MSU project helps connect Black Americans to their ancestors

Takwa Khalil, The State News

Walter Hawthorne, an MSU history professor and co-director of Enslaved.org, became interested in digital history and platforms that could bring the study of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade to the public eye. So, he launched a website that helps connect Black Americans to their ancestors in 2020.

Before the creation of Enslaved.org, a team of scholars at Matrix and others at other universities launched an earlier project called Slave Biographies, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 2011. The website published datasets and spreadsheets containing information about named enslaved individuals, made public through Matrix.

“Michigan State University really offered an ideal place to have a project, any digital project, but particularly a project about enslaved people,” Hawthorne said.

MSU has a digital humanities and social science center with a team of experts, system administrators, programmers, project managers and scholars of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. Hawthorne said that without the College of Social Science’s support for Matrix and the broad support MSU provides, this project could never have taken place.

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The website’s significance lies in documenting named enslaved individuals whose stories have never been told because their information is fragmented and scattered across archives in many parts of the U.S. The website’s purpose is to move the historical lens of analysis away from enslavers to named enslaved individuals whose stories have never been told before.

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