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Trove Of Artifacts Highlights Realities Of Slavery

The Dred Scott decision

Seventeen-year-old Tonisha Owens stared wide-eyed at the faded script on an 1854 letter. It was once carried years ago by another 17-year-old -- a slave named Frances. The letter was written by a plantation owner's wife to a slave dealer, saying that she needed to sell her chambermaid to pay for horses. But Frances didn't know how to read or write, and didn't know what she carried.


That letter is among more than 400 documents, artifacts and artwork that make up the Kinsey Collection that covers 400 years of African-American triumphs and tragedies in this nation. Bernard Kinsey and his wife Shirley began acquiring pieces more than 35 years ago and has said that Frances's letter speaks to the reality and greed of slavery.


"We accomplish so many things," Owens marveled. "They went through slavery and still accomplished so we can't say, 'I'm tired, I don't feel like doing this.' That's not an excuse."

Owens was among a group of students touring an exhibition of the Kinsey Collection at Baltimore's Reginald F. Lewis Museum. The collection has made its way around the country, including a stint at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. A small portion of it is currently on display at the Epcot Center at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla.






"What we're saying," he told a group of journalists and admirers in Orlando, "is we want to put African-Americans in the dialogue, put us in the stories, 'cause if you get used to not seeing us you start thinking that's OK, when it really isn't OK."

The Kinsey family is also very focused on what the collection means to young people who aren't learning about this history in school. Seventeen-year-old Alexander Bullock says the exhibition changed his mind about a lot of things.

"It shows more of the people you don't hear about or you don't really read about or that the teachers don't talk about," Bullock said. "Everybody talks about [Dr.] Martin Luther King [Jr.] and Malcolm X. .... But you don't really hear about the people they don't talk about, who didn't really get their names out there."

Bullock's classmate, Dominic Gilliam, 16, was both stunned and inspired by the things he learned.



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