Want to be a ’Slave for a Day’? Now you can!

[Christina Marie]

National Park‘s ’Slave for a Day’ Event Draws Outrage

Posted on June 22, 2012 at 10:45am by Madeleine Morgenstern

“Work in the fields with actual hoes and scythes.”

“Carry buckets of water with a yoke on your shoulders.”

Want to be a “slave for a day”? You can at a national historic site in Maryland at a special event next month.

That was at least the idea until this week, when the Hampton National Historic Site in Towson, Md. raised plenty of eyebrows for the name of its July 8 program: “Slave for a Day.”

Park ranger and event organizer Angela Roberts-Burton told the Towson Times the name was meant to draw attention and get people to come to the one-day program at the site, located in Baltimore County.

“By no means am I trying to, or are we the Park Service, trying to assimilate the atrocities that slave African-Americans endured,” Roberts-Burton said. “This is just a glimpse of the hard work, being out in the heat and sun,” she said.
Hampton National Historic Sites Slave for a Day Event Draws Outrage

The name certainly drew attention, including from the Baltimore Fishbowl blog, which noted not only the title, but the “awkwardly jaunty tone” in the event announcement.

“Hampton promises to let kids ‘[e]xperience what it may have been like being enslaved. Work in the fields with actual hoes and scythes. Carry buckets of water with a yoke on your shoulders!’” blogger Rachel Monroe noted. “It’s that last exclamation point that really pushes it over the edge for me….Some things are too profound to playact.”


http://www.theblaze.com/stories/nationa ... s-outrage/