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The Harper's Weekly newspaper article tells of a slave man named Gordon who escaped from his plantation in Mississippi. He was intelligent and came up with various ways to get the bloodhounds off his scent and made a successful escape to the north. There he joined the Union as a guide through Louisiana. This is much like Jed's story in "Dog Jack".  Jed escapes form his plantation and makes it to the north, though with help from many people. He proves himself worthy and becomes an important aspect to his regiment much like Gordon. The two men's lives are quite similar, the main difference being Gordon went through many periods of torture and pain that Jed did not have to experience.

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This Civil War Harper's Weekly has a story and picture of Gordon, a slave that escaped, was whipped and tortured, and became a negro soldier

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When relating fact vs fiction in the movie "Dog Jack", I'd have to say the majority is fiction. This isn't due to changing the story of Jack but more of a lack of telling it completely as Jack really isn't the main character. First off, the real Jack was described as “of medium size and jetty blackness, except a white breast and a dash of white on each of his four paws.”, while in the movie he is appears to be a type of terrier. I assume this is a play on words since his name is Jack they played a jack russell terrier for the part. Also, Jack was first owned by a rebel jailer, but insisted upon accompanying the union soldier on the battlefield. However, in the movie Jack enters the war with his best friend, an escaped slave. Like I previously stated, Jack really isn't the star of the movie like he should be, so all the true stories of his bravery and loyalty on the battlefield are not told. In conclusion, "Dog Jack" doesn't give you false information about Jack's war time, but it does not tell you much of his story to begin with.

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This original Civil War Newspaper describes the Civil War Dog, "Union Jack".

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"If You Traveled on the Underground Railroad" by Ellen Levine

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"If You Traveled on the Underground Railroad" by Ellen Levine

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If you enjoyed the movie "Dog Jack" and wanted to learn more about escaped slaves and the underground railroad in general I'd recommend the children's book "If You Traveled on the Underground Railroad". The book is easy to read but gives good information on all aspects on the Underground Railroad.  It is in a question/answer format answering 29 common questions surrounding the Underground Railroad. Also, this book would be a great start for children to about the history of slavery without all the harsh details. It provides good illustrations that set the mood for each situation and portrays the way slaves lived their life on the edge of death determined to reach freedom.

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"Dog Jack" is a great civil war family film. It highlights and gives a thoughtful reflection on living history. At times the movie lacks a certain sense of professionalism, but still does its job of telling the Jed and Jack's story. This movie would be good in a classroom setting as it appropriately tells an educational story. With that said, I do not believe this is the best movie for perhaps a "lazy Saturday", unless you enjoy slow moving plots and elementary style scripts.

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The main idea behind the movie "Dog Jack" is forgiveness. Jed during the war Jed struggles to help white men whom he didn't know well enough to trust. Through this, his minister friend who is also struggling with his own battles revolving forgiveness tells him "We help everyone, We're not going to let a good man die". At this point in time Jed struggles overcoming the hate and fear he has for the men that tortured and killed his father. But this changes, Jed learns to forgive the men who wronged him and his family and regains his connection to God in doing so.

"Dog Jack" tells the true story of a slave boy named Jed and his dog Jack. His owner is also his childhood playmate, his masters son, Kirk. After watching his father be whipped to death, Jed gains the courage to run away, taking Jack with him of course. With the help of a minister, Jed joins the Union army alongside Jack, after facing prejudiced Jed becomes on of the best in his regiment. Jed ends up facing his master on the battlefield which has a deadly ending for one of the men.

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The Movie "Dog Jack" taught me one major thing about the civil war. It taught me that escaped slaves that joined to fight on the Union side were still discriminated against and were even sometimes not allowed to carry a gun unless they somehow prove themselves worthy, like the main character, Jed, did. This was astonishing to me since the Union was fighting to abolish slavery. Why would war generals hold a black man lower than a white man on the battle field when they're all fighting for the same cause? This makes me wonder if to some or most Northerners the war was just a war to keep their beloved country together rather than to free the slaves. I believe this is where further discrimination and down-looking upon black people stemmed leading to how these things still happen today.

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"Dog Jack" tells a good story, but in a dull, monotonous way. The plot seems to drag on from one sad event to next, so you might find yourself struggling to stay awake. If I could change one thing to better "Dog Jack", it would be the abysmal script. As is, the script could be mistaken for a junior high play and the acting isn't much different. Some could say the best acting was done by Piglet, the dog who played Jack. However, in my opinion, we did not see enough of him for the movie to be named after him.

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The document I found is a advertisement encouraging black men to join the Union. It states that President Lincoln has issued the protection of colored troops. This contributes to my understanding of "Dog Jack" in that it shows one of Lincoln's strategies to win the war, utilize all the black men he can to have numbers over the South's better generals. I see this order as more of a deal given to black men as "you fight with us to win the war and in return you'll be given freedom/protection". This side of the story isn't plainly showed in the movie, Jed wanted to join the Union to get revenge on the white men who killed his father, but I'm sure the promises of freedom would have been a convincing factor as well, it is just not talked about.
https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/blacks-civil-war/article.html

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In Douglass Tribute, Slave Folklore and Fact Collide by Noam Cohen 

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In Douglass Tribute, Slave Folklore and Fact Collide by Noam Cohen 

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The "In Douglass Tribute, Slave Folklore and Fact Collide" article explained to me there is still much ambiguity about how slaves really escaped along the underground railroad. The confusion revolves around the belief that slaves used hidden messages in quilts to guide the escaping slaves. The debate is that is this fact or fiction. Many people believe this clever trick had to be true since there are so many books written explaining the code like "Hidden in Plain View" or even a segment about it on "The Oprah Winfrey Show". However, one Yale University historian who has written a book about Frederick Douglass, David Blight, says it is a myth bordering on a hoax and that Douglass never saw or used a quilt in his day. He even goes on to say that “To permanently associate Douglass’s life with this story instead of great, real stories is unfortunate at best.”

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January 24, 2007

In Douglass Tribute, Slave Folklore and Fact Collide

Courtesy of Algernon Miller

Courtesy of Algernon Miller

An eight-foot-tall sculpture of Frederick Douglass, by the sculptor Gabriel Koren, is included in the $15.5 million project honoring Douglass.

At the northwest corner of Central Park, construction is under way on Frederick Douglass Circle, a $15.5 million project honoring the escaped slave who became a world-renowned orator and abolitionist.

Beneath an eight-foot-tall sculpture of Douglass, the plans call for a huge quilt in granite, an array of squares, a symbol in each, supposedly part of a secret code sewn into family quilts and used along the Underground Railroad to aid slaves. Two plaques would explain this.

The only problem: According to many prominent historians, the secret code — the subject of a popular book that has been featured on no less a cultural touchstone than "The Oprah Winfrey Show" — never existed. And now the city is reconsidering the inclusion of the plaques, so as not to "publicize spurious history," Kate D. Levin, the city's commissioner of cultural affairs, said yesterday.

The plaques may go, but they have spawned an energetic debate about folklore versus fact, and who decides what becomes the lasting historical record.

The memorial's link between Douglass, who escaped slavery from Baltimore at age 20, and the coded designs has puzzled historians. But what particularly raised the historians' ire were the two plaques, one naming the code's symbols and the other explaining that they were used "to indicate the location of safe houses, escape routes and to convey other information vital to a slave's escape and survival."

It's "a myth, bordering on a hoax," said David Blight, a Yale University historian who has written a book about Douglass and edited his autobiography. "To permanently associate Douglass's life with this story instead of great, real stories is unfortunate at best."

The quilt theory was first published in the 1999 book "Hidden in Plain View," by Jacqueline Tobin, a journalist and college English instructor from Denver, and Raymond Dobard, a quilting and African textiles expert. It was based on the recollections of Ozella McDaniel Williams, a teacher in Los Angeles who became a quiltmaker in Charleston, S.C. "Ozella's code," the book says, was handed down from slave times from mother to daughter. Ms. Williams died in 1998.

According to "Hidden in Plain View," slaves created quilts with codes to advise those fleeing captivity. What looked to the slave master like an abstract panel on a quilt being "aired out" on a porch in fact represented a reminder, say, to be sure to follow a zigzag path to avoid being tracked when escaping. In Ms. Williams's account, there was a sequence of 10 panels to guide an escaping slave, beginning with a "monkey wrench" pattern meaning to gather up tools and supplies and concluding with a star, a reminder to head north.

The authors say that people have tried to make too much of the book, which they intended to be one family's story. "I would say there has been a great deal of misunderstanding about the code," Dr. Dobard said. "In the book Jackie and I set out to say it was a set of directives. It was a beginning, not an end-all, to stir people to think and share those stories."

Even before the book was published, the codes in "Hidden in Plain View" got a boost from "The Oprah Winfrey Show," which had Dr. Dobard, a quilter himself, as a guest in November 1998. The show was rebroadcast on Martin Luther King's Birthday in 1999, the day before the book was published, according to Janet Hill, who edited it and is now a vice president of Doubleday. That same day, Ms. Hill wrote in an e-mail message, the book was featured in USA Today. "The book seemed to take off from there," she wrote.

There are currently 207,000 copies in print, she said. The codes are frequently taught in elementary schools (teachers have been eager to take up the quilting-codes theory because of its useful pedagogic elements — a secret code, artwork and a story of triumph), and the patterns represent a small industry within quiltmaking.

Algernon Miller, who designed the memorial site, said he "was inspired by this story line," which he discovered in the library. His was a re-interpretation, he said, noting that he was "taking a soft material, a quilt, and converting it into granite."

"Traditionally what African-Americans do is take something and reinterpret into another form," he said.

The team of Mr. Miller and a sculptor, Gabriel Koren, were selected in January 2003, from six proposals in a competition organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem. While the project, which involves rebuilding roadways, will cost more than $15 million in city, state and federal money, the 15,000-square-foot plaza and sculpture were commissioned for $750,000. It's unclear how much it would cost to redesign it now. The memorial, at 110th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, is expected to be completed in fall 2008.

Professor Blight raised his concerns shortly after reading an editorial column in The New York Times in November praising the project and treating the quilting codes as fact. He posted a message at an online discussion group for historians of slavery. "Unfortunately, this UGRR quilt code mythology has also managed to make its way onto the very permanent and very important Frederick Douglass Memorial," he wrote, using initials to refer to the Underground Railroad. "Douglass never saw a quilt used to free any slaves in his day. Why do we need to pin this nonsense on him now?"

Dozens of postings later, one commentator this month posted a note cautioning that the discussion was threatening to "degenerate into an episode of 'Historians Gone Wild.' "

"We are watching in real time an unfolding of belief in a story," said Marsha MacDowell, a quilting expert and an art professor at Michigan State University. "It will take years to undo. It's like Washington chopping down the cherry tree. It has finally been written out of the history books."

Giles R. Wright, director of the Afro-American History Program at the New Jersey Historical Commission, rattled off the historians' problems in a telephone interview: There is no surviving example of an encoded quilt from the period. The code was never mentioned in any of the interviews of ex-slaves carried out in the 1930's by the Works Progress Administration. There is no mention of quilting codes in any diaries or memoirs from the period.

Mr. Miller responded to critics: "No matter what anyone has to say, they weren't there in that particular moment, especially something that was in secret."

John Reddick, who works for the Central Park Conservancy and helped shepherd the project through its financing and community board approval, noted that in less than a decade "Hidden in Plain View" had become "a touchstone to creative people" and compared the quilt code to the coded language in Negro spirituals. "Take 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,' " he said, "the slave master thinks you are talking about dying, and the slaves are talking about getting away." He also noted the paradox of historians demanding written evidence when slaves were barred from learning to read and write.

On Ms. Winfrey's show, Dr. Dobard appeared with the black descendants of Thomas Jefferson. That relationship was preserved in oral history across the centuries, even as historians of the past generally dismissed the claim. DNA tests published in 1998 are considered to have confirmed Jefferson's paternity.

A spokeswoman for Harpo Productions, which produces the show, had no comment on the controversy.

A historian, Christopher Moore, who is research coordinator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, was consulted on the printed material in the memorial, which includes many quotations from Douglass.

In an interview, Mr. Moore said that as an unpaid consultant reviewing the project, he focused on the Douglass material, and gave cursory attention to the quilts.

When told of the historians' objections, Mr. Moore said "it was a mistake" to include the text explaining the codes. He said he has since been asked to write a historically accurate text for the memorial.

Ms. Levin said she thought the memorial's larger quilting theme was appropriate. "Something can inspire an artist that is not be based in fact," she said. "This isn't a work of history, it's a work of art."
Published in the New York Region section on January 23, 2007.

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In Douglass Tribute, Slave Folklore and Fact Collide

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January 24, 2007 Courtesy of Algernon Miller Courtesy of Algernon Miller An eight-foot-tall sculpture of Frederick Douglass, by the sculptor Gabriel Koren, is included in the $15.5 million project honoring Douglass. At the northwest corner of Central Park, construction is under way on Frederick Douglass Circle, a $15.5 million project honoring the escaped slave who became a world-renowned orator and abolitionist.