About this Project
I got into this through a college friend who was delving into his family’s slave-holding past. And my friend, H.D. Kirkpatrick, got into it through a high-school friend, Jimmie Kirkpatrick. It turns out that Jimmie’s ancestors were enslaved by De’s great-great-grandfather.
De, a forensic psychologist in Charlotte, NC, has since written a profile of slave masters asking, basically, “How could they do what they did? How could they justify it?” *
Reading early chapters of De’s manuscript for Marse, I realized just how little I knew regarding this essential history. So when De sent me a timeline he had developed, I began to add to it, which hasn’t stopped.
I search for related topics online, and get at least half the info from Wikipedia—which offers extensive, detailed, interconnected reports on many aspects of slavery, admittedly not of uniform quality—and I follow new leads as they pop up. I regularly find academic texts with information new to me, but the research is pretty basic.
I try to set a neutral tone and keep events short. But the more one gets into a story, the more emerging details will enrich and alter it. And many, many people know far more about these events than I have been able to gather. I invite additions, corrections and comments; I’ll consider them all.
—Neil S. Martin
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* Marse: A Psychological Portrait of the Southern Slave Master and His Legacy of White Supremacy, H.D. Kirkpatrick, Prometheus Books, Guilford, CT, 2022.
Jimmie and De continue to explore the meaning of their ancestors’ history in articles, a video production and presentations to high-school history classes.
Bibliography
Books:
Armstrong, Nancy M., Navajo Long Walk. Lanham, MD, 1994.
Barcia, Manuel, The Great American Slave Revolt of 1825. Baton Rouge, LA, 2012.
Bradley, Patricia, Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution. Jackson, MS, 1998.
Brown, Vincent, Tacky’s Revolt, The Story of an Atlantic Slave War. Cambridge, MA, 2020.
Burrows, Edwin G. and Wallace, Mike, Gotham: A History of New York City. New York, 1999.
Catton, Bruce, Reflections on the Civil War. New York, NY, 1981.
Coit, Margaret L., John C. Calhoun, Cambridge, MA, 1950.
Crenson, Matthew A., Baltimore, A Political History. Baltimore, MD, 2017.
Darity Jr., William A., Mullen, Kirsten A., and Hubbard, Lucas. The Black Reparations Project. Oakland, CA, 2023.
DelBlanco, Andrew, The War Before the War. USA, 2018.
Louis, Wm. Roger, editor in chief, The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford, NY, 1988.
Franklin, John Hope and Higgenbotham, Evelyn Brooks, From Slavery to Freedom, A History of African Americans, Ninth edition. New York, NY, 2011.
Gill, Jonathan, Harlem, The Four-Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America. New York, NY, 2011.
Haggendorn, Jan and Johnson, Marion, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade. Cambridge, UK, 1986.
Hannah-Jones, Nikole, The 1619 Project. New York, NY, 2021.