Let My People Go Theater Documentary

In 1995, in collaboration with Brenda Schleunes, director of the Touring Theatre Ensemble of North Carolina, the editor of the Race and Slavery Petitions Project created a "script" titled Let My People Go: The Trials of Bondage in the Words of Master and Slave.

Drawn from petitions to southern legislatures and county courts, Let My People Go contains twenty true stories about slavery organized around five songs: "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen," "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," "Singin' with a Sword in my Hand," "One More River to Cross," and "Steal Away." The stories include: a mixed-race girl born to freedom, so lonely and uncared for that she petitions to become a slave; a black slave beaten so severely that his punishers marvel at how he made an escape; a white woman mocked and scorned by her husband and slaves on the plantation; and families torn apart by laws forcing freed blacks to emigrate from their home states.

One of the episodes depicted in Let My People Go quotes from petitions submitted to two state legislatures and the Halifax County, Virginia, county court, by slaves belonging to Philip E. Vass, including a petition from Halifax County, North Carolina, dated 1844.

Let My People Go premiered in April 1997 as part of the North Carolina Humanities Council's Twenty-fifth Anniversary Celebration. Between 1997 and 2000, it has been performed sixty-three times before approximately 14,000 people, averaging about 225 per performance. It has been performed in twenty-seven of North Carolina's one hundred counties, at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia, the National Archives, Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska and the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York. Following each performance, the director of the Petitions Project answers questions about the importance of petitions in understanding slavery.

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