Connecticut Colored Regiments Memorial Walk!

Memorial
Written By John Mills

To celebrate the 160th anniversary of the return of the 29th & 30th Connecticut Colored Regiments from the Civil War, the Alex Breanne Corporation in collaboration with Connecticut's Old State House is holding a memorial walk, following in the footsteps of the soldiers during the Hartford parade they were given on November 24,1865.  The walk will occur on Saturday November 22, 2025. Pre-walk activities begin at 9am with the walk beginning at 10am. We will also be holding a reception beginning at 11:30am where surprises are planned.

The route will begin at Connecticut's Old State House, 800 Main Street in Hartford, and end at the same spot.  The full route is 3.1 miles (5k), but the route brings us back by the Old State House at 1 mile, so walkers can choose to walk only that segment. Participants can also choose to simply hang out at Connecticut's Old State House during the walk to enjoy the museum. The award winning film about the 29th Connecticut Colored Regiment produced by the Berlin Equity Action Team will be playing at the Old State House for those remaining there.

Also, the Alex Breanne Corporation has produced a GPS-enabled VoiceMap audio tour that directs users on where to turn, as well as provides facts of historic Hartford buildings and locations that the soldiers would have passed along the route. The audio tour will be playing as we walk on November 22. It will also be made available after the event, allowing those who missed the walk to take it on their own in the future.

Tentative order of events:

  • 9:00am: Welcome message (Sally Whipple)

  • 9:05am: Descendants Group (Kelly Mero)

  • 9:10am: Program Intro (John Mills)

  • 9:15am: Pvt. William Webb (reenactor - Kevin Johnson)

  • 9:25am: Gov. Buckingham speech (reenactor - Dan Hayden)

  • 9:30am: Memorial walk begins

  • 11:30am: Reception Begins

  • 11:35am: Poem (Grace Figueroa)

  • 11:40am: Unveiling (Katiana Jarbath-Smith)

In celebration of these heroic men, please join us! Register HERE. You can also purchase official walk hoodies, shirts and beanies HERE. Hope to see you there!

God bless.

John

John Mills

Originally from San Diego, John Mills is a technologist by trade, but an equity advocate and independent scholar by passion. The descendant of both southern and northern enslaved, John focuses on unearthing little known people and stories of this country’s history in slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. John presents research through the lens and perspective of a descendant, with intent to inspire understanding and empathy, a means to inspire good, God fearing people, now armed with information, to look into whether they may be unwittingly aligning to biases resulting from the reverberating effects of a past time. John is a member of the Connecticut Freedom Trail and a member of the Webb Deane Stevens Museum Council. John is also working with an international team funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in an effort to deliver transformational impact on digital methods in cultural institutions...a means to decolonize museums. Finally, John is working with the state of Connecticut, business leaders and scholars in Middletown, CT to honor and memorialize a former enslaved individual by the name of Prince Mortimer.

https://alexbreanne.org
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