Community College of Rhode IslandBlack History Month events include music, food and fun
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All three campuses took part in Black History Month this February with events both educational and entertaining.
At the Liston Campus in Providence, storyteller and musician Calvin Earl combined the arts of song, storytelling and dance to demonstrate how slaves used spirituals to promote the Underground Railroad.
For example, when slaves sang, “I’m on my way to the Freedom Land,” the song may have seemed like a simple religious hymn to slaveholders. However, to slaves, the lyrics served as a coded reminder for a real journey to freedom—that of safe passage to the north and Canada.
Some songs even gave detailed directions. For example, one spiritual contains the following lyrics:
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The riverbank makes a very good road,
The dead trees will show you the way.
Left foot, peg foot, traveling on,
Follow the drinking gourd.
The river ends between two hills
Follow the drinking gourd.
There’s another river on the other side,
Follow the drinking gourd.
The “drinking gourd” is another term for the constellation, The Big Dipper, which includes the North star. The song, then, advised runaway slaves to stick to the river’s edge where it is harder for dogs to pick up human scent, and to use celestial navigation to head north. The river that ends between two hills is no mythical river; rather, it represents a real tributary to the Tennessee River. The phrase, “Left foot, peg foot,” refer to the footprints of a famous Underground Railroad Conductor Peg Leg Joe, who traveled from plantation to plantation under the guise of a handyman in order to help slaves escape to freedom.
Earle’s appearance was sponsored by the campus’s Black American Student Association (BASA) Club and the Minority Mentoring Program.
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On the Knight Campus, the CCRI Friends of the Library hosted a free lecture on author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe. Guest speaker Dr. Booker deVaughn, a board member of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, explained how Stowe’s groundbreaking novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, serves as an important example not only of American literature, but of American social justice in action.
Ten years before the Civil War broke out, Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The Fugitive Slave Act required all citizens to return runaway slaves to their owners—even those former slaves who had since built “free” lives in the northern states. An immediate bestseller, her novel helped raise the public’s awareness of slavery’s dehumanizing effects, to the point where President Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have called her “the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War.”
One hundred fifty years later, Stowe still serves as an example of “how one person can make a difference,” says DeVaughn.
BASA, the Student Government, Service Learning and the Minority Mentoring Program combined forces in Lincoln to hold a week’s worth of Black History Month events, including two lunch-time films and a noon concert on Music One.
