The art piece was a picture of Top Golf surrounded by the names she found in the will. The student wrote a poem about the place where people now shop and play Top Golf, that has no mention of what used to happen there. I encouraged the student to look deeper to see if she could find any documents that named the enslaved, and she found a will that named several people. She found out that it was owned by the Bullitt family, who enslaved dozens of people on the property and have a county named after them. For example, one student researched the Oxmoor Mall, which was once the Oxmoor Plantation. Once they started researching, they found themselves going down rabbit holes to learn more. They had no idea how many places in our city are Echoes of Enslavement. I have never seen the students so engaged. The hope is that it will help create dialogue and healing. The assignment is meant to be a bridge to the past to help bring awareness of the impact that enslavement had on people in our history. While this assignment may stir up a lot of feelings, the assignment’s goal is to bring a voice to those whose names we do not know and whose stories have been lost. It should also help people to see the echoes of slavery in Louisville. Like the written piece, the artwork should reflect the space chosen as well as the written piece. No name-calling.Īfter the piece has been written, you will create an art piece that represents the space you wrote about. The piece should NOT be hateful, bigoted, or mean-spirited. There is no page requirement except that whatever is written fulfills the guidelines above and in the rubric. It should be thoughtful and invite the reader to consider those whose names and stories have been lost to time. The piece should describe the location and help the reader see there are still echoes of slavery in Louisville. Once you have chosen a spot, create a written piece that answers several of the questions above (questions from their research) and gives a “voice” to those forgotten over time. These were part of the guidelines for this project: They then presented their findings to the class, and we displayed them in the hall. We also went to our Maker Space, where they created a visual art piece to accompany the written part. Once they finished their research, they created a written piece to give voice to those whose voices were lost to enslavement and time. When they had decided on their place, they used some of the suggested questions from the Zinn Education Project lesson plan to get information down, and I encouraged them to follow any leads related to the place that they found interesting or helpful. After we had a good list on the board, the students spent a class period browsing the internet to see which one interested them the most. We brainstormed places in Louisville, Kentucky, that are named after enslavers or were places of enslavement. We then read sections from How the Word Is Passed to bring home the point that we are still impacted by the echoes of enslavement. My students read excerpts from “ Open Wide Our Hearts,” the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’s (USCCB) letter on combating racism. I was looking for an innovative way to talk about this subject when I found the resources on the Zinn Education Project site. As part of our curriculum, we study racism and its causes, and how the history of enslavement still impacts us today. I teach Catholic Social Teaching to high school seniors. Louisville, Kentucky, high school theology teacher Sharron Hilbrecht wrote to tell us about her use of our lesson, “ Echoes of Enslavement.” In this lesson students discover “echoes of enslavement” in their own state - discrete sites of remembering, forgetting, honoring, lying, or distorting - based on the book How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith.
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