Witness Stones Project ’23
By Sasha Bindra ’25
Working on the Witness Stones project this year has been an incredible learning opportunity. Many students and adults go through life with a small knowledge about slavery. They were often told that slaves were just treated cruelly and were not free to be “regular” human beings. This project went more into depth of the harsh truth of slavery, which was hard to learn about, but it’s very important that the next generations knows the actual facts.
I learned that many humans could be born or adopted into slavery. My group studied the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850. The Fugitive Slave Acts authorized local governments to seize and return escapes to their owners. And anyone who tried to help or house the escapees would be fined. The judge and court would reward $5 if the person found the enslaved, or $10 if they found the enslaved for the enslaver.
Our group had a pretty heavy topic to discuss, which made the workload a bit large. We had many resources which made our research much faster and answered more of our questions. Researching about how the Fugitive Slave Acts affected Nean was also a highlight of this project.
I would say that this project was one of my favorite projects of this year, not only because it was very educational but also because focusing on one specific person and getting to know how these harsh topics affected one person individually was an amazing learning experience.