Sowing History, Reaping Justice: Art History Students Publish Children’s Books about Slavery in the Northern US and Canada

Content

A book about a young woman whose fight against her enslaver changed Canadian laws. A magical realist storybook about a rat who leads a young boy enslaved in Canada to freedom. The true story of the Amistad slave ship rebellion and the ensuing court case, rendered in language children can understand.

These books were written and illustrated by students in Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson’s UMass Amherst spring art history course, The Visual Culture of Slavery. They have now been digitally published in an open access collection by Black Maple Magazine. The digital collection, which is free, presents the work of all 18 authors, who researched and wrote the text, as well as illustrating the books.

Dr. Nelson is the Provost Professor of Art History and, in 2022, she founded Slavery North, an initiative which supports research on the understudied histories of Canadian slavery and slavery in the US North. Dr. Nelson is also the Editor-in-Chief of Black Maple, which is focused on Black Canadian arts, culture and history.

“I am incredibly proud of my students for doing the hard work to create these historically rigorous, engaging, and original children's books that bring the complex histories of slavery to young children in honest and compelling ways,” Dr. Nelson says.

Student River Riddle, who created The Amistad Rebellion: A Children’s Retelling, is delighted to be part of the collection. “I think it's wonderful that my book is being published online, and I hope that our books reach a wider audience so that both adults and children who read this literature can learn something from these stories.”

Genesis of a project

This is not the first time Dr. Nelson has charged her class with the task of creating children’s books, but technology did not previously make it possible to publish the works online easily.

“I routinely teach a class called The Visual Culture of Slavery that introduces students to the types of art and visual culture that were produced across the 400 years of Transatlantic Slavery,” Dr. Nelson explains. “I like designing assignments which push the students to create outcomes that can be shared with a broader audience.”

Students took the assignment in many directions; some wrote non-fiction accounts while others used their research to create fictional characters whose experiences evoked their historical counterparts. There is prose and poetry, and the illustrations include original drawings and curated artwork. And while many narratives about enslaved people focus on those in the southern US, these works’ authors cast their gaze northward.

The circumstances of enslaved people in the north are “largely understudied and overlooked,” says Dr. Nelson. “Although there were many commonalities across Transatlantic Slavery despite region, cold-climate sites were unique in many ways. As the children's books reflect, enslavers in northern or temperate climate regions held fewer people in bondage according to their labor needs, enslaved people were often forced to live in the same households with their enslavers, and slave dress was adapted to seasonal changes. Although enslaved black people still resisted in regions where they were outnumbered by white settlers and indigenous people, they often did so alone or in small groups and compared to slave majority regions, relatively little is known about

enslaved practices of healthcare, maternity, and culture in cold-climate regions. Tragically, the lives of enslaved black people in Canada and the US North were characterized by isolation and hyper-surveillance.”

Riddle said they took the course precisely because it challenged the mistaken notion that slavery was only practiced in the American South. “As someone who has grown up in Massachusetts their whole life, my education about slavery at the primary and secondary level did not account for enslavement that existed in the North aside from the Underground Railroad,” they say.

Early in the class, Professor Lisa Merrill from Hofstra University spoke about her research into the Amistad rebellion, and the story stayed with Riddle. “I chose the Amistad rebellion for my project because of how extraordinary it is, and I believed that Sengbe Pieh/ Joseph Cinqué's story was one that could be made palatable for a younger audience because of its (relatively) happy ending,” they say.

Riddle’s work, along with the rest of the books, was first presented to the public in an exhibition at the Slavery North Initiative at UMass Amherst entitled Sowing History, Reaping Justice: Writing Children’s Books about Slavery in Canada and the US North, which ran from April 16-August 26, 2025.

Watching children engage with the books and seeing the community support at the exhibit opening in April was a “full-circle moment” for Riddle. ”This project is public-facing by nature and design, as we weren't writing a paper about our topic for each other and Professor Nelson, but rather for a greater audience who could benefit from knowing these underrepresented histories, and I'm glad I got to be a part of that.”

Indeed, for Dr. Nelson, making the work public is a vital part of the project. “In today's climate with various forces working to block the teaching of black histories and to prohibit the dissemination of accurate knowledge about Transatlantic Slavery, this work is more important than ever,” she says. “That is why it was so important to make these resources open access, so that teachers, parents and guardians can share them readily with their students and children.

The Sowing History, Reaping Justice children’s book collection is available for free download at the Black Maple Magazine website.