Project aims to document early history of Valley’s Black lives

Date: 6/21/2021

WESTERN MASS. – A community-based research project in Hampden, Hampshire and Franklin Counties aims to document the lives of free, enslaved, and formerly enslaved Black residents of the Connecticut River Valley prior to 1900.

Participating historical organizations in those areas, along with student and volunteer researchers, will perform a deep dive into their relevant holdings and present their relevant findings during a fall capstone event. They will also assist local historical societies, archives, museums and other past keeping organizations in interpreting and presenting stories of Black life in the Connecticut River Valley.

Organizations participating in this project include the Amherst Historical Society and Museum, Belchertown Historical Association, the David Ruggles Center for Early Florence History and Underground Railroad Studies, Forbes Library, the Historical Society of Greenfield, Historic Northampton, the Longmeadow Historical Society, and the Wood Museum of Springfield History.

According to Marla Miller, the director of the Public History Program at UMass Amherst, after George Floyd’s murder, the  program received many inquiries from communities that wanted to better understand and better tell African American history in their communities but were not sure how to get started and locate sources.

After having many conversations with museums and other organizations in Western Massachusetts, Miller said that there seemed to be interest in a valley-wide project. Miller then reached out to the Pioneer Valley History Network (PVHN), which is a consortium of nearly 50 community historical societies and small museums in the three pioneer valley counties, to see if they wanted to collaborate.

To get the project going, Miller and company wrote a successful grant from the UMass Public Service Endowment Grant. They also received partnership funding from Mass Humanities.

“The project is underway now, and we have our launch event on June 19,” said Miller. “It will continue through the summer, and we are planning a capstone event to report our findings on Oct. 3.”

The grant included support for six core partner organizations. “We’re working with a set of historical societies and other history organizations in the valley,” said Miller. “Those core partnering organizations will all work with a number of research liaisons who are going to help volunteer at the local historical societies in their work to review their materials and uncover this history.”

Miller said that they are also welcoming engagement from people who are not members of those core communities. For instance, people can spend some time looking at court records or gathering written research materials. Throughout the summer, the core organizations will be building a common database with research they find over the course of the coming months.

“Part of our goal is to make connections across communities,” said Miller, who added that local historical societies tend to preserve stories that are easy to document among white families because of a long history of ownership, whereas many Black residents prior to 1900 were not documented because they were not property owners.

When looking at histories of enslavement, those lives unfolded across communities, according to Miller. “One of our priorities is trying to make sure that we connect those little bits of evidence we have of lives across communities and knit them together in ways that tell more complete stories” she added. “We are creating a database that will help us make those connections when they come up.”

Through all of this, the organizations hope to use these findings to connect people’s stories and lives and understand how the Atlantic Slave Trade influenced the economy in a lot of these towns. “Public historians often find a lot of misinformation out there about what enslavement looked like in the north, a mistaken belief that it was a more benign institution in New England,” said Miller.

Dennis Picard, a PVHN leader, told Reminder Publishing that UMass is coordinating their graduate students who are assisting with the research and assisting with museum archives and historical societies within the PVHN.

“A lot of smaller towns don’t necessarily get the professional support some of the larger institutions do, so we help coordinate those things,” said Picard.

Picard said that he has seen a lot of initiatives like this come and go to try and uncover these stories of people who have been forgotten. There is a lot of research that has been done in the past that the organizations plan on using for their own research, according to Picard. “We’re hoping in a lot of ways to not reinvent the wheel,” said Picard, regarding the research. “We had people of color here well before the Civil War period … we had not just enslaved people, but we also had free people of color who were leading productive lives like their neighbors.”

For the fall capstone project, Picard said the research will unveil the stories of individual lives, while the other part of the presentation involves aiding future researchers, curators, interpreters, and educators in locating and sharing relevant sources.

“There is such an urgency to developing a better, richer, and deeper understanding of enslavement in the Valley, and the outpouring of community interest we’re seeing tells us that people very much want to contribute to this work,” said Miller.

The project is presented by the Pioneer Valley History Network, the UMass Amherst Public History Program, and the UMass Amherst W.E.B.Du Bois Library.

For more information on the project, visit https://blogs.umass.edu/pvhn-blackhistory.