About Us
The sight of the Confederate flag waving inside the Capitol has reminded Americans that we as a nation have not come to terms with our history of slavery and racism. This is as true of the North as it is the South. While in the South the Confederate flag is a visible and demonstrable expression of that denial, in the North that denial manifests itself through silence about the past and the absence of visual reminders to help us recall slavery once flourished here.
Settled in 1639, Guilford, Connecticut, is no exception. While houses in town bear plaques singling out where early residents had resided, one even noting where General Lafayette once was a guest, there is no mention that for nearly 150 years enslaved men and women, first native Americans and then Africans, had been enslaved in many of these homes.
Like a bad memory, the history of slavery in Guilford had been repressed, driven out of the light, out of consciousness, even out of the school curriculum. Of the many who were enslaved here (the exact number we don’t know), only two with identical first names, Shem, have gravestones. They are located in North Guilford, far from the Green, the town’s heart.
Until four years ago, Guilford’s silence was emblematic of nearly all of New England. That is when a group which called itself “The Witness Stones Project” set out through a combination of education and commemoration to make public the missing history of slavery in Guilford. It advocated for a unit on slavery to be added to the school curriculum and petitioned the town for permission to place square 4”x4” cement stones with engraved metal caps in front of homes where the group had documented enslaved men and women had toiled.
The Witness Stones of Phillis and Montros, installed 2018
The idea for the stones came from Germany where after a long period of silence about the Holocaust a new generation started to come to terms with the sins of their country. The Germans did this many ways, one was through placing Stolpersteine, Stumbling Stones, in the sidewalk before the homes where the Nazis’ victims had resided. The pedestrians would stumble upon them, look down and be reminded of the people whose names and dates the stones bear.
In Guilford, the Stolpersteine became The Witness Stones Project. The group presented their idea to the town’s Preservation Alliance, the GPA, which recognized them as a subcommittee. A week later the town’s Board of Selectmen approved the project’s proposal to install Witness Stones. Next Guilford Public Schools okayed the educational aspect of the plan which called for middle school 8th graders to study slavery in general and specifically focus on its practice in Guilford. The students would use original documents (wills, court records, etc.) to research and write essays about specific people who bore only first names as pets do and were listed with bequeathed livestock and furniture. Each year the students would focus on three different individuals, write biographical sketches of them based on the evidence they had found forgotten in yellowed, dusty public records. The students then shared their findings in a ceremony on the Green and asked the gathered townspeople to join them in installing the stones.
The will of Ruth Naughty where Montros and Phillis are listed
The first so honored was Moses who worked where the Town Hall now is. Since then, six more Witness Stones have been installed, the last of which was for Dinah whom the Guilford Board of Selectmen had purchased in 1792.
The pandemic has interrupted the school program and their installation of stones, but it has not stopped the project which has expanded and added other initiatives such as a lecture series via zoom from the town library to help adults learn about slavery. To reflect its broader focus, the group changed its name to “Witness to History: Slavery in Guilford.” Its logo of a bird looking backwards comes from Africa and bears the name Sankofa. It symbolizes the importance of recalling and coming to terms with that what happened in the past. Doing so will aide us in better understanding the present and help us create a better future.
To learn more or to contact our group write to slaveryinguilford@gmail.com