Conference on slave rebellions offers in-depth way to teach history some don’t want in schools
Historian and the founder of the Slave Dwelling Project, Joseph McGill Jr., has waged a counter-attack on anti-CRT by way of a poignant three-day conference.
CHARLESTON, S.C. — As the campaign to quash the teachings of America’s brutal history of slavery intensifies, Joseph McGill Jr. has waged a counterattack by way of a poignant three-day conference in this antebellum port town that was once responsible for the most sales and transports of enslaved Africans to major cities in the U.S.
A contained glee emanated from McGill, a historian and the founder of the Slave Dwelling Project, which kicked off its seventh annual conference last week with a focus on the 1739 Stono Rebellion, an uprising of enslaved people who killed plantation owners and their families in South Carolina to free themselves.
Joseph McGill Jr. Curtis Bunn / NBC News“We’re at a place right now of rebellion and resistance in America, just as enslaved Africans were,” McGill said of the Stono revolt, which has been referred to as the largest slave rebellion in the British colonies. Those enslaved hoped to find their freedom in the Spanish-occupied territory of St. Augustine, Florida.
Peter H. Wood, a former history professor at Duke University who wrote “Black Majority,” one of the first books to discuss the complex history of enslaved people in the South, said: “For political reasons, the Spaniards were willing to offer freedom to those who escaped.
“So a group of 15 or 20 went from plantation to plantation,” he said, explaining how the small collection grew as it marched on, chanting “Liberty” along the way. Later in the day, the freedom-seekers were encircled by a state militia and slaughtered.
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