After ten years of planning, fundraising, and construction, the $110 million Freedom Cener opened on August 3, 2004 and the official opening ceremonies took place on August 23rd. First Lady Lara Bush, Oprah Winfrey, and Muhamud Ali attended the ceremony. Three pavilions of the museum celebrate courage, cooperation, and perserverance.
The first thing we saw was a big quilt that had pictures on it. After that, we went into an exhibit that talked about slavery in the United States at about the 1800s. It had a slave pen that we went into and saw where they used to keep slaves chained up. Another section had pictures of famous abolitionists of that time like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stow, who I learned was from Cincinnati.
Frederick Douglass was an African-American social reformer, speaker, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became an abolitionist. He stood as a living counterexample to slaveholder's arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as inpendent U.S. citizens. Many northerners found it hard to believe that such a great speaker had been a slave. He believed in the equality of all people whether male, female, black, white, or Native American.
Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and author. She wrote the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was the depiction of life for African-Americans as slaves. It reached millions as a novel and play, but provoked widespread anger in the South among slave owners. Beecher Stowe wrote more than 20 books, including novels, travel memoirs, and collections of articles and letters. She was influential for both her writings and her public stance on social issues of the day.
The Underground Railroad was a secret route used by 19th century African slaves in the United States to escape to free states and Canada with the help of abolitionists and allies who were sympathetic to their cause. At its peak, nearly 1,000 slaves per year escaped from slave states using the Underground Railroad. There were more than 5,000 court cases for escaped slaves recorded. Under the original Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, officials from slave states were responsible for the recovery of runaway slaves.
Because the law required sparse documentation to claim a person as a fugitive, slave catchers kidnapped blacks, especially children, from free states and brought them to slave states to sell them. Southern politicians would exaggerate the number of escaped slaves and often blamed these escapes on Northeners interfering with Southern property rights. At least 30,000 slaves, and potentially more than 100,000, escaped to Canada via the Underground Railroad. Numerous Black Canadian communities developed in Southern Ontario. These were generally in the region next to Niagra Falls. Nearly 1,000 refugees settled in Toronto, and several rural villages made up mostly of ex-slaves were established in Kent and Essex counties.
With the outbreak of the Civil War in the United States, many black refugees left Canada to enlist in the Union Army. Although some later returned to Canada, many remained in the United States. Thousands of others returned to the American South after the war ended. The desire to reconnect with friends and family was strong, and most were hopeful about the changes emancipation and Reconstruction would bring.
I thought the museum was very interesting because I have always liked black history ever since elementary school. The people were nice, the exhibits were well made, and I learned many things from it. So if you would like to learn more about the Underground Railroad, I recommend you check out the museum.
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