How Does a City Choose to Remember its Past?

Many Milwaukeeans are familiar with the 1854 abolitionist rescue of Joshua Glover, an African American who escaped slavery and found sanctuary in Wisconsin. Far fewer know about the horrific racial lynching of George Marshall Clark, a free black man, that happened only seven years later in Milwaukee. What was their story, and how have we remembered these two men?

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Austin Callaway

Austin Callaway Share Special Exhibits The Freedom-Lovers’ Roll Call Wall Stories Behind the Postcards: Paintings and Collages of Jennifer Scott Risking Everything: The Fight for Black Voting Rights Portraiture of Resistance Memorial to the Victims of Lynching Freedom-Lovers’ Pledge Echoes of Equality: Art Inspired by Memphis and Maya Explore Our Galleries African Peoples Before Captivity…

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Inside a Report on Slavery and Its Legacy

A New York Times reporter investigates how, in the 1840s, New York Life, the nation’s third-largest life insurance company, sold 508 policies on enslaved men and women — and discovers who the beneficiaries were and locates some of the descendants of those insured slaves.

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Did a Fear of Slave Revolts Drive American Independence?

FOR more than two centuries, we have been reading the Declaration of Independence wrong. Or rather, we’ve been celebrating the Declaration as people in the 19th and 20th centuries have told us we should, but not the Declaration as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams wrote it. To them, separation from Britain was as much, if not more, about racial fear and exclusion as it was about inalienable rights.

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