The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center unveiled an exhibit earlier this month with a focus on remembering Amer- ica’s history of enslavement, particularly in the state of Illinois.
To forget would be wrong. The museum speaks for 6 million slain European Jews, death camp survivors, and their relatives when it makes that case.
The exhibit opened on February 10. It features a new collection of artifacts, historical presentations, and interactive exhibits, and seminars will be presented as the museum introduces “Purchased Lives: The American Slave Trade from 1808 to 1865.”
Running through August 25, the presentation springs from The Historic New Orleans Collection, a massive research center devoted to the history of that city and the Gulf South. The 100,000-item museum digs deep into the role of enslavement in the Big Easy’s heartache and history.
New Orleans was the corporate center of America’s slave trade.
As for modern Illinois, that is not “somebody else’s history.”
And that is why Skokie’s museum has decided to widen its educational mandate, especially for student visitors. Through in- teractive displays, “Purchased Lives” allows visitors to engage directly with the historical record by tracking the shipment of more than 70,000 people to New Orleans. It showcases more than 75 original artifacts, including period paintings and first person accounts from slave narratives and oral histories.
The exhibit also shares a collection of “Lost Friends” ads, placed after the Civil War, by newly freed people attempting to locate family members, specifically in Illinois.
“The exhibition is powerful, not only for the subject matter but also because of the incredible and rare artifacts that are in- cluded,” says Arielle Weininger, the museum’s chief curator. “In addition the interactive ‘Lost Friends’ database helps the visitor understand that this is not a southern issue; its ramifications were felt throughout the country and are still evident today.”
In 1808 the United States legally abolished its international slave trade. But from that date through the end of the Civil War in 1865, domestic slave merchandising continued unabated from state to state; historians estimate slavery displaced nearly 2 million people during the time span.
The issue is particularly relevant to Illinois. Historians widely regard Illinois as the most proslavery of the Midwest states. The Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, was never a resident of a free Illinois. Four Illinois governors were slave holders. For 50 years after international slave trading was banned,the state protected slave “ownership” with sanctioned, vigilant violence and legal manipulation.
Slavery thrived in the open. Abolitionist activists were killed, mobs took revenge, and those who aided the Underground Railroad slaves to freedom in Canada risked being lynched.
“For a northern state, however, Illinois might have had the worst slavery record,” author and historian Tara McClellan McAndrew reported for National Public Radio. “The state was the only one in the upper Mississippi Valley, which [also] included Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, whose Constitution allowed slavery and indentured servitude.”
Illinois adopted “black codes” and perpetual indentured servitude. Those laws, McAndrew says, prevented blacks from being unaccompanied in Illinois for more than 10 days, or else they could be arrested, fined repeatedly, and auctioned. “Slaves” or “servants” had to have written permission to travel more than 10 miles from their master’s homestead, or risk a whipping. Blacks couldn’t gather in groups of three or more to dance or make “revelry,” or they could be lashed.
In short, Illinois’ record of supporting Lincoln’s call to arms against the South was exemplary. But there is little documenta- tion that Illinoisans widely backed civil liberties for freed slaves.
A discussion by experts examining the historical impact of domestic slave trade highlighted the exhibit’s opening day. The participants were Erin Greenwald, curator of “Purchased Lives”; Nancy Bercaw, chair, division of political history, National Museum of American History; and Dr. Christopher Reed, professor emeritus of history, Roosevelt University, and general secretary, Black Chicago History Forum.
The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is open daily from 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursday evenings until 7 p.m.; and Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. For more information visit ilholocaustmuseum.org or call 847 967-4800.
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