In this enlightening personal account, one man tells the story of his
groundbreaking project to sleep overnight in former slave dwellings that
still stand across the country--revealing the fascinating history behind
these sites and shedding light on larger issues of race in America.
Joseph McGill Jr., a historic preservationist and Civil War reenactor,
founded the Slave Dwelling Project in 2010 based on an idea that was
sparked and first developed in 1999. Since founding the project, McGill
has been touring the country, spending the night in former slave
dwellings--throughout the South, but also the North and the West, where
people are often surprised to learn that such structures exist. Events
and gatherings are arranged around these overnight stays, and it
provides a unique way to understand the often otherwise obscured and
distorted history of slavery. The project has inspired difficult
conversations about race in communities from South Carolina to Alabama
to Texas to Minnesota to New York, and all over the United States.
Sleeping with the Ancestors focuses on all of the key sites McGill has
visited in his ongoing project and digs deeper into the actual history
of each location, using McGill's own experience and conversations with
the community to enhance those original stories. Altogether, McGill and
coauthor Herb Frazier give readers an important unexpected emersion into
the history of slavery, and especially the obscured and ignored aspects
of that history.
