When you realize, that your Alma Mater’s name is taken from a plantation. And every time you chant that one classic chant at a football game, you’re chanting the name of a plantation.
And you see your Alma Mater as perpetuating the plantation.
And you wonder if your Alma Mater understands as much as they say they do.
Copyright Off The Porch History 2021
…there weren’t any policeman, but there were [slave] patrollers instead.
Their duty [of the slave patrollers] was the same as that of the policemen today.
If the slaves had a corn-shucking party or a prayer meeting, and if they made too much noise, the patrollers would arrest them.”
-Testimony of Jane Pyatt
[“[Jane Pyatt was] Age 89 when interviewed by Thelma Dunston in Portsmouth (Virginia)… Mrs. Pyatt was born in Middlesex County. At only three months of age, she was sold with her mother to a Norfolk slaveholder who shortly moved to Portsmouth.”]
All quotations from We Lived in a Little Cabin in the Yard, ed. Belinda Hurmence, part of the Slave Narratives of Virginia (WPA, Federal Writers Project).
copyright Belinda Hurmence, LOC/WPA and Federal Writers Project, and Off the Porch History 2020
Off The Porch History 