Until now, the story about America’s internal domestic slave trade from the upper eastern seaboard and midwest states to the deep southwestern states via Natchez has been largely untold except for a few articles in periodicals and certain inclusions in several scholarly written history books.

Historic Natchez proper was a center of chattel slavery and the selling of enslaved people.

With exception of Adams County’s historic courthouse building and maybe a historic building or two in downtown Natchez where auctions once were held, gone are the slave selling auction houses, holding pens and human commodity market sites in Mississippi and beyond.

However the historic Natchez Forks-of-the-Roads juncture where the second largest enslavement selling-market in the southwest, excepting New Orleans, was located from 1833 until the Union Army occupied Natchez in 1863 remains!

The extant Y shaped juncture or forks of the roads of Old Washington (now D’Evereaux Drive) and Liberty roads and St. Catherine Street was the historic Natchez Trace’s terminus of the major over-ground railroad’s land and waterway routes used by long-distance professional “internal U. S. slave traders” who forced, brought or shipped thousands of African in America descendants in captivity from the “Upper South” to the “Lower South” to this juncture and re-sold them into king cotton and queen sugar enslavement.

Recently, with a National Park Service, National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program Southeast Region’s Lower Mississippi Delta Region grant, I developed a full color, professional traveling exhibition about the Forks.

It is both a reading and visual exhibition consisting of 12 six-by-eight foot panels that provide information, charts and pictures on different aspects of the Forks of the Road history. This information is displayed larger than life.

Our Traveling Exhibition goes beyond the normal history of enslaved persons by providing information that sets precedents for research. The exhibition is of museum quality and having it debut at Purdue University in Lafayette, Ind., from March 20 to June 1 fulfills my vision of having it first debut at a significant venue nationally.

Folks can visit the Forks of the Road Traveling Exhibition at Purdue University’s Black Cultural Center from March 21 to June 1. I will also speak at 2 and 6 p.m., March 21 at Purdue’s Black Cultural Center.

 

Ser Seshsh Ab Heter-Clifford M. Boxley

Friends of the Forks of the Road coordinator