A Witness to History

by Rhonan Mokriski

On the first day of class this past fall, I bet the juniors and seniors in my American history class that they could not name 10 famous Black Americans who were born before 1950. They quickly and confidently took up the challenge, but after a few painstaking minutes, they all gave up. I do not share this story to embarrass them. Before preparing for the course, I too would have struggled. Now imagine trying the same task, but with naming local people of color. 

Our American history textbooks overwhelmingly feature white men, and relatively few local historians have gone back to look for historical narratives from people of color. While there has been some notable work on this front—particularly on local legends Elizabeth Freeman and W. E. B. Dubois—Black people have largely been absent from local stories. 

As my students and I began to investigate this history, we became fascinated by the story of one local man, James Mars. Mars was born in 1790 to a married enslaved couple, Jupiter and Fannie Mars, in Canaan. Their owner was a Congregational minister who decided to move to Virginia and take the family with him. On the eve of their departure, the Mars family fled to Norfolk, where neighbors hid them in basements, attics and barns. A deal was eventually negotiated between the pastor of the Norfolk Congregational Church and the Canaan minister whereby nine-year-old James and his brother would be re-enslaved in return for their parents’ manumission.

James Mars was sold to a farmer in Norfolk and eventually attained his freedom. He settled in Norfolk and worshipped in the Congregational Church. He wrote his autobiography, James Mars: A Slave Bought and Sold in Connecticut, providing us with a rare historical artifact—a Black voice of the enslaved. He became a noted civil rights activist and an abolitionist pioneer. He twice petitioned the Connecticut legislature for the right to vote. Twice denied, he relocated to Massachusetts, where he proudly voted in both of Abraham Lincoln’s victorious presidential campaigns. He ultimately resettled in Norfolk, where he was a deacon in the Congregational Church. He was buried in Norfolk’s Center Cemetery in 1880. 

As public historians, our class was eager to make Mars’s story more widely known. One student, senior Charlie Wilcox, was particularly struck by the piety in Mars’s reflection that “God never made a slave.” We decided to propose placing a Witness Stone in front of the Congregational Church in Norfolk, now the United Church of Christ, Congregational (UCC), to honor his contributions to local history. Barry Weber of the Norfolk Historical Society and the Rev. Erick Olsen and Kelly Kandra Hughes at UCC Norfolk readily agreed to partner with us. Together, we successfully applied for a $2,500 grant from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation to set the stone and organize a day of civic pride to celebrate the life and work of James Mars, planned for early May 2021. 

We believe that efforts like this will help refute the impression that American history is inherently white. Furthermore, we hope that the rich life story of James Mars will contribute to the evolving definition of what it means to be an American in new and important ways.

For more on the Witness Stones Project, visit witnessstonesproject.org. James Mars’s autobiography is available on the website Documenting the American South (docsouth.unc.edu) and can be purchased for $5 on the Norfolk Historical Society’s website.

Rhonan Mokriski is a teacher at Salisbury School.