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Scholar Spotlight: Ned Benton G’22 and Judy-Lynne Peters G’22
ACLS Digital Justice Grantees Share Work on Northeast Slavery Records Index (NESRI)
In a new video interview with ACLS, Ned Benton G’22 and Judy-Lynne Peters G’22 discuss their work on the Northeast Slavery Records Index and the impact of their 2022 ACLS Digital Justice Development Grant, awarded for the project “Recovering, Indexing, and Digitizing Missing Northeast Slavery Records.”
Benton and Peters are professors at the City University of New York, John Jay College, and co-directors of Northeast Slavery Records Index (NESRI). NESRI is an online searchable compilation of records that identify individual enslaved persons and enslavers in the Northeast. The goal is to deepen the understanding of slavery in the Northeast United States by bringing together information that is often disconnected and difficult to access.
The ACLS Digital Justice Grant Program, supported by the Mellon Foundation, awards digital humanities projects at various stages of development that diversify the digital domain, advance justice and equity in digital scholarly practice, and/or contribute to public understanding of racial and social justice issues.
Watch the interview and read the transcript below.
Recovering, Indexing, and Digitizing Missing Northeast Slavery Records
Benton: This is a historical disaster and we are responding to it.
Peters: The project arose out of Ned’s research. He was doing research in Mamaroneck, New York, and I thought it was so fascinating. I asked him to do a presentation here at the college, and out of that presentation arose the idea of doing the same kind of research for New York City. We very quickly realized that we couldn’t just study slavery in New York City, and decided to study the slavery in New York state. And that snowballed into NESRI. The idea was to document everything we could about slavery in the Northeast, any kind of record that would begin to put together the history of enslaved people, who enslaved them, where they lived, what happened in their lives.
Benton: Most people in the Northeast know very little about slavery, and what they do know is told based upon narratives. You know, it’ll be an article or a story or something that describes what happened. What we found was very effective, and it was very different for us, was our concentration on the record. It’s one thing to say that these things happened. It’s another thing to show the record and name the person and see the mother’s name and the child’s name together. You can’t say that slavery didn’t happen in the Northeast when you look at these records.
It’s one thing to say that these things happened. It’s another thing to show the record and name the person and see the mother’s name and the child’s name together. You can’t say that slavery didn’t happen in the Northeast when you look at these records. Ned Benton G’22
Impact of their ACLS Digital Justice Grant
Peters: Our objective in this project was to rediscover, index, and digitize as many records as we could. There are a lot of records out there. Most people don’t know what they are. And what the ACLS grant allowed us to do was to find those records and add them to our collection, which allows us to build a larger history and a more impactful documentation of slavery in New York.
Benton: The disaster is that this information is going away. A bunch of it has been lost already. Lord knows there’s places where the records just are not there. They may have been sold, they may have been burnt, they may have been destroyed. We’ve got to save the records before they disappear.
Peters: Our project goal was to add 8,000 records to our database. By the end of the grant, we had exceeded that by a great deal. We added 12,000 records from our partners in the other eight states, and we added a ninth state to NESRI so that we now have over 88,000 records.
Benton: One dimension of the relationship that turned out to be very helpful for us was with the NFF [Nonprofit Finance Fund], the consultants that the ACLS provided for the grantees. They worked with us about our project as an organization and the structure and the sustainability of our project. They really helped us, by helping us to see and analyze what our future path was. We identified that we depend upon our very high speed computer system, and we determined that we needed to have a funding source for that into the future. And we then organized and have completely funded an endowment that is dedicated to simply the technology costs of NESRI so that ten years from now, the NESRI reports will continue to be available because the systems that that produce them will be supported. Even if hypothetically, there’s some year where we’ve coded all the records or there’s very few. NESRI can go on as a living project because we’ve set up an organization and a funding source for it to live on.
