Young, Gifted and Black: Black music icon Aretha Franklin besought ‘Jesus, Be a Fence Around’ that was answered with ‘Amazing Grace’ as a ‘natural resource’
Aretha Louise Franklin was born on March 25, 1942, at the family home on 406 Lucy Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee. Her father was a Baptist circuit preacher from Shelby, Mississippi, and her mother was a pianist and gospel singer whom Mahalia Jackson once called one of the finest in the country.
How the 1849 scandal of Sisterhood of Marcy laid bare dark secrets of Virginia’s high society
Behind doors decorated with imported French wallpaper and carved mahogany frames. Inside the homes of Richmond’s most respected families. Eight women lived in those houses.
Eight names that carried weight in every drawing room in Virginia.
Horrors of slavery-2: How slavery contained within it seeds of its own destruction and reminder that the past lives in systems we inherit
Continued… James Brenner was a lawyer and his law office on March 28, 1847, was busy. He understood discretion. He understood that some problems couldn’t be solved through legal channels or public confrontation. So he did what men in his position did. He reached out to other husbands quietly, carefully,...
Horrors of slavery-2: Abducted into slavery with his mother and sister, Tobias vowed to revenge and did it by impregnating Whites
Tobias left that meeting and went to his quarters. He sat on his bed in the darkness and he smiled for the first time in 15 years. Because Edward Harlow had just handed him the weapon he needed, not the breeding itself. Harlow expected Tobias to stay within the enslaved population. That was the plan. That was what made it profitable.
Horrors of slavery: His job was to impregnate slave women, then impregnated his owner’s wife and daughter
When Sheriff Thomas McKinley drew his pistol, Margaret Harlow, the plantation owner’s wife, stepped forward, her belly opened, her child lying dead at her feet, and she raised her bloodied hands in front of Tobias.
Before slave trade was abolished in USA, slaves on plantation farms in Texas would receive 150 lashes for offence of dancing without a permit
Hall kept a white overseer and a Black driver beneath him. The driver was an enslaved man given authority to push other enslaved people harder, a position that sat at one of the cruellest intersections slavery could produce.
Solid gold-3: How stubborn persistence of love for Black man drove Elellanena to breach racial barriers, give birth to three mixed-race children
When Elellanena arrived, there were over 80 inmates crowded into cells meant for two or three. Most of the prisoners were there for minor offenses – theft, prostitution, public drunkenness. A few were there for violence. Elellanena was the only one there for loving across the colour line.
Solid gold-2: How slavery created a system of whips, forced labour, destruction of families, denial of parenthood and love as a secret to hide, code and deny
Samuel continued his work as a blacksmith. He was essential to the plantation now. His skills had expanded beyond horseshoes and hinges. He repaired the cotton gin when it broke down. He built a new irrigation system for the rice fields. He designed tools that made the work more efficient.
Elellanena paid him nothing for this. Of course, slaves could not be paid, but she found ways to improve his conditions: better food, a larger cabin, medical care when he was injured.
Just because I’m Black: Long before Venus and Serena Williams two Black sisters won 14 US national tennis titles but were never paid a cent
Tennis in the 1940s was strictly amateur. The Peters sisters received no prize money, no sponsorships, no compensation of any kind. They paid for their own rackets, their own travel, their own entry fees. They funded a career of national championships by working as schoolteachers.
Solid gold: How white, aristocratic women fought off social norms and law on cotton plantations in USA for romance with Black slaves
Neighbours tried to pressure her into selling. Men she barely knew proposed marriage with transparent motives. Elellanena refused everyone and everything. She hired a new overseer named Thomas Garrett, a man who came recommended by a Quaker family she had met in Philadelphia years earlier. Garrett was unusual for a southern overseer. He did not use the whip.
