Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress
in Washington D.C. John Cole: Well good morning everyone.
Welcome to the beginning of the Center for the Book's spring season.
We have an early spring season.
We have a list of our talks over on the table.
I hope that you will pick one up.
I'm John Cole; I'm the director of the Center for the Book
and the purpose of these Books and Beyonds noontime talks is
to introduce you new works that are based largely on the Library
of Congress's collections or that have a special kind
of project connection with the Library of Congress.
Each of these talks is actually filmed for Web site presentation
on the Library's Web site and on the Center for the Book's Web site.
We will have, after the presentation by Linda, we will have the chance
for questions and answers and I hope that you participate.
This is a wonderful book and you will learn about how it really comes
from all parts of the Library's collections
and it's an early Library of Congress contribution
to not only the Civil War history but of course the celebrations
that are going on with Lincoln
and all the excitement that's underway here.
When we have the questions and answers, when you have a question,
that is actually your -- and okay for us
to use your image on our Web site.
There's a permission question here we want to be clear about
but we don't want to scare off any of the questions.
The Center for the Book will have a number of activities this year.
I am able to say that we are planning to go ahead
with the National Book Festival.
Our tentative date is September 26th,
so that will be an exciting continuation
of book promotion activity here at the Library of Congress.
To introduce our speaker and her wonderful book, it's my pleasure
to present Ralph Eubanks who is the Library's director of publishing.
Let's give Ralph a hand.
Ralph? [applause] Ralph Eubanks: Good afternoon,
it's a great pleasure for me to introduce Linda Barrett Osborne.
I've had the pleasure of working with her for a number of years
and during that time, one of the things we had talked
about is developing a book that would be
for the young readers' market and I'm proud
to the say this is our first book and I hope the first of several.
And Linda is a writer, editor in the Library's publishing office
and she's worked on a number of books.
She is a co-author of the "Library
of Congress Civil War Desk Reference," and author of "Women
of the Civil Rights Movement," which is in our Women Who Dare series,
published with Pomegranate.
She's also a co-author of "Oh, Freedom!", a children's book
on the civil rights' movement
that School Library Journal called an important
and book was proclaimed sophisticated.
"Traveling the Freedom Road" is based on Linda's research here
at the Library of Congress.
And without further ado, I'm happy to turn the program over to Linda.
Thank You.
[applause] Linda Barrett Osborne: Well, thank you John for inviting me
to do this program, and John was actually not only the director
of the Center for the Book, but he was the acting director
of the publishing office while I wrote most of the book,
so I want to especially thank him for that and of course Ralph,
who's support has been enormous.
All my colleagues who are here honor me with their encouragement
and support and I want to thank them for being here today.
Also my friends, and even more, I want to thank all of you
who don't know me, for coming to hear about the book,
which is a children's book, but we think it's aimed
at junior high aged children if you're thinking of buying it,
or who the audience is for.
It deals will some difficult history, hopefully in a plain way.

It's an honor to be speaking here during Black History month,
and I think it's great that we single out a month
to celebrate African American achievement.
But I'd also like to say
that African American history deserves reading
and thinking about all year long.
It's American history, and I think we all, regardless of our roots,
need to study if we truly want
to understand how our past has shaped our present.
As I wrote in the introduction to Traveling the Freedom Road,
"Countries have stories to tell, just as people do."
And I really believe it's critically important for everyone, young people
but the rest of too, to know that story.
When I conceived The Freedom Road, I proposed it as a book,
we got the contract, and I wrote it.
I did not know that Barack Obama would win the Democratic nomination.
[laughter] Actually, it was before, it takes so long to do a book
that it was really before anybody has declared themselves.
And certainly, I didn't know he was going
to be elected President of the United States.
But I think his election provides a context for American history
that makes the stories and events described
in the book even more poignant and meaningful when you consider all
of the struggle that took, a place to get to this place, struggle,
hardship, sorrow, also courage and persistence.
In this book, stories in turn I think make Obama's election seem
more meaningful and poignant.
Again, the past and the present are always linked.
You can look at how far we have come, but always look
at how far we have to go, too.
And this is the ebb and flow of history I've tried to capture
in writing about slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction,
which is time when the North and South tried
to become one country again, and to find a place
for the newly freed slaves in the life of that country.
I had it in mind for several years to write about this period
of junior high aged kids.
At the publishing office we had talked about doing a children's book
and I wanted to do it from an African American perspective.
One of the great surprises and gifts of my life is
that for 20 years I've been absorbed in the reading of and writing
of African American history.
But it was my research at the Library for other projects
that made me want to write the book as much as possible
from a youthful perspective.
I had seen an essay in our manuscript division,
which was written in 1854, it's on the screen now.
It's actually the hand of the student
that wrote it, incredible penmanship.
I don't think it would look this way today,
actually it would be typed today, on the computer.
But, I'd seen this essay and it was written by Marietta Hill
and she was a student at Myrtilla Miner School for Free-Colored Girls
in Washington D.C. That's the official name of the school.
I sometimes think that slavery will never be abolished
and then I nearly despair of freedom swaying its banner
over a suffering world.
Sometimes the dark cloud seems to overshadow me and I say,
'will slavery forever exist?'
But a voice says, 'it shall cease, it shall and must be abolished.'
I think there will be bloodshed before all can be free.
And the question is, are we willing to give up our lives for it?
And wow, this is an eloquent, imprescient observation.
It's by a teenage girl and it was stored in-Myrtilla Miner had stored
papers here and this one little paper folder with student work,
and you can see why I think it was saved.
Well, with this observation in hand, I thought I would look
for other observations and experiences of young people
in the collections of the Library.
So "Freedom Road" incorporates some things that come
from the general collection, some from rare books,
some from manuscripts, some from prints and photographs.
It incorporates narratives by runaway slaves,
diaries of the period, anti-slavery publications aimed at children found
in the general collections, but also Rare Books and Manuscript division.
There was an enormous amount
of anti-slavery publications for children.
Hymnals, little books, there's an anti-slavery alphabet:
A is for abolitionist, which because
of the way technology works I couldn't get a picture of it
on the screen, but there's a picture in the book.
And I also relied heavily on interviews conducted
with former slaves in the 1930s as part
of the Federal Writers' Project.
And these are held in the American Folk Life Center here.
Those interviewed were children and teenagers at the time of slavery,
the Civil War and Reconstruction.
They were in their 80s and 90s when they were interviewed,
but they were talking about the period
from the perspective that I wanted.
And finally many of the illustrations
from the book feature young people in the prints and drawings
and daguerreotypes and photographs from the prints
and photographs division.
There's no new drawing in this; it's all archival,


This is the opening shot in the book, and just a general shot.
As you can see, I didn't always find pictures by children,
but I found pictures with children in them, many of them.
And these are the slaves
of Confederate general named Thomas Braden,
assembled for this photograph,
but you can see there's a Union officer there,
which means that they had already been liberated
after the Civil War started.
There's a lot of history here and I don't know how much you're familiar
with and I could spend days talking about the specific events
of the slavery and the Civil War and Reconstruction, and I'm not going
to do that, but I hope that it will be clear,
that you all have a general background.
Now, I wanted "Freedom Road" to bring to life the stories
of ordinary people and I wanted to set these in the context of major,
national events affecting Americans such as the rise
of the domestic slave trade --
this is all where we get into history 101 --
the fugitive slave laws, the Emancipation Proclamation
and the Republican Congresses and that's
when the Republicans were the good guys back then.
[laughter] Reconstruction policies; I've tried to explain these --
these are capital H history events to kids and also to connect them
to their personal stories because I didn't just want
to throw the stories out there without a context
and I didn't want the context to be so classroom-like
that they couldn't hear the individual works
of the people I'm going to quote.
Well there's an example I'm going to read to you.
I talk about the terms of the Missouri Compromise.
Missouri was accepted as a slave state; Maine as a free state;
slavery was banned in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase.
I explain all of that in I hope simple language
and then I link these to the words of a former slave, James Abbott.
He was an enslaved child in Missouri and if Missouri had become --
this is all my writing -- if Missouri had become a free state,
James might have gone to school, although not always
in the North actually, or in free state; done chores for his parents
and played with other kids.
Instead, he worked from sunrise to sunset and beyond.
His master was sick and this is the quote: Lay from the open
in the spring about the time the flies come,
till weed sowing time in the fall.
All that time he made me stand at the side of his bed,
keeping the flies off him.
I was just seven years old but there I had to stand day
and night, night and day.
Course I'd sleep sometimes, when he was sleeping.
Sometimes when I dozed, my brush would fall on his face.
Then he'd take the stick and whack me a few across the head
and he'd say "Now, I dare you to cry."
So that was one of the stories, one of the memories Before I read more
of these stories, there were a few general points I wanted
to make absolutely clear in the book for kids and all people who read it.
Beyond the details of what happened, the Missouri Compromise
or the Fugitive Slave Laws, there were just points
that I wanted to highlight in general.
Okay, one is that slavery was a contradiction to the words
of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
From the beginning, before we were even a country,
when we were debating about being a country, this was an issue.
And it was a contradiction that made Americans defensive
on some sides, and some uncomfortable.
But by not resolving the issue of slavery at our country's birth,
we were creating divisions that would continue to grow
and putting off a conflict that would almost inevitably have
to be settled in the future.
And this is a theme that runs throughout the book
and I hope it's a basic one for kids to understand.
There were people who thought slavery was good; there were people
who thought slavery was bad.
You got more and more people on each side as the country grew
and became more complex, as it added more states.
As they had to make the decision whether slavery should be there,
you got more conflict and more division.

Now, another point I wanted to make is that slavery was cruel and brutal
and deadening to the human spirit no matter how kind an owner might seem.
I think that violence and not just physical violence, but emotional
and intellectual violence were necessary
to keep the system of slavery in place.
On the screen is a picture of a slave auction and there's a --
you can see families being auctioned;
you can see a young boy at the center.
And this is actually fairly mild picture for a slave auction.
People would be -- well again, I can't go into the specific history
where people would be crowded together
in a totally inhuman way and sold like animals.
I have another point that I wanted to make.
Oh, here's part of -- this is the parting.
Families were separated in slavery.
Children were taken away from their parents;
parents were often not together at all.
And this is an incredibly and harsh and difficult thing to experience.
The parting shows the mother and child calling
out after the father's who being sold away.
And again, it's a fairly mild illustration compared
to the history, the real history,
and the other illustrations one could find,
but it's a children's book.
This is running away, which many slaves did and there are stories
of fugitive slaves in the book, which I will get to.
This actually I put in at this time when I'm talking about the emotional
and intellectual impact of slavery on the slave, but also one thing
that African Americans had to live
with was the stereotyping of themselves.
This is a tobacco label and it shows a very happy slave family playing
music and having fun and smiling,
which is the way white people depicted slaves and the argument
that the south gave that their slaves were really happy,


Next, ah, my next point.
Not all slaves were black and not all blacks were slaves.
In the contrition of being enslaved was passed
on to children through the mother.
So these are two slave children in this picture;
Isaac the boy and Rosa the girl.   They were both slaves.

They were both freed because the Union army took over Louisiana,
New Orleans and as they did at this certain point in history,
they freed all the slaves and put them into school, but you can see
that she is very light skinned.
Children could be seventh eighths or more European
in background but still be slaves.
But on the other hand, as they say, not all Blacks were slaves,
which is I think a misconception.
There was a free Black community that I wrote

about before the Civil War, oh there's another.
She was also a slave girl; her freedom was bought by abolitionists
in the north and you can see the kinds
of photos that I was looking for.
It's very exciting to find something like this and in such good shape;
thank you Prints and Photographs division.
[laughter] Now, here are a free Black mother and son;
very dignified, not poor, not ignorant, not any of the stereotypes
that applied to slaves who also had both dignity and courage
in the way that they lived.
I write about the discrimination however
that even free Blacks faced before the Civil War, after the Civil War,
during the Civil War, and their activities as abolitionists.
Some of the most -- well, the most famous was Frederick Douglas,
who's also a runaway slave to begin with.

There's Abraham Lincoln and his son again, a child's image.
And part of the way that Abraham Lincoln figures in this story is
that his goal, and the goal of the North when the Civil War started,
was to preserve the Union.
The idea of emancipating slaves came about gradually
and to some extent, as a tactic of war.
And in fact, the Emancipation Proc --
this is not to underestimate the significance of what Lincoln did,
but the Emancipation Proclamation did not free all the slaves,
which is another thing that children often don't know.
Only those in the Confederacy; slave owners and slaves
in the border states, which were the four slave owning states
that stayed loyal to the Union, were not affected.
So the idea of freeing the slaves was a gradual idea over this period.
Then there's the Emancipation Proclamation celebrated
and you see scenes on one side of slavery with whipping and auctions
and so on and of education and decent labor
for wage on the other side.   This is a very idealist poster.

But, it represented the highest aspirations of people at the time.
Okay. Now the other thing that I wanted kids to know was
that African Americans were not allowed to fight
in the Union army when the war began.
They were allowed to join the Navy, so aside from its symbolic meaning,
the tangible difference the Emancipation Proclamation made was
to allow Black men to join the battle for their freedom.
Even so, they had to fight to be granted equal pay for over a year;
equal pay with white soldiers, they had to prove themselves brave
in battle, to northern politicians, to the press,
to the general population, which they did.
This is John Henry.
I'm not sure what position some of -- I think he was an orderly.
This is company E; this is again, later in the war after 1863
when the proclamation went into effect, an all Black unit.
Then we get to Reconstruction.   This is Charleston, South Carolina.

There are four boys sitting in front of the ruined columns of a church.
That's my other point, another point,
that the South was physically devastated after the war.
No major battles except Gettysburg had been fought on Union soil
but the Freedman's Bureau was formed to help former slaves
and it was formed for after the war ended, but it was also formed
to help white southerners who were homeless and starving.
They didn't always take the help graciously, but it was meant
to help basically a war torn country restore itself.
Now although the South claimed prociferously that it suffered
from bayonet rule, that is it was occupied by Union troops
and among them, Black soldiers,
which they considered a great insult, and when the war ended,
the actual number of occupying troops was very, very small,
down to 6,000 in the -- through the whole South,
including Texas by the 1870s.
Moreover, the presence of Union troops,
the Federal troops was the only protection that freed blacks had
against discriminatory practices.
The Southern states tried to recreate slavery
through new laws and rules.
Recreate slavery, especially those governing labor.
Okay, and in there was a set of, there were things called black codes
that were begun in the 1860s, right 1866, 1865,
right after the Civil War, that set out very,
very restrictive rules for African Americans.
One of them was, I have the picture of the children here
and I'm not sure of the date of the picture; my book ends in 1877,
this could have been a little later, but as you see, it wasn't dated
and I just wanted people and children to look
at these children's faces and realize
that they could be taken away from their parents even
after emancipation if their parents were charged with not taking care
of them well, and they would be put to work for white landowners again.
They might be taken care of by these white landowners
until they reached maturity, which is really slavery all over again.
What the freed men themselves wanted most was


That rarely happened.
Most became sharecroppers and they often worked for their former owners
and that situation deteriorated as time went by.
This is a drawing of a freedmen's village in Alexandria, Virginia,
which was actually reasonably successful at educating
and employing the freedmen, but it was not typical.
Okay, and there -- I just love this shot.
Again, it's no date; sometime in this period, perhaps a little
after of people in the cotton fields.
I don't know whether they were sharecroppers, I don't know --
there's nothing labeling them, if they worked for wages,
if they worked for their owners or not.
And here's another one.
Okay. Now, although African Americans voted and were elected
to office during Reconstruction, within a few years
after the Civil War, all the southern state governments were run
by whites, many of whom had been leaders of the Confederacy
and that's 1865 to 1877, but in fact, states like Virginia never --
always had a majority white government.
So the image of the South as --
it did suffer definitely from the war [unintelligible],
the land was devastated, but in terms of the charges of rule
by outsiders, ruled by Northerners,
ruled by African Americans, it just wasn't true.
It was a story that became, in a myth, that became a part
of our history in the early part of the 20th century,
the romantization of the Civil War.   And as they say, many of the leaders

within 15 years had been leaders in the Confederacy.
Finally, the educating the freedman was a success story.
Adults as well as children were eager to learn
and they had been forbidden to read and write during slavery;
there were laws against it in all the southern states and they flocked
to classrooms to make up for lost time.
And this educational push was enormously successful and one thing
that you can't take away from Reconstruction.
And now, another point I make,
which is true for the Civil Rights movement too in the 1950s is
that any freedom and equality enjoyed
by African Americans always depended on the United States government
in this period, not the state governments.
United States government not only to pass laws that granted civil rights
and there was a civil rights law, and of course there were the 13th,
14th, and 15th amendments that freed the slaves, made them citizens,
and allowed Black men, not women, not any women, the right to vote.
They not only had to pass these laws, they had to enforce them.
And what happened in the years after the Civil War,
was that Reconstruction weakened and ended
as the North basically grew tired of protecting the freed men.
They were more interested in their own issues and economic issues,
in industrializing issues, and they decided
that Southern whites knew best how to govern the southern states
and it ushered in a period of segregation that lasted into well,
1964, the Civil Right Act and 1965, the Voting Rights Act.
Finally I wanted to make the point that despite racism, discrimination,
and violence, African Americans reunited their families,
they established churches; they came together in communities;
they stored up pride; they were determined;
they demonstrated great courage to get them through the harsh years
of segregation in the first half of the 20th century.
Reconstruction wasn't wasted; it gave them experience
that they would use, continue to use and use later.
Gave them a sense of self that was different from slavery in spite
of all the efforts of white supremacists to take that away.
I'd like to read just a few pages from "Freedom Road" now
so that you can hear some of the voices that speak through the book.
Actually the first voice is mine.
These are the Edmondson sisters on the screen.
On the night of April 15th, 1848, 13 year old Emily Edmondson,
her 15 year old sister Mary,
four of their brothers secretly boarded a schooner named Pearl
docked at the wharf in the Potomac River
in Washington D.C. Though their father was a free man,
the six siblings were slaves because their mother was enslaved
and according to the laws of Washington D.C. and many states,
children born to an enslaved mother were slaves.
Now the Edmondson children had good jobs in the capital city
but their wages were not their own.
What they earned belonged to their masters and they were well treated
but they were not at liberty to live where they wanted to
or to work at what they chose.
And what they chose that rainy night in April was freedom.
The plan was for the Pearl to sail down the Potomac,
then up the Chesapeake Bay to a place
where the 77 slaves aboard would be picked up and travel by land
to the free state city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The Edmondson girls hid in the schooner's hull with the others.
They knew the risk they were taking if they were caught trying
to escape; they would likely be sold to a slave trader.
They would be forced to leave their D.C. home
and would be taken farther south where the chances
of escape diminished with each mile.
The Edmonson sisters might never work as household servants again,
instead they might toil endlessly in the hot cotton fields
of the southern states and like many other enslaved people
who had been sold at the whim of an owner,
they might never see their parents or their brothers and sisters again.
And this is what did and did not happen to Emily,
Mary, and their brothers.
Before it reached the Chesapeake, the Pearl was captured by those
who enforced the slave laws.
A slave trader bought them all and took the siblings to New Orleans.
There they would have stayed except
that the yellow fever epidemic broke out in the city.
To make sure the sisters did not catch the disease and die,
which leaving the trader without profitable, young,
and pretty female slaves to sell, they were sent north
to Virginia while their brothers remained in Louisiana.
In the meantime, their father Paul Edmondson had been trying
to find a way to purchase their freedom.
He met the minister, Henry Ward Beecher, who was a white minister,
who had a church in Brooklyn, New York.
They raised enough money to buy the Edmondson sisters and set them free,
eventually two of their brothers were freed as well and a third sold
to a new owner successfully escaped in 1859.
Mary died of tuberculosis at a young age, but Emily lived
to see the 13th amendment to the United States Constitution passed
by Congress and ratified by most states in 1865,
and she lived to have and raise three children.
That's the way I told some stories using my own words
to give you a sense of what's in the book.
I'm going to pass this, this was another --

these last two, I'll go back, nope.
This was another example of trying to make the life seem much happier,
of slaves, they're at a cotton gin here; I explain in the book all
about how the cotton gin revolutionized the growing of cotton
and therefore required a great number of slaves
to process, to plant, to pick it.
And this was a picture, another picture that showed white
and black children playing harmoniously, but as I pointed
out in the caption, that wouldn't last, that experience and reality
and custom would teach them very soon,
that they were not equal even though they might play together.
Okay. Here is an enslaved family, again,
looking at the children's faces, photograph taken in the 1860s.
But I want to go back to just read -- as I'm talking about stereotypes,
I'd like to read a passage from a diary by Charlotte Forten [sp.
phonetically].   She was a free black

and her grandfather was very wealthy and influential.
In Philadelphia, she went to a Northern school
and this is her diary, her words.
"How bright and beautiful are these May mornings," she wrote in 1854.
The air is so pure and balmy, the trees are in full blossom
and the little birds sings sweetly.
I stand by the window listening to their music, but suddenly remember
that I have an arithmetic lesson that employs me until breakfast,
then to school recited my lessons;
after dinner practice a music lesson,
did some sewing then took a pleasant walk by the water.
Freed blacks have very difficult lives but they were again,
there's variety, there's complexity, there's humanity in this period.
This may not live up to the stereotypes of whites,
but it is Charlotte Forten [spelled phonetically],
an African American young woman in her own words.
She also added later in diary, "How strange it is that in a world
so beautiful, there can be so much" --

well, anyways, while many are enjoying themselves
in their happy homes, millions are suffering in chains.
Kids will seem to be very, very conscious of --
well I guess as kids today would be conscious of the war in Iraq.
This was the issue that surrounded them.


Oh that's Henry Box Brown who had himself packaged
in a box and mailed to freedom.
Now I have stories like that in there too.
And they did, it worked; he worked, he got to Philadelphia.
This was an abolitionist society that got him out of the box.
There's details about the size of the box
and the length of the trip in the book.

And, well, these are contrabands.
After the war started, these are African American slaves who ran away
from their owners to get to Union lines,
to get to the Army lines, to freedom.
But before I get to a quote about that, I'm just going to say,
I'm going to read this one from William Adams who was a young slave
in Texas when the Civil War started.
He says, this is a quote: Just before the war.
a white preacher came to us slaves and said,
you want to keep your houses where you get all to eat
and raise your children, or do you want to be free to roam
around without a home like the wild animals.
If you want to keep your homes, you better pray for the South to win.
All that want to pray for the South to win, raise your hand.
We all raised our hands because we were scared not too,
but we sure didn't want the South to win.
[laughter] And here's -- I'm going to read you,
because I think I'm running out of time, a quick contraband story.
This is Mary Barber.
She was an enslaved child, her father woke her up in the middle
of the night; this is after the Civil War had started.
Dressing me in the dark, all the time telling me to keep quiet.
After we were dressed, he went outside
and peeped round for a minute.
We snuck out of the house and along the woods path.
I reckon I will always remember that walk
with the bushes slapping my legs, the wind sign and the trees
and the hoot owls and whippoorwills hollering.
I was half asleep and scared stiff but in a little while,
we passed the thicket and there with mules and wagons, there was a quilt
in the bottom of the wagon, and on this they laid the younguns.
As we rode along, I listened to Pappy and Mammy talk.
Pappy says that we are going to join the Yankees.
We travelled all night and hid in the woods all day for a long time.
When we got to Newbern, the Yankees took the mules and wagon and put us
on a long white boat named Ocean Wave and to Roanoke, Virginia we go.
My Pappy was a shoemaker, so he makes Yankee boots
and we get along pretty good.   So there's another story.

There are more contrabands; this is actually stereoscopic slide
that was taken of a group of contrabands.
Contrabands being before the Emancipation Proclamation made
them freedmen.
Contrabands were literally contraband of war.
Union soldiers could take them as they could confiscate property
from slave owners and many of them worked for the Union Army
in all kinds of positions, not in the military until after 1863.
And there's some more at Camp Brightwood and you can see,
if you can see it clearly there,
there is a child in this picture too.
And there's another young man;
one of my favorite pictures, and a sailor.
And as I said, the United States Navy took African Americans
into their service during the Civil War, before the Army did.
And that's the wrong way to go -- and another family.

Okay. There's a great quote in the book, and it's long
and it's not even by a child.
And it's about a minister who runs to get the first announcement
of emancipation and I can't read it to you
because I don't think there's time, but I hope you will read it;
it's one of my favorites.
But I will read you the end of it because it -- okay.
He's got the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation
and this is his quote: Men squealed, women fainted, dogs barked,
white and colored people shook hands, songs were sung,
and by this time cannons began to fire at the Navy yard and follow
in the wake of the roar that had for some time been going
on behind the White House.
Great processions of colored and white men walked to and fro
and passed in front of the White House
and congratulated President Lincoln on his proclamation.
The President came to the window and made responsive bows
and thousands told him, if he'd come out of that place,
they would hug him to death.
It was indeed a time of times and a half time,
nothing like it will ever be seen again in this life.
The passage reminds me so much of how I felt
at the inauguration a couple of weeks ago.
There were hard times in Reconstruction
and I have many quotes that show that,
whether white or black in the South.
There was a hunger; there was homelessness.
But, there was also excitement and curiosity.
A lot of slaves did not hear
about the Emancipation Proclamation right way,
which was because of communication, the lack of them as sort
of passed through, pass the word down and along.
Here's someone called Tom Robinson; he was a teenager in Texas,
his story of hearing about emancipation.
One day I was out milking the cows, Mr. Dave came down into the field
and he had a paper in his hands.   "Listen to me Tom", he said.

"Listen to what I read you",
and he read from a paper all about how I was free.
You can't tell how I felt.   "You joking me," I said.

"No, I ain't", he says.   "See, you're free."

"No", says I, "it's a joke."
"No," says he, "It's a law that I got to read this paper to you.
Now listen while I read it again.   But I still wouldn't believe him.

"Just go up to the house and ask Mrs. Robinson, she'll tell you."
So I went.   "It's a joke," I says to her.

"Did you ever know your master to tell you a lie?"
she says. "No" say I.
"I ain't: "Well she says, the war's over and you're free."
By that time, I thought maybe she was telling me what was right.
"Mrs. Robinson," says I, "Can I go over to the Smiths?"
They were a colored family that lived nearby.
"Don't you understand?"   says she. "You're free.

You don't have to ask me what you can do.
Run along child."
And so I went, and you know why I was going?
I wanted to find out if they were free too.
I just couldn't take it all in.
I couldn't believe we were all free alike.
Was I happy?   Lord, you can take anything,

no matter how you good you treat it, it wants to be free.
You can treat it good and feed it and give it everything it seems
to want but if you open the cage, it's happy.

Now, I just want to show this because as I said,
education was really important in this period and people
who had been denied the right or were punished if they did try
to learn to read and write, wanted to be able to read the Bible
for one thing, wanted an education,
wanted to do what had been denied to them.
This is an outdoor class and I have a quote
from the same Charlotte Forten who was a teenager.

And she says, "Coming to school is a constant delight."
She teaches now, she's teaching down in the South.
"And recreation to them.
They come here as other children to play.
The older ones doing the summer work from early morning until 11,
and then come into school after they have hard toil in the hot sun.
Many of our grown people are desirous of learning to read.
It is wonderful," she says, "how a people who have been so long crushed
to the earth as they have been, can have so great a desire for knowledge
and such a capability for attaining it."

Now as they say in 1877,
Reconstruction ended although it had been considerably weakened
before that.
And the South had entered on a period of extensive segregation,
a restriction of Black rights, violence,
the Ku Klux Klan brutality.
And the North continued to be discriminatory.
Well I'm showing these last couple of pictures which are in the book
because in spite of that, in spite of all of that,
African Americans progressed.
Here's a school setting 20 years later.
Here's a family, okay?
Some did own their own land; they did get educated.
They learned what -- they had the experience
of holding office; they didn't forget that.
They built their communities, they built their churches.
They kind of got ready for the long years ahead in a way
and that thread was never lost.
Maybe my next book will be about segregation for kids, I don't know,
but that thread was never lost.
You know, I think just to finish off; it took great courage
to live through this period.
Just to live through this period, just to get up every day,
from slavery in the Civil War and even during Reconstruction.
And I also think that to make progress it took the understanding
and action of white Americans.
As I said in the beginning, this story is an American story
and it's our collective history and I feel privileged to be able tell
in this book, a part of it.   Thank you.

[applause] Does anyone have a question?
Male Speaker: I remember talking to you about research for a title,

can you talk about that a little bit?
[inaudible] Linda Barrett Osborne: Well, the informal working title
of the book was "From Slavery to Freedom," which I never really liked
and also it's a title -- for this book --
it's a title used by Don Hope Franklin and one of his books.
I had "Oh, Freedom," the earlier book that I've worked on which is
about the Civil Rights movement was the title of a song,
of a hymn that was sung in the Civil War and later and many,
many books will take excerpts from hymns and phrases from hymns
as titles and they've been in the storm so long, parting the waters.
I got it from the Bible, so I thought well that's the way to go.
I'll look up all the songs I can and find titles.
Well every title I found was already --
I went on to Amazon and to the Library.
[laughter] And every song I found, somebody else had used.
And I thought, what do I want to stress here?
Freedom, but I also want to stress time;
I want to stress that it's a process.
So unbelievably to me, I came up with "Traveling the Freedom Road."
[laughter] And I looked and it wasn't on Amazon;
it was nobody's title --
titles can't be copyrighted so I could've used anything I wanted,
but I wanted this to be distinctive.
And then the subtitle "From slavery and the Civil War
through Reconstruction" we hoped would explain what the book was
about and it was supposed to be clear since it was published
by a children's publisher; it was for children, not adults,
although I've been told by very nice friends that it's for all ages.
Now my son, who studies African American --
he's a PhD candidate in history,
thought it was a hymn that I had found.
He said, it sounds so authentic, so that's how I came upon it,
doing a lot of crossing out and thinking, yes?

[inaudible] Well, I have accounts of people being beaten until they bled.
My editor wanted that, he didn't want it to seem --
he didn't want it to seem too kind or nice or just wow, this is boring.
He wanted you to see how violent it was.
I mean the one area I didn't -- I mentioned where I have captions
and talk about the light skinned slaves,
that they had European heritage,
I did not mention why most of them did.
I just couldn't see rape in a children's book,
but there's definitely passages that show the violence.
And there's a long section on the Klu Klux Klan
and people talking about hiding from them.
So I'm not sure -- that's why I worry a little bit about --
I had imagined 10 to 14 as my age group depending
on whether a child is sensitive, but without that then, I mean,
we're not telling the true story of slavery if we take
out the beatings and the bleeding.
If we take out the seprights, I spend a lot of time
on separating families; I spend a lot of time
on the emotional cruelty, so I think I cover everything as best I can
and try to explain it without excusing it.
I don't think the book excuses the Confederacy at all.
I have no sympathy, if someone here does.
But if you read the history I have no sympathy
for what the South was trying to maintain the system.
Female Speaker: For a lot of reasons, we'd all like to be 13
or 14 again, but have you tried this out with a sample audience?
The 13 or 14 year old set?
Linda Barrett Osborne: One of my colleagues --
oh, have I tried this out with a sample audience
and what do children say?   A few children have read it.

I didn't try it out with children before it was published.
The man who work in our office has a daughter
who I promised would be the first child to read it
and I think she's 10, and she loved it.
But -- her mom's mentioned in the book and all.
[laughter] And she's an exceptional child.
But I have had friends who have shown it
to 12 year old grandchildren.
Now they say, again, I'm not sure if any child would go out
and buy this book; I think it's something parents are going to buy
for children and teachers are going to buy hopefully
for schools and libraries.
But they've said that there's enough of those voices in enough
of the story that they've enjoyed it,
but it hasn't been like a wide sampling.
The wide sampling starts now.
I'd love to hear what children think.
The editor at Abrams I worked with, Howard Reeves,
has a lot of experience and we made some adjustment to the tone
and the language so I hope he knew what he was doing.
And you heard an example of -- when I read the Edmondson girls,
that's sort of the tone of the book.
Yes? Male Speaker: Did you discuss in your book Frederick Douglas?
Linda Barrett Osborne: Oh yes, he's in there.

Male Speaker: [inaudible] Linda Barrett Osborne:
I did talk about him.   I didn't tell his complete story.

I talked about several adults, but I had 17,000 words
and there's a picture of Frederick Douglas and I did talk
about how he escaped -- actually I have a quote from him
about educating himself in Baltimore
where the streets were his classroom.
So there is a section on free blacks and a section on abolitionists


My mind is going completely -- Harriet Tubman is in there too.
I mean there are recognizable-and she actually appears
in the book first because she's an example of violence
because she was hit over the head with a heavy weight by the overseer
and suffered all her life.
But then I do mention little bits of their stories as I go on,
as much as I could without doing what a lot other books have
done well.
Yes? Female Speaker: How many different divisions
in the Library do you think you utilized in your research?
Linda Barrett Osborne: Well, prints and photographs,
a lot of these images are online by the way.
You can access them yourselves.   They're not all hi-res so I had

to get some prints, but they are online.
Rare Books had some wonderful early abolitionist literature.
There are two maps in here that come from geography and maps,
showing the Confederate and Union States
and also the way United States kind of built up its territory.
And manuscript -- oh, manuscript was kind of the start of all of this


And, not motion picture, not the law library.
The general collections too.
Amazingly -- we have access to the general collections
in our office because we research.
There are books from the mid-19th century in the general collections,
so I could just pull off the shelves,
and it was thrilling to be able to do that.
The whole -- working here is so wonderful
and uncovering this was an experience I'll never forget.
I guess we're out of time for questions.
John Cole: Not quite, I have one resource question.
When you use the slave narratives, the narratives of the ex-slaves,
what was the nature of the story,
they were reflecting on their childhood?
Linda Barrett Osborne: Mm-hmm.
People were asking- John Cole: How did you work that material in?
Linda Barrett Osborne: Yes, people were asking them questions
about what happened to them.
It was a project set up during the Depression
to employ historians and writers and so on.
And they would go out and interview them about their experience was.
So they might say, where were you living or how old were you
or did you ever run away or whatever,
and these were the answers.
I used a version that is print-on-demand;
Applewood Books has all of them.
We arranged that through the publishing office.
Every word is there.
The words themselves are done in dialect.
I have no idea how accurate the dialect is; it's that kind
of stereotype black dialect.
I'm sure people were trying to recreate the sounds they heard
as they did the transcripts, but I edited them
so that they would be a little bit more readable for a child
in a contemporary audience.
But that's how I worked with them and they have enormous amounts
of information and also some information won't go into,
that would have been hard to fit into this book,
that has me asking more questions.
Well the most interesting was that several people talked
about how it was worse after slavery for them.
And I think they definitely mean from a materialistic point of view,
from not being fed and clothed and housed,
and maybe they did have nicer people who owned them,
but that really surprised me.
But overall, people wanted just what you heard.
They wanted dignity.   They wanted respect.

They wanted economic opportunity.   They wanted their civil rights.

They wanted their freedom.   John Cole: Thank you Linda.

[applause] Female Speaker: This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at LOC.gov.   [end of transcript]