The Lost Souls Public Memorial Project, a community-based grassroots group, is collaborating with the East Brunswick Public Library to present A Day of Remembrance from 2-4 p.m. on Dec. 16 at the library, Civic Center Drive off Ryders Lane, East Brunswick.
The event will include music, dramatic performance, and discussion on the history behind the Lost Souls project. Twanda Porterfield-Muslim will sing. The new short film, “Sold South,” will premiere.
The group hopes to show examples of conceptual designs for the possible memorial, developed as part of a group effort, called Design for Public History, involving the Rutgers University Department of Landscape Design.
This event brings to a close a year of events marking the 200th anniversary of a period of local history wherein 144 African Americans were sold into permanent slavery in the Deep South by a corrupt Middlesex County judge who used his East Brunswick home as a kind of “slave castle.”
The project is developing a comprehensive plan to build a public memorial so that these “lost souls” will never be forgotten. Co-sponsors of the event include New Brunswick Area Branch of the NAACP, The Unitarian Society of East Brunswick, Afro-American Historical & Genealogical Society – NJ Chapter, Sons & Daughters of the U.S. Middle Passage Society, East Brunswick Human Relations Council and East Brunswick Senior Center.
The Facebook event link is www.facebook.com/events/294982937767466/.
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