#margaret garner

[marinamar4]

Friendly reminder that when fanfics talk about Anakin's slavery, and sometimes mention that by killing the Jedi children in the temple he saved them from a life of slavery, it's not a writer's imagination, it's real. Margaret Garner was a black slave who preferred to kill her daughter rather than have her live as a slave and there are apparently many stories like that that we don't know about.

[cincylibrary]

On January 28, 1856, Margaret Garner, her husband Robert, their four children, and approximately 11 other enslaved people crossed the frozen Ohio River. The Garners sought shelter in Margaret’s uncle’s home along Mill Creek. While in hiding, Margaret’s uncle, worried about how to keep the family safe, left his home to consult with Cincinnati abolitionist Levi Coffin.

Before his return home, U.S. Marshals and slave catchers surrounded and ultimately stormed the home. Faced with seeing her children returned to slavery, Margaret ended her two year old’s life just before being apprehended.

Margaret was held for trial in Cincinnati and abolitionists from across the country came to support her. Abolitionist Lucy Stone spoke at her trial stating, “If in her deep maternal love she felt the impulse to send her child back to God, to save it from coming woe, who shall say she had no right not to do so?”

Margaret was returned to slavery. When Ohio authorities got a warrant for Garner to try her for murder, they were unable to find her. She and her husband, Robert, died in 1858 of typhoid fever in Mississippi. Garner’s story inspired Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison’s novel "Beloved".

See this image and more of Cincinnati’s Black history in CHPL’s Digital Library:

[protectblackchildren]

OVERLOOKED

These remarkable black men and women never received obituaries in The New York Times — until now. We’re adding their stories to our project about prominent people whose deaths were not reported by the newspaper.

Since 1851, The New York Times has published thousands of obituaries, capturing the lives and legacies of people who have influenced the world in which we live.

But many important figures were left out.

Overlooked reveals the stories of some of those remarkable people.

We started the series last year by focusing on women like Sylvia Plath, the postwar poet; Emma Gatewood, the hiking grandmother who captivated a nation; and Ana Mendieta, the Cuban artist whose work was bold, raw and sometimes violent. We added to that collection each week.

Now, this special edition of Overlooked highlights a prominent group of black men and women whose lives we did not examine at the time of their deaths.

Many of them were a generation removed from slavery. They often attempted to break the same barriers again and again. Sometimes they made myth out of a painful history, misrepresenting their past to gain a better footing in their future. Some managed to achieve success in their lifetimes, only to die penniless, buried in unmarked graves. But all were pioneers, shaping our world and making paths for future generations.

We hope you’ll spread the word about Overlooked — and tell us who else we missed.

Read about the project’s first year, and use this form to nominate a candidate for future Overlooked obits.

1907-1960

Gladys Bentley

A gender-bending blues performer who became 1920s Harlem royalty.

BY GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

When it comes to loosening social mores, progress that isn’t made in private has often taken place onstage.

That was certainly the case at the Clam House, a Prohibition-era speakeasy in Harlem, where Gladys Bentley, one of the boldest performers of her era, held court.

READ MORE

1867-1917

Scott Joplin

A pianist and ragtime master who wrote “The Entertainer” and the groundbreaking opera “Treemonisha.”

BY WIL HAYGOOD

When Scott Joplin’s father left the North Carolina plantation where he had been born a slave, there was one thing he wanted to hold on to: the echoes of the Negro spirituals he had heard in the fields. In those songs he found a sense of uplift, hope and possibility.

In the post-Civil War era, the cruel breath of slavery and the aborted plan of Reconstruction still hung over the American South. But in the Joplin home, banjo and fiddle music filled the family’s evenings, giving the children — Scott in particular — a sense of music’s power to move.

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1834-1858

Margaret Garner

In one soul-chilling moment, she killed her own daughter rather than return her to the horrors of slavery.

BY REBECCA CARROLL

Margaret garner, who was born as an enslaved girl, almost certainly did not plan to kill her child when she grew up and became an enslaved mother.

But she also couldn’t yet know that the physical, emotional and psychological violence of slavery, relentless and horrific, would one day conspire to force her maternal judgment in a moment already fraught with grave imperative.

READ MORE

1878-1932

Major Taylor

A world champion bicycle racer whose fame was undermined by prejudice.

BY RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

More than 100 years ago, one of the most popular spectator sports in the world was bicycle racing, and one of the most popular racers was a squat, strapping man with bulging thighs named Major Taylor.

He set records in his teens and was a world champion at 20. He traveled the globe, racing as far away as Australia, and amassed wealth among the greatest of any athlete of his time. Thousands of people flocked to see him; newspapers fawned over him.

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1905-2001

Zelda Wynn Valdes

A fashion designer who outfitted the glittery stars of screen and stage.

BY TANISHA C. FORD

More than a half century before a “curvy” model made the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and before hashtags like #allbodiesaregoodbodies, there was a designer who knew that it was the job of clothes to fit the woman, not vice versa.

Zelda Wynn Valdes was a designer to the stars who could fit a dress to a body of any size — even if she had to do so just by looking at the client. “I only fit her once in 12 years,” Valdes told The New York Times in 1994 of her long-time client Ella Fitzgerald, “I had to do everything by imagination for her.” Valdes would simply look at Fitzgerald in the latest paper, noting any changes in her full-figured body, and would design the elaborate gowns — with beads and appliques — that she knew Fitzgerald loved.

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1941-1970

Alfred Hair

A charismatic businessman who created a movement for Florida’s black artists.

BY GORDON K. HURD

“Well-Known Artist Alfred Hair Slain,” read the headline in The Fort Pierce News Tribune newspaper in Florida.

But before he was killed in a barroom brawl on Aug. 9, 1970, at just 29, Hair had become more than just an artist. With his drive, charisma and business acumen, he helped start a collective of Floridian artists, all African-American, who painted vibrant landscapes of their home state. They would later come to be known as The Florida Highwaymen, or more simply The Highwaymen.

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1912-1967

Nina Mae McKinney

An actress who defied the barrier of race to find stardom in Europe.

BY ANITA GATES

About 20 minutes into “Hallelujah,” Hollywood’s first all-sound feature with an all-black cast, Nina Mae McKinney appeared on screen as Chick, a singer and dancer, in a sexy flapper dress.

She had flashing eyes, an armful of jangly bracelets, and no qualms about cheating a handsome young cotton farmer out of the money he had just gotten for his family’s crop.

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1856-1910

Granville T. Woods

An inventor known as the ‘Black Edison.’ He found that recognition came at a hefty price.

BY AMISHA PADNANI

He carefully sealed the drawings in a mailing tube and quietly placed them out of sight from his business partner, then went to a meeting.

But when he returned, Granville T. Woods found that his drawings — a design for a novel invention that held the potential to revolutionize transportation around the world — were gone.

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1884-1951

Oscar Micheaux

A pioneering filmmaker prefiguring independent directors like Spike Lee and Tyler Perry.

BY MONICA DRAKE

Almost as soon as you settle in to watch the 1939 melodrama “Lying Lips,” you can figure out who is the victim, who is the villain and who is the hero. And even if you know how it all will end, you want to watch anyway.

That was the beauty of the filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. He made you want to soak up the exuberance he clearly felt in delivering a whole new way of telling stories.

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1814-1907

Mary Ellen Pleasant

Born into slavery, she became a Gold Rush-era millionaire and a powerful abolitionist.

BY VERONICA CHAMBERS

When the abolitionist John Brown was hanged on Dec. 2, 1859, for murder and treason, a note found in his pocket read, “The ax is laid at the foot of the tree. When the first blow is struck, there will be more money to help.” Officials most likely believed it was written by a wealthy Northerner who had helped fund Brown’s attempt to incite, and arm, an enormous slave uprising by taking over an arsenal at Harpers Ferry in Virginia. No one suspected that the note was written by a black woman named Mary Ellen Pleasant.

In 1901, an elderly Pleasant dictated her autobiography to the journalist Sam Davis. As Lynn Hudson writes in the book “The Making of ‘Mammy Pleasant’: A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco,” Pleasant told Davis, “Before I pass away, I wish to clear the identity of the party who furnished John Brown with most of his money to start the fight at Harpers Ferry and who signed the letter found on him when he was arrested.” The sum she donated was $30,000 — almost $900,000 in today’s dollars.

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1827-1901

Elizabeth Jennings

Life experiences primed her to fight for racial equality. Her moment came on a streetcar ride to church.

BY SAM ROBERTS

Because she was running behind one Sunday morning, Elizabeth Jennings turned out to be a century ahead of her time.

She was a teacher in her 20s, on her way to the First Colored American Congregational Church in Lower Manhattan, where she was the regular organist, when a conductor ordered her off a horse-drawn Third Avenue trolley and told her to wait for a car reserved for black passengers.

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1876-1917

Philip A. Payton Jr.

A real estate magnate who turned Harlem into a black mecca.

BY ADEEL HASSAN

“Human hives, honeycombed with little rooms thick with human beings,” is how a white journalist and co-founder of the N.A.A.C.P., Mary White Ovington, described the filthy tenements that black New Yorkers were relegated to at the turn of the 20th century.

As more rural Southerners arrived in the city, the teeming Manhattan slums in which African-Americans were living had become the most densely populated streets in the city, nearly 5,000 people per block, according to one count, as landlords rented almost exclusively to white tenants.

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1857-1924

Moses Fleetwood Walker

The first black baseball player in the big leagues, even before Jackie Robinson.

BY RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

When Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, becoming the first African-American player in modern major league baseball, he was not only a trailblazer in the sports world, but an inspiring figure in the modern civil rights movement.

But Robinson was not the first ballplayer in the long history of big league baseball known to be an African-American. That distinction belongs to Moses Fleetwood Walker.

READ MORE

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/obituaries/black-history-month-overlooked.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes

[leptoquark3]

[ukwonswife]

[from The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture by Dr. Derrick Spires]

These poems by abolitionist writer Frances Harper are often paired together, not only because of their similar titles but also because the second serves as a kind of sequel or advancement of the first. In the 1850's, abolitionist thinking began to move away from "cultivating white sympathy" toward calls to action. While the more simple, sentimental language of the first poem is effective, its only goal seems to be to garner emotional reactions - "She is a mother, and her heart is breaking in despair." The second poem, though, does not stop at sympathy, but goes on to demand justice: "Will ye not, as men and Christians, on the side of freedom stand?" (By the way, the second poem is inspired by the story of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who killed her two-year-old daughter upon capture rather than see her returned to slavery.)

Dr. Derrick Spires, author of The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture, describes this difference in sentimentality as a way of not necessarily bridging the gap between Harper and white audiences, but to expose it: "she challenges them to recognize that this feeling is insufficient or even beside the point."

Derrick Spires on Twitter

More poems by Frances Harper

[ukwonswife]

Liberty until death

In 1854, abolitionist writer Charlotte Forten wrote in her journal, "I believe in resistance to tyrants, and would fight for liberty until death." Dr. Derrick Spires draws an important connection between the phrase "liberty until death" and Patrick Henry's famous line, "Give me liberty or give me death!" as "a sense of desperation, betrayal, and resolution among writers in the late 1850s." Liberty and death, he argues, did not have to be mutually exclusive, and in fact many abolitionists and slaves accepted that taking their freedom with their own hands would mean their death. The abolition of slavery was beginning to feel like a distant dream.

This line of thought helps to explain such tragedies as the arrest of Margaret Garner, who killed her two-year-old daughter upon capture by slave catchers to save her from a life of slavery. Garner's defense lawyer fought to have her tried for murder despite the possibility of her being executed if found guilty because this would at least imply her legal status as a human being, but ultimately she was tried and convicted of destruction of property. As for her slain daughter, Garner rejected the options of liberty or death, and chose to end her life in freedom - in liberty until death.

Dr. Derrick Spires is an Associate Professor of English at Cornell University and author of The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. He is on Twitter.

[theherstorybuff]

Margaret Garner

Margaret Garner (c. 1856) was an enslaved woman, appearing of mixed race and believed to be the child of an enslaver. She was born in Kentucky. In 1849, she was married to another enslaved person, Robert Garner. That same year, the plantation was sold along with all of the enslaved people to another family member. Margaret had her first child in early 1850.

Three of Margaret's later children were described also as appearing of mixed race, and each were born seven months after a child born to her enslaver, suggesting these children were the results of rape.

On January 28th, 1856, Robert and a pregnant Margaret attempted an escape with many other enslaved families. Robert had stolen his master's sleigh and gun. It was said to be the coldest winter in 60 years, and the Ohio River had frozen. The families crossed the ice just west of Covington, Kentucky at daybreak and escaped to Cincinnati. While many families reached safehouses along the way, the Garner group was pressed to continue further west of the city, where many freed Blacks lived. Unfortunately, mercenaries and U.S. marshals found the Garners in the home they were awaiting nightfall in. They surrounded the property and stormed the house.

During the struggle, Margaret killed her two-year-old daughter with a butcher knife. She was preparing to do the same to the others and herself, rather than see her children returned to enslavement, but was subdued before she could carry this out. The group was taken to jail, and the trial lasted two weeks. The judge deliberated for another two weeks.

The core issue was whether to try the Garners as persons with the murder of their daughter or as property under the Fugitive Slave Law. Over a thousand people turned out each day to watch the proceedings. Abolitionists spoke at the trial, suggesting the mixed race of her children were evidence of the violence enslaved women undergo. Mixed race enslaved people were often treated with even greater violence and abuse as they were 'proof' of the adultery of the enslaver, and Margaret was merely trying to protect her children from the violent life she had known. The judge eventually ruled that the Fugitive Slave Act superseded other charges.

Margaret, her husband, and their youngest daughter were forced back into enslavement. When Ohio authorities finally obtained an extradition warrant to try Margaret for her daughter's murder, she could not be located, as her captor kept moving her between cities in Kentucky.

In 1856, the Garners were being transported on a steamboat when it collided with another boat. Margaret and her baby daughter were thrown overboard and the child drowned. Margaret expressed her happiness at this, saying she had tried to drown herself as well. She and her husband remained in Arkansas for a time, before being sent to another captor in New Orleans.

After this, the Garners disappear from history. It is said Margaret died of typhoid fever in 1858.

[djrobblog]

In Memoriam: Don’t forget about Toni Morrison, the Librettist

In Memoriam: Don’t forget about Toni Morrison, the Librettist

(August 7, 2019). Few people – male or female – have captured the African experience in America through their art better than the late Toni Morrison.

And certainly even fewer musicians have done so.

Toni Morrison (1931-2019)

So when I heard that the great novelist, essayist and educator Morrison, 88, had passed away on Monday, August 5, my first thought was how great a loss America had…

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