Through a collaborative Brock project, work is underway to share the lived experiences and community contributions of African descendants in Niagara-on-the-Lake and across the Niagara region.<\/p>\n
Brock University Professor Lissa Paul, artist Quentin VerCetty and PhD candidate Hyacinth Campbell have been working to memorialize those buried in Niagara-on-the-Lake\u2019s historic Niagara Baptist Church Burial Ground and to restore the memory of Niagara\u2019s African diaspora community to the landscape.<\/p>\n
The project, \u201cMemorializing the people of the fugitive slave ads: Barbados and Niagara,\u201d has been underway since 2020 and includes a website and proposal for a physical memorial at the Mississauga Street burial ground, where the former Niagara Baptist Church, formed in 1930, once stood.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is about recovering the lived experiences of the African diasporic community and people of African descent in Niagara as well as their contributions to the community,\u201d Paul says.<\/p>\n
The research reflects the experiences of many individuals who arrived in Niagara through the Underground Railroad.<\/p>\n
\u201cInstead of depicting them as people needing help, we are focusing on sharing their story as creative, independent, courageous, resilient and imaginative people who built lives for themselves under consistently oppressive conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n
The project comes out of Paul\u2019s more than decade-long work on fugitive slave ads and her collaboration with the Barbados Archives to digitize the Barbados Mercury<\/em> and Bridgetown Gazette <\/em>newspapers under the British Library Endangered Programme Grant and as part of the Digital Library of the Caribbean.<\/p>\n