Freedom Center film traces history of Kentucky slave pen

One of the nation’s only surviving slave pens rests in the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. There, it provides testimony of a wicked chapter in American history. As part of the 2024 FotoFocus Biennial, the Freedom Center is debuting a new short film examining the slave pen’s role as a memory keeper.Working with Emmy Award-winning director Alphonso Wesson, the Freedom Center’s curator of social justice revisited the fields of Maysville, Kentucky, where the slave pen once stood. The film project titled Excavated: From Soil to Stars traces the journey of the sun as it rises and falls over the Kentucky crops and the land upon which the slave pen once stood.Following a screening of the film on October 12, the filmmakers will discuss how the project is connecting people and histories across time.The restored interior of the Slave Pen inside the Freedom Center. Credit: National Underground Railroad Freedom CenterThe slave pen was a jail for enslaved people who were to be sold to slave markets in Natchez, Mississippi, ripping apart families in the process.    Inventory records from 1835 list the names of 34 men, women and children imprisoned within the slave pen. These 34 human beings watched as beams of...