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October 23, 2008

Museum exhibit on local slavery opens

A new museum exhibit that documents the region’s ties to slavery offers some surprising revelations, said Pitt history professor Laurence A. Glasco, the exhibit’s historical director.

Created by the University, “Free at Last? Slavery in Pittsburgh in the 18th and 19th Centuries” opens Saturday and runs through April 5 at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh’s Strip District.

The exhibit was prompted by the discovery of 55 handwritten records in the Allegheny County Recorder of Deeds Office last year. Dating from 1792 to 1857, the handwritten records document slavery and indentured servitude of blacks in the region.

With support from the Office of the Chancellor, Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs Robert Hill and the Craig Hall Public Affairs staff began planning the exhibition last spring. Pitt history faculty researched supplementary materials to complement the county records.

Among the records are a bill of sale documenting a black man’s purchase of his wife in order to free her, a record of 36 black people transported to freedom in Pittsburgh from Louisiana, a paper concerning a free black man who was wrongly imprisoned as a fugitive slave and a contract indenturing a 6 year old for 22 years. “We think of Pennsylvania as the land of the Quakers, the ‘good guys,’” Glasco said. “We wouldn’t be surprised if these papers were from Virginia,” he said. But “these things didn’t exist just in Virginia or in the deep South or far away. At the same time it was very present among us.”

Glasco said that even he, who studies Pittsburgh history professionally, found some surprising information in the materials.

“It was stunning to me to see how many black indentured servants there were and how late it ran,” he said, noting that indenture typically is associated with white non-free labor and with colonial times, rather than being thought of as existing into the early 19th century.

“These documents show the transition from slavery to indentured servitude.”

Glasco said that the information contained in the exhibit is powerful and a little-known part of the region’s past. Seeing the handwritten documents makes the experience that much more vivid, he said.

“It brings history closer to you in a way that reading in the abstract doesn’t do,” he said. He plans to take his History of Black Pittsburgh class to the history center, in part to view the exhibit.

Glasco said slave owners often are demonized as bad people, but the exhibit reminds viewers that some of Pittsburgh’s leading citizens, who were otherwise respected and good people, were involved in a practice that since has been condemned.

At one time, owning slaves was considered “normal, natural and nothing to be ashamed of,” Glasco said. After the Quakers began decrying the practice as an abomination, attitudes turned. “Within 100 years nobody would defend it,” he said.

“What we’ve got here is the transition.”

In addition to being of interest to Pittsburghers, who will see some familiar names such as Beltzhoover, Craig and Neville among the list of slaveholders, the display also is of use in placing local history within a global context. Noting that Pitt’s history department includes faculty who study slavery and race relations in areas including the Caribbean, Latin America and Asia, Glasco said, “I think it can be of interest to students and faculty who are investigating these similar types of practices elsewhere in the world.”

—Kimberly K. Barlow

Filed under: Feature,Volume 41 Issue 5

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