Our view: Telling the stories of the enslaved | Opinion | salemnews.com – The Salem News

We should all know the story of Deliverance Symonds.

Dill, as she was called, was enslaved in 1766 and freed in 1783, when she moved from Danvers to Salem.

As researcher Sheila Cooke-Kayser told reporter Taylor Ann Bradford, Dill was an excellent cook and poet. Married twice, she had six children, six grandchildren and several great-grandchildren. Eleven men in her family sailed on Salem ships between 1790 and 1855, when that city was one of the busiest ports in the world. One grandson, William Fowler, served in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War.

Her legacy carries on to this day.

Something that I was amazed to find was that she has living descendants today, Cooke-Kayser said. That is something I never thought we would find.

Cooke-Kayser, a former National Park Service employee, was scheduled to share her findings with the public Wednesday night at a forum sponsored by the Danvers Historical Society.

We should also know the story of Brutus Julius Mozambique, an African who was bought in Brazil, taken to Beverly, and trained as an indentured servant. And of Lucy Foster, born into slavery in Boston in 1767, and given to Hannah Foster of Andover at the age of 4 as a wedding gift.

Their stories are our stories. And we are hearing them thanks to the hard work and fearlessness of local historians.

While Cooke-Kaysers presentation was part of the observance of Black History Month, the contributions of the Danvers and other local historical societies and museums has not been limited to the month of February. Rather, they are playing a vitally important role in ensuring the regions complicated past isnt lost to time. For example:

The Marblehead Museum has launched The Free and Enslaved People of Color in Marblehead, an online database that shares the stories of Black and Indigenous residents of the town through the 19th century.

The Museum of Newbury in Newburyport is a driving force behind the Newburyport Black History Initiative, which looks to bring the citys Black history to light through interpretive signs, lectures, panel discussions, and workshops.

In Gloucester, the Cape Ann Slavery and Abolition Trust, which grew out of the Unitarian Universalist congregations in Rockport and Gloucester, manages a website of its own, Cape Ann Slavery & Abolition, which documents how the nations oldest seaport benefitted from the slave trade.

And the Beverly Historical Societys exhibition, Set at Liberty: Stories of the Enslaved in a New England Town, lays bare how many of the towns founding fathers built their fortunes, and thus their lasting reputations, aided by generations of slavery. As Set at Liberty details, the 1754 census of Negro Slaves that found Beverly had 28 slaves, 12 males and 16 females over the age of 16.

Why are these stories important, some 150 to 200 years later? The murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and the death of Breonna Taylor brought several months of protests by Black Lives Matters activists and a long-overdue reckoning with racism in America.

For those of us in the seemingly progressive Northeast, it is easy to see those events as happening somewhere else, in places with histories fraught with discrimination and outright oppression. The work of local historians is a bracing rebuke to the notion that our history is somehow kinder and gentler. We owe them our thanks, this and every month.

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Our view: Telling the stories of the enslaved | Opinion | salemnews.com - The Salem News