Sunday, February 23All That Matters

Black families split apart by slavery used newspaper ads to reunite.

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Black families split apart by slavery used newspaper ads to reunite.

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7 Comments

  • We’re so connected today that we don’t really think about “separation” the same way they did 160 years ago. When slaves were separated then, that relationship was effectively destroyed.

    Plus, consider that many slaves were illiterate, so couldn’t even take advantage of this very rudimentary form of reconnecting.

  • Two of these have dates, and both are after the end of slavery, and three of them mention people (either the person posting the ad or the missing person) leaving of their own will.

    These people were split apart by the chaos after slavery ended. It wasn’t easy for people to travel and find each other in that era, and this was doubly true for people who were economically disadvantaged and from communities with low rates of literacy. But they were free. They faced unfair conditions, but they traveled from home by their own will. And, while there was injustice was beyond comprehension, the rigid racial caste system of the Jim Crow era wasn’t set in stone at this point. [There were seven black men in the United States Congress in 1870](https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/african-americans-house-of-reps/) Several colleges had been founded by this point, and many graduates of those colleges had opened community funded primary schools for black students. Black Americans in 1870 were in difficult circumstances, but their outlook was better at that time than it was by 1910, when the Tulsa massacre, Wilmington insurrection, and thousands of lynchings had solidified the boundaries of segregation.

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