James Shields '00 leads a group of high school students on a tour of the Underground Railroad in Guilford's woods.
Students walked the same path many enslaved African Americans walked more than 170 years ago and learned more about their personal lives.
More than 70 high school students from two Greensboro schools spent a day at Guilford College in November, taking part in an innovative project designed to deepen their understanding of the Underground Railroad.
Students from Western Guilford High School and New Garden Friends School spent the day learning about the Underground Railroad by researching the College’s extensive archives with Gwen Erickson, the College's Quaker Archivist and Special Collections Librarian. They also heard about the railroad's history from Jill Peterfeso, the Eli Franklin Craven and Minnie Phipps Craven Associate Professor of Religious Studies, and Associate Professor of History Sarah Thuesen.
Jill and Sarah invited students to practice thinking like historians, first by asking them to imagine themselves as historical subjects many centuries in the future. They then provided students an overview of antebellum North Carolina to prepare them for their tour of the Underground Railroad.
“We talked about many different ways of doing history and humanities, by studying things like maps, photographs, historic places and data,” said Jill. “For the majority of our time, we had students reading short excerpts of historical documents from the 19th century -- excerpts that included the voices of a range of people, from the enslaved to the formerly enslaved, from enslavers and judges handing down harsh penalties. We discussed these texts with students, modeling the kinds of thinking and communal discussions that happen in a Guilford classroom.”
The students also toured Guilford College Woods with James Shields ’00, the former director of Guilford’s Bonner Center, who provides regular tours of the portion of Underground Railroad that cuts through woods.
The day – and future days like it -- was made possible through a $20,000 grant from North Carolina Humanities. The grant will help implement "Guilford’s Freedom Trails," an innovative project designed to deepen students’ understanding of the Underground Railroad, and segments of it that were on what is now the College campus.
North Carolina Humanities is one of the oldest and largest cultural funders in North Carolina.