Starting Sunday, Jan. 24, and continuing for several weeks, instead of offering a livestreamed worship service on Sundays, we will be trying something a little different. We will be videotaping a special series of worship services that we will distribute on Sunday mornings via email, the website, Facebook and YouTube.
During the time in the worship service that’s normally reserved for the sermon, we’ll be sharing video segments we have filmed throughout Connecticut and Rhode Island. It’s something we’re calling “Wheels of Justice: Stories from the Deep North” – a title borrowed from an important documentary film by Katrina Brown.
A little more than four years ago, many in our community traveled throughout the South, learning the stories of the Civil Rights era, and how they intersected with contemporary struggles for racial justice. It’s something that we might have tried again this year, if not for the pandemic. But as protests for racial justice swept the nation this summer, we decided to try something in that same spirit, only now in our own backyard.
Over several months of reading, conversations and site visits, we’ve compiled a kind of tour, in hopes of exposing the long history of enslavement in the North, as well as some of the stories of resistance that occurred during that time as well. It’s been a collaborative project – we’ve asked old friends and new to help share these stories. Some faces you’ll recognize. Others you’ll be meeting for the first time. Everyone is committed to telling these stories, that we might know a little more about where we live, who we’ve been, and who we’ve come to be. But we also tell these stories because we’re convinced that without historical memory, we can’t fully address who we wish to become.
We hope these stories from the Deep North haunt you, inspire you, and change you. We hope you’ll come along on this journey through the Deep North, hidden in plain sight all around us. Most of the stories come from the following sources, all of which are highly recommended.
- “Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery,” a book by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
- “New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America,” a book by Wendy Warren
- “The Logbooks: Connecticut’s Slave Ships and Human Memory,” a book by Anne Farrow
- “Forgotten Voices: The Hidden History of a New England Meetinghouse,” a book by Carolyn Wakeman
- “Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North,” a film by Katrina Brown