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Units October 24, 2023

Resistance and Resilience in Lowell, MA

State:

Massachusetts

Grades:

Elementary
Team:
Lesson Summary: Kindergarten and first grade students explore concepts of enslavement, resistance, and racial justice through an analysis of maps and primary source documents reflecting resistance to slavery in Lowell, MA. Downloads: Unit resources
SECTIONS


This unit was created by the Educators from Lowell Community Public Charter School team as part of the 2022 cohort of The 1619 Project Education Network. It is designed for facilitation across approximately 2-3 weeks.

Objectives

Students will be able to: 

  • Compare and contrast the stories of significant people and places that contributed to the story of Lowell, MA.
  • Explain how the people they are learning about helped to fight injustice.
  • Explain how the people and places they are learning about helped to create a vibrant community in Lowell, MA.
  • With help, create a timeline of significant people, places, and events using information from their research.
  • With help, create and explain a map of significant people, places, and events using information from their research.
  • Use symbols, words, and pictures to create a quilt square that symbolizes their feelings about what they have been learning.
  • Share what they have learned with others using words and pictures.

Unit Overview

In this unit, students will explore how their community in Lowell, MA struggled, as did all communities in the United States, with the problems of enslavement and exploitation. They will also explore how communities dealt with those challenges with resistance, resilience, and justice. 

This project assists students in identifying and analyzing Lowell’s relationship to slavery in both space and time. Lowell has a rich story of abolition, as well as a role on the Underground Railroad.  However, our school is housed in one of the mill buildings of the many textile companies that benefited from the cotton produced in the South by people who were enslaved. “Lowell Cloth '' was made in the mills of Massachusetts with the cotton cultivated through forced labor by Black people who were enslaved on plantations in the South. It was then sold back to those plantation owners for use as clothing for the enslaved laborers. This unit seeks to teach hard history concepts of enslavement, resistance, and racial justice to our youngest learners in kindergarten and first grade. The unit also invites them to learn more about the history of their own city.

The standards in kindergarten and first grade encourage students to look for the “helpers” in communities, and to see themselves as helpers who are empowered with the ability to help change things they see as unfair. Students will work as historians, explorers, and social justice activists. They will read and hear stories of people who escaped enslavement and moved to Lowell, as well as stories of people and institutions in Lowell who sought to end slavery, aid in the Underground Railroad, and create a vibrant community in Lowell, MA.  They will visit important historic sites in town and use resources created by the historians at UMass Lowell and at Visualize Lowell’s Black History to ultimately create and explain a map of significant people, places, and events using information from their research. They will also use symbols, words, and pictures to create a quilt square that symbolizes their feelings about what they have been learning.

IN THIS UNIT, students will be using both maps, as well as information from several local museums and historical societies to guide their analyses and final projects. The following excerpt from the article, “Untold Stories: Lowell Black History” by the University of Massachusetts Lowell library introduces some of the maps, background information, and historical sites that students explore to prepare their projects:

“Anti-Slavery and Underground Railroad District – 34 Downtown Lowell Sites: The Downtown Lowell Anti-Slavery and Underground Railroad District is located at the Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack River. These 34 Sites are presented with brief descriptions and links to the Lowell Cultural Resources Inventory Reports, Related Stories and Web Maps. Guided by these maps, one can take a walk through the City while learning our history.

In the 1840s and 1850s, Lowell seemed an unlikely community for freedom seekers, assistants, and safe-places on the Underground Railroad. However, this busy northern textile center with its small black community dominating the local barber shops and hairdressing salons, three anti-slavery societies, half a dozen anti-slavery churches, several abolitionist newspapers, and established railroads and stage routes to Canada provided a good location.

Although the stories of some freedom seekers have been preserved, including Nathaniel Booth, Weston Fisher, and Edwin Moore who stopped and settled in Lowell, the number of slaves that passed through Lowell on their way to freedom will never be fully known.

Many of the pre-Civil War commercial buildings and churches in the Downtown Lowell District affiliated with Lowell’s Underground Railroad have survived.

Map 1 Begins on Market Street at the site of the Lowell Manufacturing Company which produced high-end broadloom carpets. The route moves on to stories of Freedom Seekers and their assistants, black owned local businesses, anti-slavery newspapers and churches.

Map 2 Takes us through the Boott Manufacturing complex, whose female textile workers, managers, and investors supported the anti-slavery movement, meeting halls where pleas for support from leading abolitionists were heard, and on to Ladd and Whitney Monument and Memorial Hall, reminders of the terrible conflict of the Civil War.”Note for educators: This unit introduces students to sites in their communities that connect to key moments in African American history. To adapt this unit for your community, consider revising the story cards and map to align with sites in your community. The following resource documents African American Heritage Trails in several communities throughout the U.S.: https://africanamericanheritagesites.stqry.app/en/list/4159

Performance Task:

1) With their classmates, students will create a map of significant locations in Lowell’s Black History story. 

2) With their classmates, students will create a timeline of significant events in Lowell’s Black History story. 

3.) Each student will design a quilt square which symbolizes the themes they have been studying in this unit.  These squares will be sewn together to serve as a border around a map of Lowell embroidered onto toweling made at the Boot Cotton Mill in Lowell. This map will feature the locations of the stories students will study in this unit. 

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