I'VE GOT A HOME IN GLORY LAND

Dr. Karolyn Smardz Frost will be at the Riverdale Library (370 Broadview Avenue) at 2;00 p.m. on Saturday, November 13, 2010 to talk about her book I've Got A Home In Glory Land.

It was the day before Independence Day, July 3, 1831. As his bride, Lucie, was about to be “sold down the river” to the slave markets of New Orleans, young (19 years old) Thornton Blackburn planned a daring—and successful—daylight escape from Louisville, Kentucky. Three years later after living as free people, they were discovered by slave catchers in Michigan and slated to return to Kentucky in chains, until the African Anerican community rallied to their cause.

The Blackburn Riot of 1833 was the first racial uprising in Detroit history. The couple was spirited across the river to Canada, but their safety proved illusory. In June 1833, Michigan’s governor demanded their extradition. The Blackburn case was the first serious legal dispute between Canada and the United States regarding the Underground Railroad. The impassioned defense of the Blackburns by Canada’s lieutenant governor set precedents for all future fugitive-slave cases.

The Blackburns settled in Toronto and founded the city’s first taxi business but they never forgot the millions who still suffered in slavery. Working with prominent abolitionists, Thornton and Lucie made their home a haven for enslaved Africans who escaped slavery. Thornton Blackburn transitioned to join the ancestors in 1890 and his beloved Lucie followed in 1895. The fascinating story of their lives was lost to history until a chance archaeological discovery in a downtown Toronto school yard brought the story of Thornton and Lucie Blackburn again to light Karolyn Smardz Frost.

Karolyn Smardz Frost is a Toronto-born archaeologist and historian whose 1985 excavation of the Thornton and Lucie Blackburn site made history. I’ve Got a Home in Gloryland is the result of more than twenty years of historical detective work into this enslaved African couple’s dramatic escape to Canada via the Underground Railroad. She is internationally recognized for her work in multiculturalism and anti-racist education through public archaeology and history. In 1985, Karolyn Smardz Frost founded the Toronto Board of Education’s Archaeological Resource Centre where, over a 10 year period, more than 100,000 schoolchildren and members of the public helped uncover and preserve their own city’s past.

The 1985 pilot project was the excavation of the home of Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, fugitive enslaved Africans who have been designated Persons of National Historic Significance in Canada and of state historic significance in Kentucky based on her research. Karolyn Smardz Frost has been a guest lecturer at the University of Newcastle-on-Tyne, U.K., a UNESCO lecturer at Robben Island, Cape Town, SA, and between 1995 and 1998 was Manager of Public Programming for the Institute for Minnesota Archaeology.

A former Vice-Chair of the Toronto Historical Board, Karolyn Smardz Frost was for several years Canada’s representative to the World Archaeological Congress. She has been Recording Secretary of the Ontario Historical Society, and a founding member of the education committees of both the Society for American Archaeology and the Society for Historical Archaeology. She is a board member of the Commemorative Committee on the Bicentennial of the Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade; the Tubman Institute for the Global Migrations of African Peoples; and the Promised Land History and Education Project (Chatham, Ontario).

The author of numerous articles, Karolyn Smardz Frost co-edited the first textbook on educational archaeology, The Archaeology Education Handbook: Sharing the Past With Kids (2000). With historians Adrienne Shadd and Afua Cooper, she wrote The Underground Railroad: Next Stop, Toronto! (2002), and has conducted research for exhibits for Parks Canada and the Ontario Heritage Trust, as well as the documentary, Freedom’s Land for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Karolyn Smardz Frost’s critically acclaimed book, I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: a Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad (Farrar, Straus and Giroux of New York & Thomas Allen Books of Toronto 2007) is the first entirely original fugitive slave biography since the 19th century. She is currently engaged in two projects: Voices from a Promised Land? African Americans in Antebellum Canada and Dear Mistress: Letters from a Kentucky Runaway. She was also guest editor of the Spring 2007 edition of Ontario History in honour of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade.