Paula D. Royster – författare

Countless stories about the Liberty Lines (the Underground Railroad) have been written. Still, few ever mention the African abolitionists who established the Liberty Lines and managed the passage of thousands of self-emancipating Africans safely to freedom in the early 1800s. Thornton J. Alexander was an African abolitionist who used the power of his freedom to liberate the physical and intellectual constraints placed on African people in colonial America. His inspirational story transcends the sufferings of bondage. His lifetime of risks guaranteed the promises of liberty for anyone who reached his land. He knew “Eliza Harris” (Uncle Tom’s Cabin) because she made her escape to freedom from his property in Indiana. He allowed Bishop Paul Quinn to establish an AME church behind his family cemetery. In 1845, he donated land to construct the first private black college in the U.S. called Union Literary Institute (ULI). The first African American U.S. Senator, Hiram Revels, and his brother Willis were both educated at ULI, as was Rev. John G. Mitchell, a co-founder of Wilberforce University. No longer hidden in the oppressive shadows of American abolitionists, Thornton Alexander’s story of resistance, rebellion and success has finally been reclaimed from the clutches of invisibility.

The genealogy of racism dates back to 610 AD when Islamic jihadists invented whiteness as a religious justification for deracinating and enslaving African people out of East Africa and into Southeastern Europe for more than 1,300 years.Through a new interdisciplinary research methodology, Ancestorology, a taxonomy of Western cultural and visual productions of history are juxtaposed with the social stratifications of the African Diaspora to arrive at a new interpretation of the historical narrative.Decolonzing Arts-Based Methodologies: Researching the African Diaspora provokes critical analytical thought between the historical narrative and current public discourse in Western societies where people of African descent exist. The importance of this work begins the process of unlearning Western ways of knowing and seeing through hegemonic productions of knowledge and by assigning new values to humanity’s collective memory.