daryle williams

By Jessica Weiss ’05

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded grants to projects involving two University of Maryland historians to expand a massive digital database on the transatlantic slave trade and investigating the desegregation of mass transit in New York City.

Department of History Professors Daryle Williams and Richard Bell are benefitting from $24 million given last month to support 225 projects at museums, libraries, universities and historic sites across the country.

Williams is part of the multi-institutional team awarded $349,744 to add 10 digital collections to Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (Enslaved.org), an online portal launched last year with records on hundreds of thousands of individuals involved in the historical slave trade.

Among the new collections are records from the Maryland State Archives’ Legacy of Slavery in Maryland project, which includes primary resources like newspaper ads, committal notices and census records related to Black Marylanders, fugitives and those who assisted slaves on the run in the state. Researchers will work to integrate those records into the Enslaved.org platform, where they can be used by scholars, family historians and the general public.

“This is a great opportunity to know more about slavery right here in Maryland—to know more about ourselves,” said Williams, who is a co-principal investigator at Enslaved.org. “We can’t understand the history of the state without talking about the impact of enslavement here. And these are really rich materials to do that.”  

Other additional data sets, which range from those held at small, local institutions to those at large, university-based special collections in the mid-Atlantic, the Carolinas and the Lower Mississippi, will increase the Enslaved.org linked open data platform to approximately 1.3 million records.

The funding will also go in part toward supporting undergraduate researchers who will work on the project as part of the Summer Research Opportunity Program, a long-standing pipeline collaboration among member institutions of the Big Ten Academic Alliance.

Another $6,000 will support Bell as he works on his next book, “The First Freedom Riders: Streetcars and Street Fights in Jim Crow New York.” It will tell the story of Elizabeth Jennings, a 25-year-old New Yorker who launched the first successful civil disobedience campaign in U.S. history. On July 16, 1854, Jennings stepped onto a ‘whites-only’ streetcar on Third Avenue, becoming the first among a small army of young Black women and men to fight to forcibly desegregate mass transit in New York City.

“Her story got under my skin—not only because it was dramatic and significant, but also because it reminds me that Black women have often been at the center of this country’s most important civil rights fights,” Bell said.

Recently named a 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to support his work on the book, Bell will use the new NEH funds to travel to out-of-state archives for research.

“I’m eager to get back into the stacks and reading rooms, where the true riches for a project like this definitely rest,” he said.

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The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $1.4 million to fund the third phase of Enslaved.org, which will refine the site’s data infrastructure, ensure a dedicated team and continue partnerships with scholars, heritage and cultural organizations and the public.

The Mellon Foundation funded the initial two phases of Enslaved.org—the first beginning in 2018 and the second in 2020—which provided support for both proof-of-concept and implementation. Phase II also saw the launch of the project’s peer-reviewed Journal of Slavery & Data Preservation.

This new round of funding is the latest in a long series of Mellon investments into research projects at the University of Maryland or involving Maryland researchers.

Among them, the foundation has provided over $3 million since 2016 to fund the African American Digital Humanities initiative at Maryland, and a recently announced $4.8 million grant will fund the Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, & Optimism (DISCO) network, which includes UMD Assistant Professor of Communication Catherine Knight Steele.

NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with Daryle Williams, an associate history professor at the University of Maryland, about the Enslaved.org initiative aimed at documenting the lives of enslaved people.

Click here to listen.

Transcript:

AILSA CHANG, HOST: Twelve and a half million people were sold into slavery during the transatlantic slave trade, but little to nothing is known about the lives of the vast majority of those enslaved people. A new project seeks to change that. The initiative, called Enslaved.org, is documenting the lives, the names and experiences of both enslaved people and the perpetrators of the slave trade. Daryle Williams teaches history at the University of Maryland and is a co-principal investigator.

Welcome.

DARYLE WILLIAMS: Thank you so much, Ailsa.

CHANG: So, you know, the first enslaved people arrived in America 400 years ago. And in the centuries since, you know, we've seen families and researchers like yourself try to document this incredibly shameful past, and yet there is still so much we do not know about the lives of these individuals. Why do you think that is? Why do you think we don't know more?

WILLIAMS: Well, slavery itself was a system of violence and an attempt to strip individuals of their lives, of their names, of their families. And that has many ramifications in the documentary record that, you know, fractured those lives and stripped those names away. And we live with that today in the legacies of slavery and all the things associated with anti-Blackness that come to frame what we think is knowable or worthy of knowing. And so we tried in this project to address some of that and hopefully remedy some of it.

CHANG: Yeah. So it sounds like a lot of the research that has been done already has been done in this piecemeal fashion; it's focused on one particular region or era. Do you feel like your project is trying to connect the dots between different bodies of scholarship that have already existed but existed separately from each other?

WILLIAMS: Certainly. In terms of the - there's a tremendous amount of scholarly energy and effort in the work that's being done by various kinds of scholars to try to uncover the lives and the names of enslaved people. Connecting that scholarship together, that is something we've - we're learning it's possible to connect these various kinds of projects.

In connecting those projects, we're also understanding that it's going to be possible - we've already made some advances here of actually connecting the people who are in the various datasets - a sale that might be in one dataset connecting that same person to a baptismal record in another dataset or a flight ad (ph) in another dataset. So to connect those - that is possible. We've learned that now to be possible.

CHANG: Well, ultimately, how do you hope people like me can use the information in this database?

WILLIAMS: There's so many different ways. You know, we do have people who want to find a direct connection, and they're looking for names of family members or ancestors, maybe someone they have - directly know or they suspect, whether it's last names or first names - and so that discovery process of finding one's own past.

But sometimes it's not about finding one's own past, but it's about finding out about a place or time period to begin to understand more broadly what the lives of the enslaved would look like in various spaces and times, what their voices sounded like and registered in various kinds of documents, the violence and the pressures that they faced and the choices. And so to be able to understand, potentially to empathize, certainly to comprehend the fullness of the lives of the enslaved is something which I do think many different people, including yourself, might be interested in.

CHANG: I mean, what do you think many people still misunderstand about the lives of enslaved people?

WILLIAMS: That - the fullness. I think that that is something that's very - it's a deep, dark legacy of enslavement itself - to strip the fullness. And so that is very difficult to understand - family life, to understand the dreams and hopes, the personalities which come across in some of the documents and court testimonies, for instance. I just find these personalities in these stories. There's peculiarities. And I think that that's a very troubling dimension to the broader violence of enslavement - is to strip this humanity from these individuals and their families and their lives and our knowledge about that.

CHANG: Daryle Williams is a co-principal investigator with Enslaved.org.

Thank you so much for being with us today.

WILLIAMS: Thank you.