Resources

I Am The Bridge (2023) was produced and directed by Bernie Cook; co-produced by Dawne Langford, Christina Dropulic, and Mélisande Short-Colomb; filmed by Kuna Hammad and Jonathan Howard; and edited by Dawne Langford. The temporary soundtrack for this work-in-progress screening is by Grammy Award-Nominated Composer Carlos Simon, who will provide original music for the final version of the film.

In the I Am The Bridge documentary film, She finds herself drawn to courses through which she can engage her family’s history and the legacies of slavery in America. Increasingly, she serves in the roles of teacher, elder, and witness. We see a student reparations movement born over a meal of jambalaya that Méli cooks with her younger classmates. On April 11th, 2019, Méli takes up a megaphone during a rally in the center of Georgetown’s campus to implore her fellow students to vote to commit to a student fee of $27.20 per semester that will fund the first student-led effort toward reparative justice at an American university. At the start of her third year, Méli decides to step away from classes to focus on the development of a one-woman performance in partnership with the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics.

The GU272 Memory Project is the product of a collaboration among the GU272 descendants, the Georgetown Memory Project, and American Ancestors, the oldest non-profit genealogical society in America. The collective work of these groups — which is accessible via this website — includes a searchable online database of genealogical data for GU272 families, oral histories of more than 40 descendants, and educational material about genealogy.

In 2017, the Georgetown Memory Project partnered with American Ancestors, the oldest non-profit genealogical society in America, to digitize the GU272 genealogical research and turn it into a searchable online database that would be free to everyone. This website is the product of the partnership between GMP and American Ancestors..

This project collects, digitizes, and makes accessible the freedom suits brought by enslaved families in the Circuit Court for the District of Columbia, Maryland state courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court. In making these documents accessible, the project invites you to explore the legal history of American slavery and the web of litigants, jurists, legal actors, and participants in the freedom suits. This project places these families in the foreground of our interpretive framework of slavery and national formation.

Georgetown University Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation website: Georgetown is engaged in a long-term and ongoing process to more deeply understand and respond to the university’s role in the injustice of slavery and the legacies of enslavement and segregation in our nation. Through engagement with the members of the Descendant community, collaborative projects and new initiatives and learning and research, the university pursues a path of memorialization and reconciliation in our present day.

The Georgetown Slavery Archive is a repository of materials relating to the Maryland Jesuits, Georgetown University, and slavery. This project was initiated in February 2016 by the Archives Subgroup of the Georgetown University Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation and is part of Georgetown University’s Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation initiative. Our research is ongoing.

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA). At the conclusion of the Slave Narrative project, a set of edited transcripts was assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. In 2000-2001, with major support from the Citigroup Foundation, the Library digitized the narratives from the microfilm edition and scanned from the originals 500 photographs, including more than 200 that had never been microfilmed or made publicly available. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs divisions of the Library of Congress.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture is the only national museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life, history, and culture. It was established by an Act of Congress in 2003, following decades of efforts to promote and highlight the contributions of African Americans. To date, the Museum has collected more than 40,000 artifacts and nearly 100,000 individuals have become members. The Museum opened to the public on September 24, 2016, as the 19th museum of the Smithsonian Institution.

NPR Planet Money Podcast, Georgetown University Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation 2016 report (Part 1 & Part 2, 2017

Ithaka S+R, Accountability and Reconciliation: Higher Ed’s Fraught History of Slavery A Question of Freedom: Freedom Suits , 2021

Publisher’s Weekly, The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church, 2023

William G. Thomas III, A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War (Yale University Press (November 2020)

Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Harvard University Press 2004)

Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (Bloomsbury 2014)

Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me To Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (University of North Carolina Press 2016)

At a time characterized by polarization and distrust, the need for approaches that humanize others through narrative and empathy has never been greater. The Lab is dependent on outside funding in order to make our work possible.

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