Читать книгу The Book of Awesome Black Americans - Monique Jones - Страница 11

The number of interesting characters in Africa’s history pre-slavery could fill up volumes of books or populate movie theaters with Marvel-esque film franchises. Unfortunately, a lot of this history has gone unrecognized by the Western world in large part due to the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which involved the kidnapping and trafficking of millions of Africans from their homes to the New World. It’s estimated that 12.5 million captives were brought from Africa to the Americas between 1525 and 1866. That means families were forever broken, knowledge was lost, and communities were deprived of parts of their identities.

It’s worth noting that some of the entries in this section include enslaved African Americans who differ in opinion about their treatment in slavery. As you’ll read, some actually liked their owners, whereas several more disliked their masters. The differences in opinion must be put in context; some who speak of less-than-horrific experiences can only do so because they happened to have owners who were kinder than most. These types of masters, however, were the exception, and the overarching effect on slavery in the US perpetuated a system of racism that is so entrenched, we still feel its effects today.

Some slaves’ gentler accounts also have to do with the wealth and status they had before becoming enslaved. Some of the following slaves were royals in their countries of origin. As such, they might believe they were enslaved because they were wrongly thought of as being part of a lower class, not just because they were Black. As you’ll read, one formerly enslaved man even became a slave trader once he was freed and was able to return to Africa.

With that said, every slave listed below has a history that we should learn from. Regardless of their personal stances, their narratives and experiences have helped America move forward toward a more just society.

Transatlantic Survivors

Enslaved Black Americans were faced with hardship and abuse simply because of their skin. Incredibly, many were able to rise above adversity and accomplish great feats. One of those Black Americans who rose to notoriety during slavery’s grip on the country was Abdulrahman Ibrahim ibn Sori.

Sori was a prince of Fouta Djallon in Guinea and, with a command of two thousand men, was responsible for protecting Guinea’s coast and economic interests when he was captured in 1788 and enslaved in the US for forty years. His title of “Prince” became a source of petty humor for those who couldn’t believe a Black man could be royalty. Sori’s enslavement brought him to Natchez, Mississippi, and, after realizing escape was impossible, he set about earning his freedom by becoming an integral part of the life of his new master, the uneducated Thomas Foster. Thanks to Sori’s knowledge of cotton, a native crop of his home country, Foster became one of the South’s largest cotton producers. As for Sori, his power earned him limited freedom on the plantation, which allowed him to grow and sell his own vegetables.

After gaining relative freedom and building a family with his wife, Foster’s midwife Isabella, Sori was recognized by a random traveler, British surgeon John Cox. Decades before, Sori and his family had helped Cox when he was shipwrecked off the coast of Guinea. Intent on paying Sori back for his kindness, Cox made it his duty to spend the rest of his life buying back Sori’s freedom. Even though the surgeon’s efforts didn’t pan out, Sori became a celebrity due to the story, and he used his status, as well as the country’s racism, for his own advantage: he allowed America to believe he was a Moroccan citizen who was wrongly captured.

Morocco was considered different from the remainder of Africa (including West Africa, where many slaves were from). Why was America so friendly with Morocco? Because the Moroccan government was one of the first nations to recognize the US as an independent nation in the late 1700s. Sultan Sidi Muhammad Ben Abdullah extended the proverbial olive branch to create an alliance with America to establish peaceful trade. This explains why Sori felt it was in his best interest to pretend to be Moroccan; if America believed the lie, they would fear ruining trade relations—and Sori would be set free. The almighty dollar is often more powerful to the corrupt than actual human decency.

And so, out of fear of worsening the country’s relationship with Morocco, Secretary of State Henry Clay ordered for Sori’s release.

His battle to earn the release of his children proved unfruitful, and, even though he did make it to Africa—he arrived in Monrovia after his decades-long battle to return home—he died at age sixty-seven, after contracting a fever from his journey. Tragically, he never reached his homeland or saw his children again.

Thomas Peters was born Thomas Potters and was rumored to have been an African royal kidnapped and enslaved in North Carolina, but little did anyone know that he would become a founding father of an African country. Enlisted as a Black Loyalist in the Black Company of Pioneers, Peters fled his enslavement with the British during the Revolutionary War. When he arrived in Nova Scotia, Canada, he also became notable for his recruitment of Black settlers in the Canadian province to join him in establishing a colony for free Blacks in Sierra Leone, Africa, called Freetown. Freetown is now the largest city and capital of Sierra Leone.

Absalom Jones,born enslaved, founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), a denomination that is immensely popular today, with seven thousand congregations and a membership of at least 2.5 million. Jones was born into slavery in Sussex County, Delaware, and asked for help to learn how to read. With this education, his owner Benjamin Wynkoop brought him to Philadelphia to serve as a clerk and handyman in a retail store. This allowed Jones to work for himself and keep his pay. During his time as a clerk, he also attended a Quaker-run school, where he learned writing and math.

His earnings allowed him to purchase the freedom of his wife, Mary Thomas, in 1770, and he eventually earned his own freedom through manumission. During his life, he became a businessman owning several properties, and he also organized the Free African Society with his friend Richard Allen. The organization helped those in need, such as orphans, the infirm, widows, and those who needed help with burial expenses. The two were pastors and, because of their charitable efforts, increased their congregation to the point that they were able to create “The African Church,” an offshoot of the Free African Society.

Archer Alexander was a former slave who is immortalized in the Emancipation Memorial at St. Louis’s Lincoln Park. He was born into slavery in Virginia and was moved to St. Louis with his master before he was sold to another master in Missouri. He eventually became a source of information to Union troops before the Civil War, warning them that a train trestle they were looking to use was sabotaged by Confederate sympathizers. Suspected as the leak, slavers caught up with him, but he broke free and managed to escape back to St. Louis.

He became a part of writer Greenleaf Eliot’s life after his wife hired Alexander as a servant. Eliot’s personal credo said he wouldn’t return a fugitive slave to a former master, so he managed to keep Alexander safe until Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, allowing him, his wife Louisa, and one of their daughters, Nellie, to be reunited shortly before Louisa’s death. Alexander later remarried, but she, too, died one year before Alexander’s death in 1880.

While Alexander was alive, his life story as a Union spy compelled Eliot to write his biography, The Story of Archer Alexander: From Slavery to Freedom. Sculptor Thomas Ball also utilized Alexander’s visage as a model for the freed slave in the Emancipation Memorial. Here’s the story of how Alexander became the model: The Western Sanitary Commission, which helped victims of the Civil War, began a fundraising campaign to build a statue after a freed woman gave them five dollars toward building a monument to President Abraham Lincoln. As a person affiliated with the group, Eliot met with Ball about the sculpture. At the meeting, Eliot gave Ball photographs of Alexander to use, because one of the Commission’s contingencies was that the statue feature a real freed slave. The statue, which features a freed slave kneeling in gratitude to President Abraham Lincoln, made its debut in 1876.

Alexander also has another connection to today’s culture. According to DNA, Alexander’s great-granddaughter is the paternal grandmother of “The Greatest,” boxer Muhammad Ali. Ironically enough, author Greenleaf Eliot also has a connection; he is the grandfather of famous playwright and poet (and the person we have to blame for Cats), T.S. Eliot.

Ayuba Suleiman Diallo was a prominent merchant from Senegal before he and his translator were captured by Mandinka slave traders in 1729 and brought to Maryland. Diallo was eventually freed after his owner was convinced of his nobility by Rev. Thomas Bluett and a letter Diallo wrote to his father. This letter had caught the attention of James Oglethorpe, the director of the business that captured Diallo, the Royal African Company. After his freedom, he was brought to London and became part of the region’s elite circle. In a dark twist, he himself became an interpreter and slave trader for the Royal African Company until his death in 1773. Even though he sent fellow Africans to harsh fates, his account of slavery, published by Bluett, is considered vital in understanding the horrific nature of the slave trade.

Dred Scott is the man behind the famous case Dred Scott v. Sanford.

As we know, the Dred Scott case involves Scott, an enslaved man, suing for his freedom as well as that of his family. In the suit, he asserts that he, his wife, and his family were free after having lived in the free state of Illinois with his owner before returning to the slave state of Missouri and then completing the journey in the free Wisconsin territory. However, the case has a longer history than what we are taught in the schoolbooks.

Scott was an enslaved man who was owned by John Emerson and his family. It’s the Emersons’ move between Missouri and Illinois due to John Emerson’s military duty that is the basis for Scott’s case. But reportedly, after his owner John died, Scott attempted to purchase his freedom from Emerson’s widow. She refused, compelling Scott and his lawyers to file individual suits for Scott and his wife, Harriet. The courts in St. Louis agreed that the case should move forward, and, by 1850, Scott had actually won his case on a state level. But the verdict was reversed in 1852 by the Missouri Supreme Court, which invalidated the state’s “once free, always free” doctrine.

By this time, Emerson’s widow had given estate control to her brother, John F.A. Sanford. Sanford was a New York resident, and, since he wasn’t bound by Missouri law, Scott’s lawyers filed a case against Sanford in US District Court. Even though the court ruled in Sanford’s favor, the case advanced to the Supreme Court.

Unfortunately, the case failed, with the US Supreme Court ruling that no Black person could claim US citizenship nor could they petition for their freedom. Particularly, the ruling made by the majority and written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, hinged on the Fifth Amendment, which declares it unconstitutional to be held for a crime barring a correct indictment by police. Slaves, it was argued, are property and therefore not American citizens. As non-citizens, slaves also had no ground to sue for their freedom in court.

Overall, Taney’s ruling was a backward attempt to keep racial prejudices intact; his opinion did state that Black people could be citizens and even vote in certain states. But in his view, state citizenship wasn’t equal to national citizenship. However, if you’re a citizen of a state, you’re thereby a citizen of the United States. But Taney claimed that while Scott might have been free in one state, he wasn’t free in Missouri, where he resided. Ironically, Scott and his family were emancipated merely three months after the Supreme Court decision. Their freedom was granted by the Blow family, who had sold the Scotts to the Emersons in the first place. Scott lived the rest of his life working as a hotel porter in St. Louis, and Harriett worked as a laundress. Unfortunately, Scott died just a little over a year after gaining his hard-fought freedom in 1858. His cause of death was tuberculosis. Incredibly, the Blow family continued to care for Scott after his death, giving him a proper burial.

Scott wasn’t the only person in American history to sue for freedom. Hundreds of slaves waged such lawsuits before the Civil War, and Elizabeth Key Grinstead is one of those litigious enslaved Americans. She became one of the first Black people in the North American colonies to successfully sue for her freedom. The lawsuit, filed in 1656 in Virginia, was for her freedom as well as the freedom of her infant son. Similarly, Elizabeth Freeman successfully sued to be freed by her owners Colonel John Ashley, the judge of the Berkshire Court of Common Pleas, and his wife. Freeman and her sister were wedding presents, in fact, since Ashley’s new wife was the daughter of Freeman’s former master, Pieter Hogeboom. The newly minted Mrs. Ashley was a cruel mistress to Elizabeth, known as “Mum Bett,” and her sister. For instance, when Elizabeth tried to protect her sister from one of Mrs. Ashley’s strikes, Elizabeth received a wound on her arm that never healed. Instead of shielding it, she instead kept it visible so everyone could see her mistress’s cruelty.

It is Colonel Ashley’s own words that gave Elizabeth the keys to the freedom she so desperately wanted. Colonel Ashley was part of the committee that wrote the Sheffield Declaration in 1773, stating that “mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.” These words compelled Freeman to seek lawyer Theodore Sedgwick for help. In 1781, she actually won her case in the Berkshire Court of Common Pleas, but Ashley refused to release Freeman. That August, the case, Brom and Bett v. Ashley, went to the County Court of Common Pleas of Great Barrington, where Sedgwick argued that Massachusetts actually outlawed slavery per the state’s constitution. The jury sided with Sedgwick and, finally, Freeman was a free woman. Freeman used her liberty to become a healer, nurse, and midwife. She also worked as a paid domestic to Sedgwick and his second wife, Pamela. Within the home, she became a rock for the family, even helping Pamela through her severe depression. She bought her own house to live with her children. By the time she died in 1829, she had a lineage of grandchildren and great-grandchildren to carry on her legacy.

Interestingly enough, the “Brom” included in the case was the name of another slave, a man named Brom who was also a slave in the area. It’s unknown as to how he became involved in the case, but it’s believed that Brom was also in Ashley’s household. At any rate, the case also allowed for Brom’s freedom. However, we don’t know what became of him. Let’s hope he had a better life than the one he led before the case.

Enslaved people also made their way into high office. Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley was a former Virginia slave who bought her and her son’s freedom in 1855 and eventually became the personal modiste (a personal stylist and dressmaker) and confidante for the First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. She also became a civil activist and author, who published her memoirs on living in the White House called Behind the Scenes, Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. While in the White House, Keckley and Fredrick Douglass organized educational programs and relief initiatives for emancipated slaves.

Archibald Grimké was the son of slave Nancy Weston and her owner Henry Grimké in Charleston, North Carolina, but went on to become a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Archibald and his brother Francis lived as free Black men before his half-brother, Montague, employed them as servants. After suffering abuse at the hands of Montague, he escaped and hid with relatives until Charleston surrendered to the Union during the Civil War.

After attending Lincoln College in Pennsylvania, Grimké became one of the first African American students at Harvard Law School in Massachusetts, later establishing a Boston-based law firm. He also acted as consul to Santo Domingo (the Dominican Republic) and, in 1903, he became the president of the American Negro Academy until 1919. He helped found the NAACP in 1909 and became the president of the Washington, DC, chapter in 1913. In 1919, he was given the NAACP’s highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. Grimké died in 1930.

Estevanico, who was also known as Esteban the Moor, Esteban de Dorantes, Estebanico, or Mustafa Azemmouri, is believed to be one of the first Africans to reach the continental United States. As a boy, he was enslaved by the Portuguese and later sold to a Spanish nobleman. He was aboard the Spanish Narváez expedition to establish a colony in Florida in 1527. He was among the few to survive the trek through Florida, with many of the three hundred men dying along the way from attacks by Florida’s Native Americans and the state’s harsh jungle. The survivors made barges and tried to sail away to Mexico, but only eighty people survived after the boats capsized near Galveston, Texas. The Native Americans in Texas were friendly at the outset, but eventually enslaved the remaining explorers, and, after five years, only four of the eighty survived, including Estevanico.

Estevanico became an explorer of the American Southwest, traveling with Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, and Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, the remaining survivors, through New Spain (what is now the US Southwest and northern Mexico) to Mexico City to meet up with Spanish forces. Estevanico and the other survivors became medicine men after living with another Native American tribe, and the four men became known as healers, earning the nickname “The Children of the Sun.” Estevanico also became fluent in several Native languages.

Estevanico led a reconnaissance party back through the Southwest for the viceroy of Mexico. But it’s believed he was killed by the Zuni in their city of Hawikuh in 1539 because his trademark medicine gourd was trimmed with owl feathers, a bird that’s thought to be a symbol of death to the Zuni.

Harriet Ann Jacobs escaped from slavery to protect herself from sexual threats put forth by her owner’s father, Dr. James Norcom. She lived as a fugitive for ten years before she was freed by Cornielia Grinnell Willis, the second wife of her employer, poet and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis. She became an abolitionist and an author, writing her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which included the sexual trauma she and other Black female slaves experienced from their masters. Unfortunately, the book would fall from the public eye until the 1960s and 1970s, when the civil rights movement and women’s movement gained traction.

Hannah Crafts, also known as Hannah Bond, is the author of The Bondwoman’s Narrative, thought to be the first novel by an African American woman, as well as the only one written by a fugitive slave woman. The novel was written in the late 1850s but was only rediscovered and published in 2002 after Harvard professor Henry Lewis Gates Jr. purchased the manuscript.

The slave “Fed” renamed himself John Brown and became an author with his book of memoirs, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England. The book, which was published in London in 1855, contained the dictated accounts of Brown (written by the secretary of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society’s secretary, Louis Alexis Chamerovzow) and how he managed to escape from Georgia to England. His memories include abuse, loss, familial separation, medical experimentation, and more. Brown eventually lived a full life in London, marrying a local woman and working as an herbalist. He died in 1876.

Jordan Winston Early was born as a slave in 1814 in Virginia and lived with his maternal aunt, an astronomy-loving uncle, and an older woman known as “Aunt Milly” on his plantation before he became a minister at the young age of twelve. When he and his family were taken to Missouri by their masters in 1826, he was emancipated and began his journey toward becoming an African Methodist Episcopal Church preacher in 1836. After expanding the AME Church in St. Louis, Illinois, Indiana, New Orleans, and Tennessee, Early became a deacon in 1838 and established the first AME Church in St. Louis in 1840.

Jupiter Hammon is known as the first African American poet to be published in America. Born into slavery in New York on Henry Lloyd’s estate, Hammon was educated along with his master’s children and worked with his master at his businesses. His first work, An Evening Thought, also known as An Evening Prayer and An Evening’s Thought: Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries, was published in 1760 and used to preach to Lloyd’s slaves. In 1787, he spoke to New York’s Black community at the African Society of New York City called “An Address to the Negroes in the State of New York.” Despite his celebrity status, Hammon was never freed. He was buried in an unmarked grave on his master’s estate.

Lewis Adams, formerly a slave in Alabama, took his passion for education to found the Tuskegee Institute, now known as Tuskegee University, one of the prominent HBCUs in America. Born in 1852, Adams became proficient in reading and writing and became a polyglot even though he had no formal education. He was a Jack of all trades as an expert in tin-smithing, shoe-making, and harness-making. His Tuskegee Institute, which opened in 1881 as the Tuskegee State Normal School, came at the right time for freed Blacks after the Civil War and during Reconstruction, when Black people were in need of gaining different skills to make a living. To show just how interconnected Black leaders were throughout history, the first principal of the Tuskegee Institute was none other than scholar Booker T. Washington.

Omar ibn Said was a wealthy Senegalese Islamic scholar and writer who was captured and enslaved in 1807 in North Carolina. Even though he was never able to return to his Senegalese home of Futa Tooro, Said became an author in the US, writing a series of books on theology and history and an autobiography that was published after his death in 1864. His account of his life in America includes escaping from his first owner, an abusive man named Johnson. He was put in jail and was later recovered by North Carolina governor John Owen and his brother Jim, whom Said described as godly people. He converted to Christianity and remained with his owner’s family until his death.

Paul Jennings was a slave who served President James Madison and his family in the Madison family home of Montpelier and in the White House. Jennings’ memoir, A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison, is thought to be the first memoir about life at the White House. It also provided one of many written accounts of how slaves interacted with their owners, particularly those whose morals seem antithetical to the tenet of slavery. Jennings was later able to buy his freedom via statesman Daniel Webster, and, after gaining his freedom and making a living as a “laborer” by completing clerical tasks, he visited Madison’s widow, Dolley Madison, now broke, and provided “small sums of money from [his] own pocket” if he thought she needed it.

Solomon Northup is known to us today because of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s dramatic performance in Twelve Years a Slave. Of course, like in any film, Northup’s account is dramatized for effect. That doesn’t mean that the horrors Northup lived through were any less vile or terrifying. The real man behind the film character was an abolitionist, professional violinist, and landowner in New York. Northup was born free as the son of a freed slave and a free woman but was later held hostage in slavery for twelve years, living through unthinkable conditions. His account of his enslavement furthered the abolitionist case in the US and fueled Northup’s work with the Underground Railroad as well as his lectures throughout the country. In fact, many freed Black people were kidnapped into slavery, so much so that the exact number of victims is unknown. Sadly, many didn’t have the happier fate of Northup, who managed to escape. Many who were sold back into slavery were never heard from again because of the nefarious ways their histories as free individuals were erased. In many instances, their freedom papers were either destroyed or dismissed by judges as being forged, White witnesses refused to testify against their neighbors who were committing these crimes, and much more.

Slavery was much easier to excuse by the masses before the image of Gordon, who became known as “Whipped Peter,” circulated throughout the nation. Gordon’s influential status was established in 1863 after he came to a Union encampment in Baton Rouge. His harrowing escape was just part of the violence he had endured as a slave, which included being whipped nearly to death. The photograph of his raised scars, which traveled the length of his back and were accumulated over years, were revealed during a medical examination and became one of the most widely circulated photographs about slavery at the time, strengthening the abolitionist movement and putting the importance of the Civil War into perspective; as much as the argument could be made about the war being about “economics,” it was clear that there were human rights at stake. His photo propelled other Black abolitionist leaders, like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, to either pose for pictures for circulation or sell them to raise awareness and funds for abolitionist initiatives.

The Bridge to Freedom

Incredibly, there were also enslaved people who lived long enough to not only be emancipated, but to also make headlines in the mid-1900s. Cudjo Lewis and Redoshi are two of the last slaves to be trafficked across the Atlantic, coming from Africa to Alabama via the Clotilda, the last slave ship in operation in the Americas. Cudjo Lewis (born as Oluale Kossola) and Redoshi (also known in the US as Sally Lewis), were both born in Benin and kidnapped into slavery in 1860. Lewis and other Clotilda survivors went on to establish Africatown near Mobile, an isolated community of independent freed Blacks who not only shielded themselves from outside discrimination but preserved their shared African culture.

Eliza Moore was also one of the last documented slaves in the Unites States. Moore was born in Montgomery County, Alabama, in 1843 and was a slave to a man named Dr. Taylor. She lived at Gilchrist Place, where she and her husband were sharecroppers for between sixty-five and seventy years. At the time of her death in 1948 at the age of 105, she was thought to be one of Montgomery County’s oldest residents, if not the oldest resident. However, her husband was just as blessed with longevity as she was. Ashbury died in 1943, and he too was over a hundred years old.

North Carolina’s last Confederate Civil War veteran to receive a Class B pension from the state was Alfred “Teen” Blackburn, the last living person in North Carolina’s Yadkin County to be counted as a slave. Similarly to Lewis, Redoshi, and Moore, Blackburn is also one of the last living survivors of slavery in the nation to remember slavery as an adult.

According to his family’s accounts, Blackburn was the son of Fannie Blackburn, a biracial Cherokee-African enslaved by Augustus Blackburn, a plantation owner and Confederate colonel in the Civil War. During the Civil War, he served as Augustus’s “body servant” and served Blackburn’s regiment as the cook and help.

His time after the war included various jobs such as farming, working for a local sheriff, and becoming a contract male carrier for the US Postal Service, where he supervised both White and Black workers for sixty years. He also married a well-to-do White woman named Lucy Carson, related to the frontiersman Kit Carson. Together, he and Lucy had ten children, all of whom had formal education due to Blackburn’s tireless work ethic. Blackburn died in 1951 at the age of 108.

George Freeman Bragg was born as a slave in Warrenton, North Carolina, but he and his family very quickly became free after the Civil War. Religion had always been a huge part of Bragg’s upbringing; he was baptized at Emmanuel Episcopal Church, and his family later moved to Petersberg, Virginia, to live with his grandmother Caroline Wiley Cain Bragg, a former slave of an Episcopal priest and a devout Episcopalian herself. Caroline became one of the founding members of Petersberg’s first Black Episcopalian church, St. Steven’s Episcopal Church. Bragg attended St. Stephen’s parochial school until 1870 when he was expelled for a lack of humility. He founded the weekly Black newspaper The Lancet (eventually known as The Afro-American Churchman and the Church Advocate) in 1882 and returned to parochial school in 1885. He was finally ordained as a deacon in 1887 and received his ordination as an Episcopal priest in 1888. Bragg died in 1940.

Dr. Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was born into slavery in 1858, but later became one of the nation’s most prominent African American scholars. Known as “the mother of Black Feminism,” she earned her PhD in history from the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 1924, making her the fourth Black woman to earn a doctoral degree.

Much of Cooper’s focus was on the importance of keeping African American folklore alive. Because she realized the importance of cataloging the oral tales told by Black families, she cofounded the Washington Negro Folklore Society to collect and preserve these stories. Her book A Voice from the South (1892) is considered the first book about the African American experience from a feminist perspective and focuses on suffrage, poverty, segregation, Black literature, and more. She later became the second president of the Frelinghuysen University, which offered vocational, religious, and academic education for Black working class adults. Even though the school earned and lost its accreditation within the decade of 1927 to 1937, Cooper continued to make the school (renamed the Frelinghuysen Group of Schools for Colored Working People) an avenue for Black Americans to take when advancing their careers. She remained with the school until 1942. She, like Moore, lived to the old age of 105.

Going Forward After Slavery

Although those who were enslaved were stripped of their magnanimous titles and prestige and, indeed, their human rights, they managed to keep their dignity through sheer force of will. It is their survival instinct that is present in Black American history today, and that instinct helped propel many of the country’s inventors, businesspeople, activists, artists, scientists, doctors, eco-warriors, and many more achieve their dreams and change American society in the process.