African Americans have made extraordinary contributions to the history and culture of the United States as part of the nation and apart from it. This month, Auction Finds present s “28 days (Plus 1)” of…
Tag: slavery
African Americans have made extraordinary contributions to the history and culture of the United States as part of the nation and apart from it. This month, Auction Finds presents “28 days (Plus 1)” of this…
Black footprint in America came way before slavery
Posted in Black history, Books, and history
At auction some years ago, I stumbled across a worn, beaten-down and scruffy book whose title faintly included the word “Negroes.” Opening it, I saw that it was children’s book titled “The First Book of…
Enslaved Africans on illustrated pages of Harper’s Weekly
Posted in Art, and Ephemera/Paper/Documents
The sheets of yellowing pages emblazoned with “Harper’s Weekly” instantly attracted me. During the Civil War, the newspaper was famous for its illustrations of the war’s battles, its wins, its losses and its politics. Harper’s…
Broadside shows slavery’s awful practice of splitting families
Posted in Black history, Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and slavery
The bold title was very clear in its mission: “Public Sale of Negroes by Richard Clagett.” If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was the title of a book and its author. But this was…
Trying to biblically justify slavery in face of reality
Posted in Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and slavery
“The Duties of Servants.” On the surface, the broadside didn’t conjure the word “slavery” in my mind. But there it was among the slavery and abolition documents up for auction this week at Swann Auction…
The error of asking “Django” to save black people
Posted in Black history, Movies, and slavery
I wasn’t too keen on engaging in all the intellectual back-and-forths swirling around Quentin Tarantino’s movie “Django Unchained,” but I broke down and went with my friend Kristin over the weekend to a discussion about…
A Georgia cotton plantation so close to home
Posted in Architecture/Buildings, Black history, and slavery
I almost stepped foot on a cotton plantation last week. I was headed to a bookstore in my hometown of Macon, GA, when at the foot of the exit off I-75, I spotted the sign…
Remnants of slavery – auction ads & neck shackles
Posted in Black history, Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and slavery
I was flipping through a decade-old black history newsletter recently when I came across an article illustrated with two 19th-century ads announcing slave auctions. The headlines slapped me across the face because they were so jarring:…