Join a Collective Video Response to “A Hard Road to Freedom”

A Hard Road to Freedom: Positively Impacting the Present
View a video on the Black experience on North Carolina’s Outer Banks during the Civil War and early Reconstruction that includes period photography and drawings. Viewers ages 18-30 participate by answering lending input related to the video that will be turned into a video response to A Hard Road to Freedom and viewable on the museum’s website.
A Hard Road to Freedom informs viewers of the struggle of enslaved and formerly enslaved people that flocked to Hatteras Island and Roanoke Island, NC during the war to seek freedom, refuge, and work. Viewers can gain an understanding of a transitional and complex time in history where society was battling views of enslavement and freedom. The video brings to the fore the challenges faced by African Americans in the 1860s. It highlights the successes and failures of the Freedman’s Colony on Roanoke Island -where the Union Army was encamped and where more than 2,000 African Americans flocked between 1862-1867. The video also invites dialogue on how the past helps us understand the present and inform the future.
With the latter in mind, the 2022 Civic Season program includes a questionnaire created to illicit response and provoke thought on how, with knowledge, people can gain understanding and bring people closer to one another in an inclusive and humanitarian sense. The goal is to provoke self-reflection, inspire action, and examine the role history education can play by following this little-known chapter of history to modern day. In the end, the goal is to make a lasting personal and emotional impact that motivates positive action.
Questionnaire
This questionnaire will be posted on our website and open to viewers between the ages of 18-30. The criteria for choosing questionnaire answers to include in the subsequent video will be those that share positive ideas and reflective thought to make a difference in life.
Participants also will provide an image of themselves or one that they identify with in a positive way to be included with their answers that will be combined to create a collective video response to A Hard Road to Freedom. The response will be called Positively Impacting the Present and posted on the museum website with A Hard Road to Freedom.
1. How did this video affect you emotionally and intellectually and why?
2. What image(s) in the video moved you the most and why?
3. Do you feel the Freedman’s Colony was successful? Explain.
4. What could have been done to improve conditions in the Colony? How would your idea be implemented?
5. How can you reach your age demographic with your message?
6.How can this video influence your future actions?
7. Share an idea or plan to make a difference through a community program or a personal action based on equality, inclusion, and the specific needs of a community.
8. How does this video affect your views on the presentation of history in education?
9. Does social inequity affect your life? If so, how, and how have you managed?
10. Has history affected your life and how?
11. What role does language play in promoting inclusion?
12. What is the most important thing you learned by watching this video?
13. How can understanding the past inform the future?