SLAVE BANJO
AIRED: Season 3, Episode 4
THE DETECTIVE: Tukufu Zuberi
THE PLACE: Baltimore, Maryland
THE CASE:
A beautiful, worn banjo is purchased by a Chicago resident at an auction a few years ago.
A tattered note inside says the banjo dates to the mid-1800s and was bought from a former slave in Bethel, Ohio, by an abolitionist family some time after Emancipation.
According to the note, the slave who owned the banjo and the boy who ultimately purchased the banjo had once shared a classroom. Could this be the only slave banjo known to exist?
History Detectives is off to Ohio and Maryland to trace the roots of two American families divided by racial lines during the Civil War and to track the surprising lineage of an instrument that has contributed to more than 200 years of American music
Think you have a case for the History Detectives? Send us your mystery here. 