A Stirring Song Sung: Heroic African Americans from Slavery to Freedom, 1619 to 1865

For the last three decades, William Earle Williams has traced the overlooked histories of African Americans, locating unmarked sites and photographing them with clarity and quiet elegance. 

This exhibition includes more than 130 photographs together with historic books, maps, newspapers, and manuscripts. Through both his research and his photographs, Williams tracks the history of African Americans from the first shipments of enslaved Africans to the many stops on the Underground Railroad, and from the battlefields of the Civil War to Emancipation. He summarizes his subject as “historical places in the New World from the Caribbean to North America where Americans black and white determined the meaning of freedom.” 

This moving exhibition revealed the power of photography to bring what has been willfully forgotten or erased back to our collective consciousness.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.