National+Slavery+Museum+Page

Dear Chairman Wilder, In our exhibit we plan to look through how slaves lived and how they powered through their awful lives, people who stood up against slavery, like Frederick Douglass, and the Underground Railroad and other means of escape from slavery. We our exhibit like this to look at slavery from the slaves point of view and explain to people what it was really like for the slaves of that time. Our first section of the museum will be a slave field with prop cotton and mannequins. You will be able to go around and feel real cotton seeds to feel what it was like for the slaves to be picking them all day. The mannequins will have motion sensors so when you walk past they will talk to you and discuss their ways of surviving a how things like song could give them resilience to fight through. They will also all sing together to give people walking past a feel of what it was like to hear 100 slaves singing. The next part of our exhibit will be be a section about the Underground Railroad where the visitor will walk though a path to various railroad checkpoints that would be on the actual path of an escaped slave on the Underground Railroad like houses, barns, and even riverboats. At each point a mannequin member of the Underground Railroad will talk to you about their role and what its like for the slaves on the railroad. At the river boat you can go inside the kind of compartment that slaves would spend hours in being smuggled to the North and see what it was really like for the slaves. Our final area will be an exhibit completely about abolition and people who stood up against slavery. It will be an abolitionist meeting being headed by Frederick Douglass. There will be a number of benches with abolitionists sitting on them, but with spaces for the the guest to sit in next to the abolitionists. Frederick Douglass will be continuously talking and giving a speech but there will be motion sensors on the abolitionist mannequins in the crowd that when you sit down next to them they will shout support and phrases like "End slavery" to Douglass. On the walls around the speech room there would be a timeline of the abolition movement and the progress they made throughout the 19th century. As you can see, we have clearly thought through our exhibit and hope you will choose to build it.

Sincerely,

Jack C, Billy L, Daniel T, and Alex D