Spotlight on… Charles Mauldin, Selma Youth Leader
Middlesex School history teacher Ken Whitlock recently brought Selma civil rights activist Charles Mauldin to the Robbins House:
“I enjoyed my recent visit to the Robbins House with Charles Mauldin, my friend and Boston University classmate who resides in Birmingham, Alabama. A youth leader in the 1965 Selma demonstrations, Charles returned to Boston last month to speak at a ‘Facing History and Ourselves’ conference at Babson College.
“I was impressed with the exhibits about the descendants of Caesar Robbins that illuminate the story of one African American family in 18th- and 19th-century Concord. Ellen Garrison Jackson’s activism and commitment to racial justice were particularly memorable and inspiring. The Robbins House exhibit enhances our knowledge of the history of blacks in Concord.”
To read about Mauldin’s recent talk at the ‘Facing History and Ourselves’ conference at Babson College, click here.
![Did you know that April is National Poetry Month? We have you covered with a little Robbins house trivia. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a poem entitled Peter’s Field. Peter’s Field most likely referenced Peter Hutchinson, who was the last African American owner of The Robbins House. Peter purchased the home in 1852 and lived with his wife, Nancy, and several of their children in the home until 1868. Emerson described Peter’s farm, and by extension the original area of farmland attached to The Robbins House out in the Great Field like this:
KNOWS he who tills this lonely field
To reap its scanty corn,
What mystic fruit his acres yield
At midnight and at morn?]
That field by spirits bad and good,
By Hell and Heaven is haunted,
And every rood in the hemlock wood
I know is ground enchanted.
[In the long sunny afternoon
The plain was full of ghosts:
I wandered up,
I wandered down,
Beset by pensive hosts.
For in those lonely grounds the sun
Shines not as on the town,
In nearer arcs his journeys run,
And nearer stoops the moon.
There in a moment I have seen
The buried Past arise;
The fields of Thessaly grew green,
Old gods forsook the skies.
Happy Reading!](https://robbinshouse.org/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)