Dorris Keeven-Franke

  • The Untold Story

    The Untold Story

    Archer was a hero in his own right, an unknown American hero, whose untold story is difficult to share yet needs to be told. Don’t you think the time is right? For more about Archer visit https://archeralexander.wordpress.com/ online anytime.

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  • Encyclopedia Virginia

    Encyclopedia Virginia

    A recent entry in the Virginia Humanities’ Website Encyclopedia Virginia shares the story of Archer Alexander. The contributor is Dorris Keeven-Franke who is an award-winning author of books on Missouri history

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  • A son named James

    A son named James

    This is the story of two men named James Alexander, one white, one black. One was the owner of Archer Alexander, one was his son. This son lived and died in St. Charles County.

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  • Community

    Community

    Missouri was a slave state that the great orator Henry Clay had compromised with over 10,000 enslaved people when it reached statehood.

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  • The Emancipation Monument

    The Emancipation Monument

    The Emancipation Monument “Freedom’s Memorial” was paid for entirely by funds from the formerly enslaved. It sits in Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C. today. It was dedicated by Frederick Douglass on April 14, 1876.

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  • Hidden History of the Emancipation Monument

    Learn the Hidden History of the Emancipation Monument from historians, researchers and authors.

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  • From Slavery to Freedom

    From Slavery to Freedom

    Free program via Zoom about Archer Alexander’s journey from Rockbridge County Virginia to Missouri in 1829. Details below…

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  • Rockbridge County Virginia

    In July 2019, Archer Alexander’s great-great-great grandson Keith Winstead and author Dorris Keeven-Franke visited Lexington and the Rockbridge Historical Society in Virginia.

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  • Black Lives Matter

    Take a closer look please, as Archer’s shackles have been broken and he is rising to stand next to Lincoln.

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  • Boston’s Emancipation Memorial

    Boston’s copy was placed there as a tribute to the people of Boston who were the nation’s largest contributors to the Western Sanitary Commission. That is what people of America saw when they visited your statue in the 1870s.

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  • Looking for descendants

    Looking for descendants

    In 1829, a small group of four families, Campbell, McCluer, Wilson and Alexander, all wealthy and well educated . planters from Virginia, came with their enslaved, about two dozen of them. They settled in “Dardenne” along the Booneslick Road, south of the Zumwalt place, (O’Fallon) in St. Charles County, Missouri. They were all members of

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  • St. Louis

    St. Louis

    When Lincoln, a personal friend to Eliot, was assassinated, the formerly enslaved wanted a monument to Lincoln, and St. Louis’ former slave, Archer Alexander would be the one, to represent them, rising up and as Eliot says “breaking his own chains”.

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  • A journey into the past

    In an effort to trace Alexander’s early roots Keith Winstead and I will begin in Virginia. Join us as we take a journey along the same route, footstep by footstep, laid out in Campbell’s diary that brought these people to Missouri. Winstead, who shares the DNA of his cousin Muhammad Ali, has been researching his…

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  • The Genealogy of a Slave

    The search for that special slave known as Archer Alexander has begun and needs to be found. Only then can that “true” story, as Keith Alexander calls it, be really known. Not easy when you are trying to find the genealogy of a slave. This is what is known as thorough and exhaustive research, for…

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  • St. Charles County Missouri

    Using DNA the family is looking for other descendants of Archer Alexander. They are planning a reunion in St. Charles County in August 2019.

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