The Lost Souls Public Memorial Project
The Lost Souls Public Memorial Project (LSP) of New Jersey is a non-profit organization that endeavors to pay tribute to the lives of Black women, children, and men who were unlawfully sold during the domestic slave trade. In 1818, officials holding offices of public trust facilitated the transportation of these individuals from New Jersey and surrounding areas to plantations in the Deep South. The project recognizes the humanity of these individuals and seeks to raise awareness of their stories.
Our mission has three main objectives.
1. Through ongoing research, the project aims to connect the Lost Souls with their New Jersey communities while tracing their lives in the Deep South.
2. Through public events and teacher training, the project aims to raise awareness about New Jersey’s role in the domestic slave trade and history of slavery in the state.
3. As a testament to their resilience, our goal is to create a dedicated living memorial in present-day East Brunswick, NJ that recognizes the agency of the Lost Souls who resisted and endured the impact of slavery.
The Lost Souls Public Memorial Project has funded ongoing historical research across various New Jersey counties to identify and connect the Lost Souls to their New Jersey communities.Tracing the Lost Souls through the largest slave port in the United States, New Orleans, Louisiana, LSP fostered a partnership with Louisiana State University’s History department,demonstrating our continued commitment to exploring the communities the Lost Souls created and sustained in the Deep South.
Lost Souls hosts and participates in a range of educational and public programs, including in the last year, contributing to the Emmy-nominated documentary “The Price of Silence: The Forgotten Story of New Jersey’s Enslaved People”; the New Jersey State Library, among others; teacher training with future New Jersey educators with William Paterson University and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey; and internship program for undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at colleges and universities.
A Living Memorial
The proposed design for the LSP Memorial is a healing garden featuring what Black farmer, educator, and activist Leah Penniman refers to as ‘the plants of Black freedom.’ Enslaved Black women and men used the powers of plants to survive, sustain, and nurture themselves and their loved ones, as well as resist the oppressive and dangerous, thus enduring the dehumanizing realities of slavery.
Symbolically, the healing garden will honor the connection of the Lost Souls to their African heritage and their home communities in the Garden State before they were uprooted and transplanted into perpetual servitude in the harsh southern climate. Forced into the surreal conditions of their new reality, they undoubtedly relied on nature to survive.
