In this lesson, created in partnership with the Association for Cultural Equity, students discover how the banjo and music making more generally among enslaved people contributed to debates on the ethics of slavery. They listen to slave narratives, examine statistics, and read primary sources to better understand how slavery was conceptualized and lived through in the 18th and 19th centuries. Throughout the lesson, students return to videos created by Alan Lomax of pre-blues banjo player Dink Roberts as a way to imagine what music among enslaved people in the United States may have sounded like.
View the lesson here
