Panel Discussion: Promoting awareness of African-American history through community efforts, New Paltz, NY, November 3, 2002.

Panelists: Dave Strong (formerly) Town of New Paltz, moderator; A.J. Williams-Myers, SUNY New Paltz; Susan Stessin, SUNY New Paltz; Corinne Nyquist, SUNY New Paltz; Ellen James Town of New Paltz Race and Racism Committee.

Former Town of New Paltz councilman David Strong moderated a panel on the role of the community in the recovery of local African American history. The session began with Strong's account of the discovery of an African American graveyard on Huguenot Street in New Paltz. As Strong told it, the recent search for the lost burial ground began with the New Paltz Study Group on Race and Racism. When the group decided to look into look into local history it turned to William Heidgerd's pamphlets "Black History of New Paltz." That collection includes two articles which grabbed his attention; the first is from the editorial page of the New Paltz Times in April, 1864:

"As some of our readers manifest considerable interest in the African race, would it not be a good idea to give them a suitable burying place. Their present yard, north of this village, on Miss Mary DuBois¼ farm is without a fence about it, and the rough stones that mark the last resting place of those who have attended you in your infancy are broken down by the cattle. Cannot a portion of the grounds of the rural cemetery be set apart for the colored race? We merely make the suggestion and do not wish to be understood that we are in favor of miscegenation."

Strong pointed out the contradictory sentiments expressed here ­ on the one hand an attempt to show a certain amount of respect for former slaves, on the other hand the desire to keep the races separate, even past the grave. On May 6, 1864, the Times reported that: "Susan Tinbrook, a colored woman, was buried on Friday last, April 29th, in the colored people's burial ground 1/4 of a mile north of this village. The funeral procession which passed through this place was the largest number of colored persons seen together here in some time ­ there being about thirteen wagons and forty persons."

With these hints as to the site, he went about gathering a group of people wanting to research and document the location and use of the burial ground. According to Strong, the Ad hoc Committee for the Preservation of the African American Burial Ground (precursor to the present African-American History Reaearch Committee) met for the first time in April 1999 at the Huguenot Historical Society ­ some of the people involved were Joe Diamond, Al Marks, Tanya Marquett, Don Roper, Eric Roth. The committee worked for about a year and succeeded in identifying a probable location, but was unsuccessful in getting access to the site from the owners of the property. The committee confirmed the existence of the burial site through conversations with a long time neighbor, and before it was closed off, Joe Diamond did an inspection which indicated that the stones were of a type commonly found in slave burial grounds. Placing the marker there ­next to the site, on the adjoining property ­ was a kind of fall back and the committee hopes to conduct further inspections sometime in the future. One reason that the marker was placed there is so that a future owner who would buy that property would know that it is there and would be willing to work with the community. Another reason is that it is a good way to introduce people to local African American history.

With that background, Strong introduced the first question to be addressed by the panel and audience: "Why is it important to promote the study of local African American history?" Panelist Corinne Nyquist, librarian from SUNY¼s Sojourner Truth Library and longtime advocate for commemorating Truth,s life in New Paltz, opened with an apropos quote from Lest We Forget by Belva Neal Thomas:

"Why bring up the painful period in our country,s history? Some may feel they have no apology to make as neither they nor their forefathers were slave holders. Others may feel that dredging up tales of Africans in chains humiliates the race. When one speaks openly of slavery, the nation tightens. Perhaps there is an uneasement because the attitudes which undergird slavery exist today. Prejudice still looms. America is still a divided nation. American was built on the backs of enslaved Africans. It still suffers inner
turmoil because it never righted that wrong, never really tore down the walls of racism."

Yet the reasons given for delving into this difficult subject were wide ranging. Several speakers emphasized that as much as African American history merits attention in its own right, it is not a separate subject but part of American history, which simply remains incomplete without acknowlegment of the role of blacks in the founding generations of our "brave new world." Most fundamentally, the early African Americans should be recognized because because they were there, living and working in the
same houses on the same streetas their owners. To fail to represent their story in a historical site such as Huguenot Street creates an unbridgeable gap in our understanding of ourselves and eachother, creating
misunderstandings down to the present day. According to A. J. Williams-Meyers:

"To study slavery on the local level really tells us about ourselves because this history is still with us, along with the shadow of American slavery which is racism. We have not studied what this history tells us about race relations today. To study slavery is to study a mindset that transcended North, South, East and West. To study local slavery is to see that the South was not by itself. If you study American history correctly you discover that the confrontation has always been there because we refuse to address the issue. We are afraid to say to ourselves we did wrong and we need to rectify it. Why did America walk out of the Durban conference? The issue of Israel aside, we should have been at that table because
historically we had slavery and we have allowed the shadow of slavery to persist until the present day. The shadow of the past will conintue until it is faced so it can dissipate."

Recognizing this history, on the other hand, can have real benefits. I recalled how, shortly after I had moved here in 1992, I discovered, with the the help of the librarians at the Elting Memorial Library¼s Haviland Heidgerd Genealogical Collection, that the original owner of my house at 127 Huguenot Street, Margaret Hasbrouck Clow, was the daughter of parents who had been slaves on nearby farms. Margaret¼s father was the same John Hasbrouck whose life and ledger we had heard about earlier in the day. I
began looking into the history of her family and the family of Jacob Wyncoop, the African American carpenter who built my house. The research had been slow going; I would come across a new fact every year or two.

When I made a connection with the work of other members of the community ­ Susan Stessin¼s History Education class at the College, the work on the Slave Registry at the Historical Society -- a critical mass of substantive information began to come together so that we are now able to start telling the stories of some of the individual personalities who made up the rapidly shrinking African American community of New Paltz in the generation after slavery. Although details are difficult to come by, they suggest lives of
active particiaption in a community with very restricted opportunities, lives with their full share of inspiration and struggle.

One way of defining the importance of promoting the study of such lives was suggested in a post-September 11 comment made by Cornell West, philosopher, professor and doctor of divinity: "If we are asking how to find hope in the face of terror, there is much to learn from the history of African
Americans."

Additional values in this work were summed up by Strong: "It makes the community more welcoming," he said, in relation to the following story:

"A professor I know who came here to work for a nearby college said that when she learned that there had been slavery in New Paltz but saw no mention of blacks being here, she felt totally alienated in her environment. One way to be more open and welcoming to a more diverse community is to value
the people who have been here before. One other thing I want to mention personally is that as a white person to have a chance to work with black people in an on going constructive project with a common goal is a very unusual thing in our society and studying local black history as a multiracial group is one way of working together."

If the last few years have seen some good things happening with the formation of the New Paltz African History Committee, with the lead taken by the Historical Society, the Study Group on Race, and Black Studies at the College, other community political and cultural institutions, such as the schools, "still have a long way to grow," according to panelist Susan Stessin Cohn, Professor of History and Education. In the fourth and fifth grade curricula which address colonial history, much of the content relating to African Americans "is just gone now" because both teachers and administrators are unwilling to include it. Meanwhile, local history is being downplayed in the pressure over standards.

One member of the audience sounded a cautionary note from the perspective of historical anthropology: Rediscovering African American history and getting it out to the world is a very important pursuit, but we
should not continue to cast the African American as "the other." It is not "just a black story, but an American story, because we cannot understand the creation of the so called brave new world without taking account of the contributions and active participation of African Americans in it." She
noted that recent scholarship in this area reminds us that it is about "giving voice to the voiceless."
Another participant took up the "devil's advocate" role. As a local historian from a nearby town, he questioned whether a hard look at slavery in the Hudson Valley might do more harm than good:
Like New Paltz, we had slavery in the past and we were both small and restrictive communities until after World War II. The people who live there now have no idea of what was going on then. So you have a population that is unaware of your past, that doesn't believe you had slavery here.

The real question we are addressing, he continued, is how strongly should the various townships of the Hudson Valley which were involved with slavery broadcast the knowledge that they were made up of
slaveholding families in the past. We didn't plant cotton.... We fed New England with grain grown by slaves [from our town]. Its a different matter...and there are a lot of people who don't want to hear about it. We are dealing with our communities and not with the nation as a whole.

Turning to the question of documenting African American lives and deaths in the nineteenth century, Joe Diamond, whose work on the slave cemetery in Kingston was presented earlier that morning, focused on the difficulty of recovering the history of most slaves and their descendants. The well-off families, with their orderly cemeteries and well-kept documents have easy access to family histories. In the Kingston slave cemetery, on the other hand, the only record or a person buried there is for a woman who was
hanged for murder. Ordinary people become anonymous and very hard to trace. Susan Stessin Cohn noted that when she includes early African Americans among the local personalities in her students' research projects, she has to dig twice as hard to find material. But once they actually began to look at
what was there, they become more "posessed" than anybody else.

On the subject of changing views and attitudes toward our multiracial history and ancestry, a Newburgh genealogist with long experience tracing the census records of African-Americans, observed that people have become more accepting than we give them credit for. He cites the results of his genealogical research for two white women from Chicago who discovered, with no misgivings and a salutary sense of satisfaction, that they had black ancestors in their background. He added as an afterthought that the women happened to be related to Jessie Helms. Another wave of laughter, of multicultural cadence, ripples through the room. Had the denizens of the graveyards at either end of Huguenot Street been there to observe, they might have been astonished at how much has changed in the expression of race relations since their time, and as well by the themes that have endured.