Jul 31, 2023
Research on Gerrit Smith’s gift of 120,000 acres of land to 3,000 black men will be presented on Gerrit Smith’s estate for the 13th Annual Peterboro Emancipation Day Saturday, August 5 at 1:30 pm. Independent scholar Amy Godine, a central member of John Brown Lives, will return to Peterboro to introduce her new book and share updated information on her three decades of research and writing about Black Adirondack history. Godine is the curator of the exhibit Dreaming of Timbuctoo at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site in North Elba NY. The Timbuctoo exhibit, and the film by the same name, explain Smith’s attempt at black suffrage and describes the black pioneers.
Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker, states that Godine’s new publication The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier “is a beautifully written, painstakingly researched, and uncommonly nuanced story, heretofore a footnote in the ongoing saga of race in America.” John Stauffer PhD, Harvard professor and author of The Black Hearts of Men, describes Godine’s new publication as “A rich and intimate story of African Americans and abolitionists in a little known Adirondack community called Timbuctoo. Beautifully conceived, deeply researched, The Black Woods is an immensely timely book, and a necessary book for our time.”
The Black Woods chronicles the history of Black pioneers in New York's northern wilderness. From the 1840s and '60s, black families migrated to the Adirondacks to build farms and to vote. On their new-worked land, they could meet the $250 property requirement New York's constitution imposed on Black voters in 1821, and claim the rights of citizenship. Smith's suffrage-seeking plan was endorsed by Frederick Douglass and most leading Black abolitionists. The antislavery reformer John Brown was such an advocate that in 1849 he moved his family to Timbuctoo, a new Black Adirondack settlement in the woods. Smith's plan was prescient, anticipating Black suffrage reform, affirmative action, environmental distributive justice, and community based racial equity more than a century before these were points of public policy.
Peterboro Emancipation Day begins at 10:00 on Saturday August 5 with the gathering for song, announcements, and photos followed by a processional to the cemetery to lay wreaths. After Godine’s presentation at 1:30, at 2:30 John J. Hanrahan from Charlottesville VA will describe, and sign, his first book Traveling Freedom’s Road: A Guide to Our Civil Rights History, the proceeds of which he donates to two social justice organizations. At 3:30 Norman K. Dann PhD will conduct a tour of the Gerrit Smith Estate National Historic Landmark.
The public is encouraged to join the commemoration.
Independent scholar Amy Godine, a central member of John Brown Lives, will return to Peterboro to introduce her new book and share updated information on her three decades of research and writing about Black Adirondack history. Godine is the curator of the exhibit Dreaming of Timbuctoo at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site in North Elba NY. The Timbuctoo exhibit, and the film by the same name, explain Smith’s attempt at black suffrage and describes the black pioneers.
The Black Woods chronicles the history of Black pioneers in New York's northern wilderness. From the 1840s and '60s, black families migrated to the Adirondacks to build farms and to vote. On their new-worked land, they could meet the $250 property requirement New York's constitution imposed on Black voters in 1821, and claim the rights of citizenship. Smith's suffrage-seeking plan was endorsed by Frederick Douglass and most leading Black abolitionists. The antislavery reformer John Brown was such an advocate that in 1849 he moved his family to Timbuctoo, a new Black Adirondack settlement in the woods. Smith's plan was prescient, anticipating Black suffrage reform, affirmative action, environmental distributive justice, and community-based racial equity more than a century before these were points of public policy.