Witness Stones Project, Inc.

Restoring History & Honoring Humanity

#LymeCT

Witness Stones Project Installation Ceremony Honoring the Forgotten in Old Lyme

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Friday, June 3, 2022
10:00 a.m.
Hosted by Lyme-Old Lyme Middle School at
The Old Lyme-Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library
2 Library Lane, Old Lyme, Connecticut

 

The community is invited to gather on the Lawn of the Old Lyme Library to celebrate the second installation of Witness Stones on Lyme Street, extending this year to McCurdy Road. The program will include music, poetry, and words from community partners and guest speakers. World-renowned soprano Lisa Williamson and acclaimed saxophonist and U.S. Coast Guard Band conductor Richard Wyman will provide music. Twelve members of the Old Lyme Middle School chorus, led by Laura Ventres, will also contribute to the program.  Seventh-grade students from the Lyme-Old Lyme Middle School will read biographical poems they wrote to tell the life stories of Harry Freeman and Margaret Crosley Lewia. Using primary documents, the students researched these two enslaved town residents, making the story of local slavery tangible, personal, and relevant to their own lives.

Poets Marilyn Nelson, Rhonda M. Ward, Antoinette Brim-Bell, and Kate Rushin and Their Witness Stones Project Collaboration

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The poets’ collaborative project appears in the the November 2021 issue of Poetry magazine. The poems were commissioned by the Witness Stones Old Lyme Affiliate and were debuted at the June 4, 2021, Witness Stones Installation in Old Lyme. We invite you to read the interview about the collaboration and the full portfolio of poems:

What birthed this collaboration?

Although the four of us did think of ourselves as a “team” of poets, our project is less a collaboration among the four of us than a collaboration of each of us with the brilliant and generous historian who was our guide: Carolyn Wakeman. Carolyn is a former professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as faculty chair of the Graduate School of Journalism and director of the Asia-Pacific Program. Our collaboration grew from a larger collaboration with the Witness Stones Project, started in 2017 in Guilford, CT, with the mission to restore the history and honor the humanity of the enslaved individuals who helped build our communities. The Project provides research assistance, teacher development, and curriculum support to help middle and high school students study the history of slavery in their own communities. The students explore the lives of enslaved individuals through primary source documents, doing original historical research with the aim of remembering. And, of course, everyone involved in the project knows that we are collaborating not only with each other, but also with long-gone enslaved individuals who were denied voices during their lifetimes.
—Marilyn

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