About

Our Mission

Historical research has shown how much we can learn about slavery, even in places where the presence of race-based bondage has long been underestimated, such as Pennsylvania. We seek to bring similar inquiries to the graduate and undergraduate curriculum, guided by scholars and students who have worked to bring light to the past. We have chosen to focus first on our commonwealth, but the project is expected to expand to the mid-Atlantic region, as states that border Pennsylvania are also crucial to the story. Our project is an outgrowth of the Penn & Slavery Project (P&SP) that probed and publicized the University’s role in the economy of racial slavery. We build on that ethic and the dedication to uncovering and wrestling with the past. The result, we hope, will expand knowledge and insight into an understudied history. Equally important, we aim to involve students in key roles at every stage of the process. Ensuring that the project remains student-centered is essential to our mission. The University and archives in Philadelphia and across the state are goldmines of information.

We aim to enrich conversations about race in the United States by making them historically and legally robust. Our goal is to build a significant and ongoing inquiry – led substantially by and for students in the law school, graduate history program, and undergraduates – into the history and legacy of enslavement in our region. In Spring 2022, a law school seminar is assembling cases and materials that will allow undergraduate students to explore the legal history of enslavement and resistance to bondage in “free” Pennsylvania. Collecting likely cases (there are hundreds of available but little-known freedom suits, habeas corpus petitions, challenges to allegedly consensual labor contracts, and more) is central to the project. As one of our seminar participants put it: “We hope to uncover meaningful knowledge into how laws such as the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780, the Pennsylvania Fugitive Slave Act of 1826, the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, among others, were enforced. Both black enslaved and freed people communicated and organized in the face of extreme violence from mob attacks, kidnappers, the general state, and enslavers. Much of these channels of communication within Pennsylvania remain unstudied, especially the legal aspects of it.” To supplement legal records, we are consulting newspapers, the records of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, and other documents at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP), where the university’s alliance HSP provides a clear path for student researchers. Students will also be able to make use of printed as well as graphic material at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the American Philosophical Society. The physical primary sources and databases at Penn libraries are also important to this project. The Price Lab and Kislak Center, as well as Biddle Law Library, have already provided significant support and commitment to ongoing involvement.

Our database, website, blog, documentary videos, and other public facing material will attract legal historians as well as other scholars (historians, political scientists, Africana Studies specialists) and public intellectuals (journalists, artists, playwrights, filmmakers) whose use of the materials will showcase Penn’s commitment to the history of African American freedom struggles. Undergraduate use of these materials as well as their connection to the ongoing work of law and other graduate students will create an intellectual community defined by a common purpose. Several talented P&SP undergraduates have gone on to graduate study at highly ranked law schools, and graduate students who worked on the project as undergraduates will provide continuity and mentorship.

Our inaugural undergraduate course will launch in spring 2023. The class will allow students to probe individual cases and the lives that were changed by them. Many legal rulings will inform and even surprise students, as they sustained coerced labor far more extensively than we have previously recognized for those of African and Native heritage. Predictably, the children of the enslaved were especially vulnerable. Students will choose who, when, and where they want study, with the possibility of drawing on students’ skills in French or Spanish, and including different locations, time periods, etc. The stories behind the cases are often difficult to document in detail, but census, tax and parish records, newspapers, diaries, family histories, and modern scholarship all help to fill in gaps. Even when the legal record is sparse, names of litigants and descriptions of their claims provide invaluable clues. One of the central lessons of the 1619 Project and other efforts to recover the past is that archives often reinforce the silences imposed by slavery and the slave trade. Students will explore the process called “reading against the grain,” with the awareness that bland language often conceals the violence that lies behind systemic racism and enslavement.

We view the 2023 course and the current law school seminar as beginnings. We are dedicated to telling the history and legacy of enslaved people in Pennsylvania through multiple media and with careful research. We aim, as one student put it, to do everything we can to “convey the fullness of individual and community experiences and stories.” We will continue to deepen and broaden our scholarly methods as well as our public engagement. We will expand our curricular offerings as we engage students in the work of recovering the past, as well as the ongoing value of careful attention to the experience of slavery and bound labor in free states. Once we have completed one full cycle of data collection, website construction, videography, and undergraduate research, we will assess the potential for a symposium to bring participants, the Penn community, and community partners together for discussion of the findings. Such an event could yield a volume of essays, additional programming, and new directions for collaboration.