DETROIT – We’re in the final days of “Black History Month,” and we’re still sharing stories about the past that we should never forget.
On Tuesday (Feb. 27), Local 4 highlighted a Detroit church that was an actual stop on the Underground Railroad.
The site uses living re-enactments as its museum exhibit and teaching tool.
Midnight was the code for Detroit between 1840 and 1863. When conductors said the word midnight to the enslaved people who traveled through churches, safehouses, and passageways from the deep south headed for Canada, they knew a journey, sometimes one that lasted two years or more, was close to being over and for many, part of that journey was traveled exactly on the hallowed ground in which is now the exhibit.
It cannot be lost that at the First Congregational Church of Detroit on Woodward Avenue, a precinct and voting is going on upstairs by the people whose very ancestors stopped at the very lowest levels of the church during a perilous journey to freedom.
The church was part of the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, known as the Underground Railroad, and beneath the church was a museum tour that brought slavery and the fight for freedom to life.
Taking the tour Tuesday, a group of middle schoolers from The Mercy Education program were given a wristband that said “Slave,” and some of the first words they hear are, “Your name means nothing, today you are a slave” and then they are taken on a masterfully crafted tour in the first person.
More than 100,000 enslaved people ran for freedom, but relatively few made it through, and our conductor, Bo, shows why.
Part artifact, scenery, imagery, and performance are all historically sound; the museum tour is the story handed down from 200 years of slavery to the advent of the very first Civil Rights Movement, the dangerous, agonizing march to freedom little more than 150 short years ago.
The tours are open to the public Tuesdays through Saturdays.
Watch the video above for the full story.