a famed black abolitionist who in her early years was a slave held in New Paltz. Stessin transferred her own experiences with discovering Sojourner Truth to her students in an activity that also introduced the students to census records. " I think for me what was one of the most powerful parts was when I went to the archives and I found her on the census. I found her at the Hardenberghs and I found her at the DuMondsÖ[and I remember thinking] she was real, she was really real!" In the activity, the students find the listing of Sojourner Truth in the census, as well as the listing of her one-time lover, Robert. The students also looked at a recent newspaper article on Sojourner Truth that appeared in the New York Times. Whenever possible, Stessin tried to bring the past into the present to show how many of the issues of history are still relevant today.