A new exhibit on the United States Colored Troops has opened for Veterans Day weekend at the Roots 101 African American Museum in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. Entitled “We Fought For Our Freedom: Kentucky’s African American Civil War Soldiers,” the exhibit displays photographs of Black soldiers who fought to end slavery. The exhibit is open until December 31, 2022.
According to local news reports, the non-profit putting on the exhibit, Reckoning, hopes to show visitors how to use Civil War military records to explore their own ancestry:
The Executive Director of Reckoning, Dan Gediman, said that the importance of this project is evident.
“So the whole point of our project which is called the Kentucky U.S. colored project is to use these military records,” Gediman said. “And in particular these pension records as a way to open up and to connect the records from slavery that exist in Kentucky to the records that exist after the civil war to allow people today the African Americans today to try and find who there enslaved ancestors were.”
Out of all the pitfalls of slavery, one aspect that is often overlooked is the loss of identity. This loss is something many African Americans are in a continuous search for.
”We had a conversation about reparations and I asked, what would be meaningful reparations for you for slavery in this country,” Gediman recalls. “And she said, help me find my people.
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