Dreaming of Timbuctoo Exhibition
Open for viewing in Eben South ~ February 27th – March 2nd, 2012
8:00am - 8:00pm
An Adirondack Timbuctoo: Afterlives of a Dream
Lecture by Exhibition Curator, Amy Godine
Monday, February 27th, 2012
7:00pm
in Eben Holden Main
This event is being co-funded by the
Elizabeth Margaret Vilas History Department Fund.
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Dreaming of Timbuctoo Exhibition
Open for viewing in Eben South ~ February 27th – March 2nd, 2012 8:00am - 8:00pm
As voter identification laws are enacted around the country, St. Lawrence University is partnering with John Brown Lives! (JBL!) to bring a traveling exhibition to the campus that delves into a little-known voting rights saga in pre-Civil War New York.
The "Dreaming of Timbuctoo" exhibition celebrates a New York abolitionist's "scheme of justice and benevolence" to fight longstanding legislation that deprived black New Yorkers of voting rights in the mid-1840s. With the donation in 1846 of 120,000 Adirondack acres in forty-acre lots to poor African Americans mostly from metropolitan New York, the Madison County philanthropist Gerrit Smith hoped to furnish 3,000 free black New Yorkers with the means to become pioneers and voters.
Since 1821, New York blacks were compelled to meet a $250 property-owning requirement to gain the right to vote. This discriminatory law disenfranchised almost all of New York's potential black electorate. Since black voters would be antislavery voters, Gerrit Smith and his volunteer agents, New York's leading black reformers, saw his land giveaway as a strategy in the political war on slavery and racism.
Through letters, documents, archival photographs, and curator Amy Godine's text, the exhibition illuminates the crucial role of some of the country's most illustrious anti-slavery leaders in the energetic promotion of this giveaway, including Rev. Henry Highland Garnet of Troy, Frederick Douglass, Syracuse's Rev. Jermaine Loguen, and Dr. James McCune Smith of New York City.
The 3,000 "grantees" included 2 men from St. Lawrence County. Like them, most of the men never moved onto their land, but some small black enclaves were formed, among them, Freeman's Home, Timbuctoo, and Blacksville. As the settlement that attracted the radical abolitionist John Brown to the region, Timbuctoo is the best known. The exhibition looks at the 'giveaway' from its inception to its unraveling, how it thrived on paper and struggled on the ground, and how it lives in memory even now.
"Dreaming of Timbuctoo" was produced by John Brown Lives!, a freedom education project founded in 1999 to promote social justice and human rights through the exploration of issues, social movements and events, many of them rooted in Adirondack and New York State history. A production of JBL! in cooperation with the Essex County Historical Society, the exhibition premiered at the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake in 2001 and has been seen by over 100,000 people as it has traveled the state.
Dreaming of Timbuctoo is a John Brown Lives! production, in cooperation with the Essex County Historical Society. Other sponsors include: New York State Council on the Arts, New York Council for the Humanities/National Endowment for the Humanities, International Paper Foundation, Charles H. Douglas Trust, Carl E. Touhey Foundation, Puffin Foundation.
An Adirondack Timbuctoo: Afterlives of a Dream
Lecture by Exhibition Curator, Amy Godine
Monday, February 27th, 2012
7:00pm in Eben Holden Main
Independent scholar/curator Amy Godine tells the little-known story of a wealthy radical reformer's ambitious attempt to bring 3,000 poor black New Yorkers to the Adirondack region in 1846 and 1847 as part of an effort to win voting rights for disenfranchised African-Americans. Though Gerrit Smith's giveaway of 120,000 acres was embraced and promoted by leading black reformers like Frederick Douglass and Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, in the end fewer than two hundred grantee-pioneers settled in the region, and most didn't stay. Godine will discuss how Smith's innovative "scheme of justice and benevolence" has been represented in white memory, and black, and will talk about recent findings that expand the story's scope and value for how we understand our civil rights history.
Readers of Adirondack Life magazine are acquainted with Amy Godine's work on social and ethnic history in the Adirondack region. Whether delving into the stories of Spanish road workers, Italian miners, black homesteaders, Jewish peddlers or Chinese immigrants, Godine celebrates the "under-stories" of so-called "non-elites," groups whose contributions to Adirondack history are typically ignored. Exhibitions she has curated on vanished Adirondack ethnic enclaves have appeared at the Chapman Historical Museum, the Saratoga History Museum, the Adirondack Museum and the New York State Museum. The 3rd edition of The Adirondack Reader, the anthology Rooted in Rock, and The Adirondack Book, feature her essays; with Elizabeth Folwell, she co-authored Adirondack Odysseys. A former Yaddo, MacDowell, and Hackman Research Fellow, she is also an inaugural Fellow of the New York Academy of History.
