Panels from the "Dreaming of Timbuctoo" Exhibition

2/20/12

Voting Rights History Exhibition & Lecture Set At SLU

CANTON - A traveling exhibition that delves into a little-known voting rights controversy in pre-Civil War New York State will be at St. Lawrence University, along with a talk by the exhibition's curator.

The exhibition, called "Dreaming of Timbuctoo," will be in Eben Holden North from February 27 through March 2, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. each day. Curator Amy Godine will give a talk titled "An Adirondack Timbuctoo: Afterlives of a Dream," on Monday, February 27, at 7 p.m. in the main room of Eben Holden. The talk and exhibition are open to the public, free of charge.

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 40-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.

Beginning in 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 anti-slavery voters, 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 Godine's illuminating text, the exhibition illustrates the crucial role of some of the country's most illustrious anti-slavery leaders in the energetic promotion of this giveaway.

The 3,000 "grantees" included two 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.

Other sponsors include the New York State Council on the Arts, New York Council for the Humanities/National Endowment for the Humanities, the International Paper Foundation, the Charles H. Douglas Trust, the Carl E. Touhey Foundation and the Puffin Foundation.

The events are part of the Contemporary Issues Forum on campus.