March Book Drive – #1000blackgirlbooks
The Robbins House is supporting 11-year-old Marley Dias and her #1000blackgirlbooks project. Marley is collecting books about black girls to distribute to schools in the US and in her mother’s home country of Jamaica. She started this project because she was frustrated by being forced to read almost exclusively books about “white boys with dogs” in school. The only place she could read books about children who looked like her was at home.
What can you do?
If you would like to help, please donate a new book with a black girl as the main character. You can find children’s books that feature black female leads here: http://weneeddiversebooks.org/
Please bring your book to Sunday’s event or drop your book donation off in the Concord-Carlisle High School office with the name of Johanna Glazer, The Robbins House attached. Thank you!
For more information about Marley‘s project, visit http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
![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!](http://robbinshouse.org/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)