Saturday, June 16th, 2012
Want to see an amazingly detailed model of an actual slave slip in the Underground Railroad Room at the Gage Center? WE’VE GOT ONE!! Frank Grenier, an award-winning model ship builder from Manlius has gifted us with a model of Dos Amigos, a famous ship used to transport enslaved people from Africa in the 19th century. An attempt to create a national museum in the South centered around a Dos Amigos life-sized replica failed to get funding, but we succeeded on a model-ship size scale with a LOT of help from our Manlius friend and funding from the Ludwick Family Foundation. But now we need you.
While we search for a period table on which to display the ship, we would like you to check your garage, basement, garage sales or thrift shops for a table, dresser or other piece of sturdy furniture about 20×22x50 so we can get Dos Amigos up for you to see ASAP. Please contact Teresa or Pat at 315-637-9511 or foundation@matildajoslyngage.org if you have a piece to donate.
And then watch as we tell the story of the system of slavery then and now. While slavery in the world is everywhere illegal, there have never been as many enslaved people in the world as there are today. Matilda Joslyn Gage wrote about trafficking in human beings in 1893:
Matilda Joslyn Gage on Human Trafficking
Excerpt from Woman, Church & State
(originally published 1893)
“There is also proof of regularly organized kidnapping schemes and deportation of girls for the vilest purposes, not only abroad, but [also] to the pineries and lumber camps of Michigan and Wisconsin. Bloodhounds kept for this purpose or hunting down the girls with shotguns prevents escape, when attempted. In January 1887, Representative Breen appeared before the House Judiciary Committee of the Michigan legislature, confirming the charge that a regular trade in young girls existed between Milwaukee, Chicago and the mining regions of the Upper Peninsula of that state…. So little attention have legislators given, that policemen, judges and sheriffs are found aiding and abetting the proprietors of these dens. Their emissaries find young girls between thirteen and sixteen the easiest to kidnap and when once in power of these men, their hair is cut in order that they may be known. A regular system of transfer of the girls exists between the many hundred such dens, where clubs, whips and irons are the instruments to hold them in subjection.”
(p. 110, Modern Reader’s Edition. Read more by purchasing this book from the Gage Foundation.)
Gage’s book was banned partly because she brought to light
these horrors against young girls in her time.
