Blog Archives

Gathering African American Families’ Oral Histories – The Getting Word Project: African American Stories from Monticello – Part Two of Three

Posted on April 4, 2017 by prinnyanderson — Leave a comment

Part 2 of the Oral History post describes the kinds of impacts that oral history research can have, regardless of the circumstances of the family whose history is being woven together. The Getting Word project’s impacts and aftermaths are an…

Tagged with: Getting Word, Monticello., oral history
Posted in Arts & Community Culture, Contemporary (1970- present), Discovery & Personal Reactions, Enslaved People, Legacies

Gathering African American Families’ Oral Histories – The Getting Word Project: African American Stories from Monticello – Part One of Three

Posted on March 28, 2017 by prinnyanderson — 2 Comments

So many of us want to know our ancestors’ stories and find out more about where we’ve come from. DNA research has advanced our ability to find and learn about our family members to an extraordinary extent, but family stories…

Tagged with: Bankhead, Beverly Gray, Chilicothe, Dianne Swann-Wright, Fossett, Getting Word, Hemings, Lucia Stanton, Monticello., oral history, Scott
Posted in Ancestry, Enslaved People, Intimacy & Family Life, Linked Descendants, Plantations, Slaveholding (1780 -1865)

Spontaneous Eruptions

Posted on February 26, 2017 by prinnyanderson — 4 Comments

Tagged with: cross-racial communication, inter-racial friendship, linked descendants, racial reconciliation
Posted in Connecting Across Families, Contemporary (1970- present), Discovery & Personal Reactions, Intimacy & Family Life, Linked Descendants, North America, Racism

To Honor the Dishonorable

Posted on February 7, 2017 by uurevken — 25 Comments

There is a problem I have been wrestling with for many years. One of the refrains I hear over and over among people working for racial reconciliation is the necessity of honoring the ancestors and the insistence that the ancestors…

Tagged with: Benjamin Powell, Charles Collier, Collier, George Cader Powell, Isaac Collier, John Powell, legacy of slavery, Powell, racial reconciliation, Racism
Posted in Contemporary (1970- present), Discovery & Personal Reactions, Legacies, North America, Racism, Slaveholders

Our Caribbean Kin

Posted on January 19, 2017 by Alaí Reyes-Santos — 12 Comments

“Transcolonial kinship narratives seek to transform exploitative and dehumanizing social relations that characterized the European invasion of the Americas, and Eurocentric understandings of history, knowledge, power, citizenship, and humanity.” (Reyes-Santos, Our Caribbean Kin, pg. 8, 2015 ) I sit here in…

Tagged with: Caribbean, Colonialism, Feminism, Legacy of Resistance, linked descendants, power, Puerto Rico, Sexism, social bondage, women’s lives
Posted in Carribean, Central / South America, Colonial (Before 1770s), Cooperation: Assistance, Cooperation: Assistance, Support & Harmony, Farms, Free People of Color, Historic Harms, Linked Descendants, Philosophical Culture, Racism

Brattonsville Experience

Posted on November 16, 2016 by prinnyanderson — 2 Comments

Story by Quest Whalen, Class of 2019, Tuskegee University, submitted kindness of Dr. Lisa Bratton, Professor, Tuskegee University Dr. Bratton shared Ms. Whalen’s essay soon after their overnight at Historic Brattonsville on Friday, September 12, and participation in “By the…

Tagged with: Brattonsville. Tuskegee University. Family history. Bratton family.
Posted in Ancestry, Contemporary (1970- present), Discovery & Personal Reactions, Enslaved People, Plantations, Slaveholding (1780 -1865)

Spontaneous Solidarity

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Roger David Hardesty — 9 Comments

Serial, unpermitted marches; a die-in on a major bridge; even overnight encampment at City Hall did not get #BlackLivesMatter concerns into meetings with the Mayor/ Police Commissioner in Portland, Oregon. Instead of allowing public testimony on a secretly negotiated police…

Tagged with: #BlackLivesMatter, Civil Rights Movement, complicit, dominance, Equality, identity, Jim Crow, Justice, moral crime, power, private property, Reconciliation, segregation, shame, social bondage, status quo, white domination, white privelege, women’s lives
Posted in Coercion, Punishment & Sale, Contemporary (1970- present), Cooperation: Assistance, Cooperation: Assistance, Support & Harmony, Discovery & Personal Reactions, Implications for Action, Power, Racism, Support & Harmony, The Journey

No Account For It

Posted on June 19, 2016 by Roger David Hardesty — 1 Comment

While drafting the post Half-white Slaves of Aristocratic Masters at my blog, I acknowledged that Edward Ball, in his text, The Sweet Hell Inside: The Rise of an Elite Black Family in the Segregated South, employs the term ‘concubines’ to describe intimate, long-term…

Tagged with: 1830s-1870s, Alabama, archival records, Civil War, Concubinage, enslaved Africans, families, slaveholding, Slavery, Stories
Posted in Coercion, Punishment & Sale, Cooperation: Assistance, Support & Harmony, Enslaved People, Intimacy & Family Life, North America, Philosophical Culture, Plantations, Research Adventures, Sex & Concubinage, Slave Trader, Slaveholders, Slaveholding (1780 -1865), Slavery

Saving Slave Cemeteries

Posted on January 27, 2016 by Andi Cumbo-Floyd — 4 Comments

Cemeteries are protected spaces. But in order for those spaces to be protected, they have to be identified. Sadly, for many reasons, many slave cemeteries are not identified, and thus, they are particularly vulnerable to destruction.

Tagged with: slave cemeteries
Posted in Implications for Action, Slaveholding (1780 -1865)

Linked in Nashville

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Felicia Furman — 7 Comments

A friend of mine recently forwarded me this link to a story about two women who discover they are linked descendants. This story is not unusual to those of us who post on BitterSweet: Linked Through Slavery. If anything, it reminds us…

Tagged with: Andrea Scott, Ann Walling, Sunday Dinner: Coming of Age in the Segregated South
Posted in Contemporary (1970- present), General, Intimacy & Family Life, Jim Crow Segregation (1890- 1955), Legacies, Linked Descendants, Racism, Slaveholding (1780 -1865)