Juneteenth Celebration: From Grief to Resilience
Resources
Truth: A Biofictional Choreopoem: A new play combining spoken word, storytelling, movement and music to tell the stories of black female abolitionists.
Hope is a practice and a discipline: building a path to a counterculture of care: This article is from Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine’s winter 2023 issue, “Love as Social Order: How Do We Build a World Based in Love?”
James DeWolf and the Rhode Island Slave Trade: An unsettling story of corruption and exploitation in the Ocean State from slave ships to politics.
June 22, 2025
The Story Circle series: Confronting the Historical Grief of the Transatlantic Slave Trade begins with a story based in Bristol RI. Bristol is the historic site of one of the largest slave trading families in the U.S.-- the DeWolf family, whose mansion still stands today.
Through a writer’s residency sponsored by the Linden Place Mansion Writer's residency, the playwright, and director of the Center for theater and pedagogy of the oppressed, Gail Burton, used fragmented bits of story excerpted from a DeWolf written text, to reanimate the story of an enslaved woman held by the DeWolfe's to develop the character, Louisa. She is a character in the play, TRUTH: A biofictional choreopoem.
TRUTH is a play about the psycho-spiritual lived experience of 19th century black female resistors. Louisa's monologue about her journey into slavery in Africa will be used as the jumping off point of the Juneteenth Circle and used to initiate story, dialogue and reflection. Additionally, engagement will be informed by the Active Hope method of Joanne Macy through the lens of Mariame Kaba (see link to article in Resource list below).