Up from Slavery by Richard E. van der Ross

allowed IHS to convene interested organizations to guide a team of researchers to gather available research on early black settlements.

Over the past 30 years, various research projects related to early black settlements have been completed by independent researchers, college professors and students, IHS, Indiana Humanities, Ball State University, Conner Prairie and Indiana Landmarks.Ī planning grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. With the exception of a handful of monographs, graduate papers and journal articles, few publications have been written that focus on this history.

With a mounting interest in history related to Indiana’s Bicentennial, now is an opportune time to uncover and share untold parts of Indiana’s history.ĭespite a rich history, little is known about the African-American experience from the state’s founding to the Civil War era. These untold stories have the potential to evoke pride and add a level of complexity to our understanding of black heritage and Hoosier history. This generalized thinking situates Indiana’s African-Americans as part of a national story, but fails to reveal the stories of free blacks and formerly enslaved people who settled the state much earlier. Nevertheless, a comparable interpretation of the letter, or more accurate, its translation, would be suggested two hundred years later.Popular understanding of Indiana black history focuses on post-Civil War African-American migration to cities in the north, such as Evansville, Fort Wayne, Gary, Indianapolis and South Bend. In truth, the letter itself does not suggest anything of the kind. Subsequently he was sentenced to death and broken on the rack. September was accused of being at the head of a (Bugis) slave conspiracy, and the letter found in his chest would be presented to the court as major evidence for this. Surely neither of the two could have surmised that this innocent note would turn out to be a kind of death sentence for the adressée, and that two centuries later it would still be discussed. The letter was written in the two slaves' mother tongue, Bugis, and in that language's script. September, the name of the healer, received the note and kept it in his chest in the slave quarters where he was living. When, some time before August 1760, in Stellenbosch at the Cape the Bugis slave Upas had been ill for two months, he wrote a short note to another Bugis slave who was widely known to be a healer, asking him for help. Upas, September and the Bugis at the Cape of Good Hope.

Up from Slavery by Richard E. van der Ross