The Freedom Road
RSSDaryl Grabarek, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 10/20/2009
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Three complementary resources—Linda Barrett Osborne’s superbly illustrated Traveling the Freedom Road (Abrams, 2009), the haunting PBS film Unchained Memories (Films for the Humanities & Sciences, 2008), and Walter Dean Myers’s fictional Riot (Egmont, 2009)—offer secondary teachers a variety of quality materials with which to invigorate units on 19th-century American history.
Mining the resources of the Library of Congress, Linda Barrett Osborne recounts stories of the children and families who lived through enslavement, the Civil War, and/or Reconstruction, and a country divided about the meaning of liberty and unity. Through stirring text and plentiful quotes, students will read about Cato Carter, who vividly recalled hearing the roars and pops of cannonballs firing close to his home in Alabama during the war years, and Isom Moseley of Georgia, a child at the end of the Civil War, who later with his family became a sharecropper. Reproductions, drawings, maps, and black-and-white archival photos offer a look at the papers “free” men and women of color had to carry, images of the soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Colored Infantry, scenes of people fleeing troop activities, and numerous individual and family portraits.
Some of the compelling quotes in Traveling the Freedom Road, including Cato Carter’s, come from the Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938. During the 1930s there were 100,000 ex-slaves still alive, most living in the South. Hired by the Federal Writers’ Project, journalists and writers traveling throughout the country transcribed some 2000 personal stories of life under bondage. In Unchained Memories, actors—Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Oprah Winfrey, Samuel L. Jackson, and Angela Bassett, among others—read excerpts from these poignant narratives.
Martin Jackson’s first memory was of, at age five, being presented to his two-year-old master; Jenny Proctor tells of hiding a “Webster’s speller” to study at night and witnessing brutal beatings, while Kate Rowe remembered the day a gray-haired man came riding up and told her and the other slaves on the plantation where she lived and worked to “remember the day,” for she and everyone else there “no longer had to go by the horn”; they were free. Archival footage and photos from the 1930s, and background music and recordings of spirituals, slave songs, and ring shouts, provide context and depth.
In New York City, African-Americans encountered bitter recrimination and violence during the Draft Riots of 1863. In Walter Dean Myers’s Riot (Egmont, 2009; Gr 7 Up), the 15-year-old daughter of a black father and a white mother finds herself caught in the middle of the chaos unleashed on the city by mobs of angry citizens after Abraham Lincoln’s announcement of a draft that individuals could have waived for the sum of three hundred dollars. In screenplay format, Myers’s story moves cinematically from scene to scene around the city, encountering looting, arson, and murder, amidst acts of kindness and courage.
All three resources offer fresh material and approaches to the study of 19th-century American history. Used individually or together they generate questions and meaningful discussions on the period and leave students with lasting images of the long road to freedom traveled by many of the people who lived in our nation.
