The Institute for History & Healing

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I tried to acquire, personally, a stone house that was built in the 1700s. Gradually, the more I studied them, the more I realized that etched in that stone was African and African American history, and also indigenous history. That is one of the things that propelled the institute and hence the sense of place. With that house as an artifact, we would be able to make certain points that without it just become theoretical. 

 

Someone else bought that home and said, ‘Tell her not to worry, we kept the stones.’ Then I began to understand what gets lost when even one of us doesn’t know. That passion is undergirding this drive for the institute, which is about memory. One of the things we do with that memory is we put a marker on it, we memorialize the sense of place. We do not let the African Burial Ground be buried again. When we tell history it’s not about the past. It’s about the value we hold in the present. 

 

We change how the history of the past is told in order to

change how the history in the future is lived. 

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-Dr. Janus Adams

Founder, IH&H

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