Sacred Ground Resources

Films:

• "Backs Against the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story"
• Debby Irving's TED Talk "Finding Myself in the Story of Race" July 2015
• Debby Irving's Presentation in Suffield CT, April 2021: "I'm a Good Person! Isn't That Enough?" (To view this recording, please use the following password: 2021Suff!
• "Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin" (streaming on Apple TV+). Read the NPR article about the special

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Books:

• From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, Second Edition by William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, 2022
  Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. At several historic moments, the trajectory of racial inequality could have been altered dramatically. But neither Reconstruction nor the New Deal nor the civil rights struggle led to an economically just and fair nation. Today, systematic inequality persists in the form of housing discrimination, unequal education, police brutality, mass incarceration, employment discrimination, and massive wealth and opportunity gaps. Economic data indicates that for every dollar the average white household holds in wealth the average black household possesses a mere ten cents.
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• Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War by Nathaniel Philbrick, 2007
  How did America begin? That simple question launches the acclaimed author of In the Hurricane's Eye and Valiant Ambition on an extraordinary journey to understand the truth behind our most sacred national myth: the voyage of the Mayflower and the settlement of Plymouth Colony. As Philbrick reveals in this electrifying history of the Pilgrims, the story of Plymouth Colony was a fifty-five year epic that began in peril and ended in war. New England erupted into a bloody conflict that nearly wiped out the English colonists and natives alike. These events shaped the existing communities and the country that would grow from them.
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• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond Ph.D., 1997
  Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this “artful, informative, and delightful” (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, a classic of our time, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond dismantles racist theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for its broadest patterns.

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Websites:

• Documenting the Early History of Black Lives in the Connecticut River Valley
• Records of Enslavement from Northeast Colonies and States
• The Witness Stones Project

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News Articles:

• NPR 6/14/2024: Oklahoma Supreme Court dismisses suit over reparations by survivors of Tulsa massacre
• NPR 6/13/2024: Reconstruction-era records reveal how formerly enslaved people were stripped of land