by Gwen McKinney
Part genealogy study, part haunting narrative, historian Mary Frances Berry’s new book, “Slavery After Slavery: Revealing the Legacy of Forced Child Apprenticeships on Black Families from Emancipation to the Present,” surfaces the little-known roots of child theft, labor abuse, and human trafficking. Berry’s research explains the present and, like all solid historical content, gives us a compass to navigate the future. Her storytelling traces the trail of exploitation visited upon the formerly enslaved from the 19th Century forward.
For most, slavery never ended. All the hallmarks — dehumanization, greed, and rigged legal schemes — are entrenched in policies and practices persisting over centuries. They turn the notion of “freedom” into a farce.
The author gives the protagonists and their descendants a voice that issues a call to arms for long overdue reparative justice. An essential precursor to remedies and recompense is an acknowledgment of the cruel generational harm of enslavement. Knowing the travesties that delivered us to our current circumstances also sheds light on the systemic problems and essential solutions. “Slavery After Slavery,” bound in a compact 170-page package, is a potent reminder that the struggle for racial equality is far from over.
Unerased | Black Women Speak sat down with noted scholar Mary Frances Berry, former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and author of 14 books, to mark Black History Month with a sharp lens on Black labor.
UNERASED: “Slavery After Slavery: Revealing the Legacy of Forced Child Apprenticeships on Black Families from Emancipation to the Present” is a captivating title. But the term “apprenticeship” is a euphemism. Why not call it what it is —indentured servitude?
MARY FRANCES BERRY: Because the people who kept the Black children and wouldn’t free them seized that term. In fact, they colluded with the local courts and legislatures when the Civil War was over, and usurped the concept of apprenticeship, and then enshrined it in law. To continue slavery after emancipation, the only paperwork they could use was “indentures” or “apprenticeships,” which was ostensibly established to “help” the colored people earn their daily bread. The whole idea of apprenticeship is to train and educate willing learners in some kind of trade, preparing for practice as a livelihood to earn an income.
U: It sounds like the apprenticeship practice turned on its head the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.
MFB: As my book lays out, it was purely slavery after slavery, consigned by legislation in slaveholding states and the courts. The planters (former slaveholders) attested that these were children whose parents couldn’t afford to take care of them and that they (the planters) were better equipped to educate the kids (ranging in age from 3 to 16). This was a lie to perpetuate unpaid labor.
What were they going to educate them to do? What were these apprentices to learn? Depending on where they lived, this might be how to pick tobacco or how to pick cotton. That was all they were required to state, since the local courts and the slaveholders were all buddies. When parents and relatives tried to take their kids, they were told, “You can’t have them.”
Eventually, through the Freedmen’s Bureau (a short-lived entity during Reconstruction) some of the families got lawyers who attempted to get their children back. Most of them didn’t get them back, but a few did. And there were some Republican judges who were willing to affirm the parents’ rights. But the popular notion was that these poor Black people are unable to take care of their children and the former enslavers could do a better job.
U: Share a story that you surfaced in your research.
MFB: There’s this poignant story of Violet Maples, who I follow from emancipation to the 21st Century through her descendants and extended family. Maples versus Maples was a legal case that tells the story of the empty promises of emancipation. In her dream of getting the 40 acres, Violet thought emancipation would unite her children and siblings, get some land and become farmers. But she was never able to prevail. The slaveholders of her children enlisted Violet’s father, living on one of the plantations, to testify to the local court that his daughter was a “loose woman” and the children would be better off with the former slaveholders.
These plantation owners were backed up by the law that they were providing apprenticeships. This case points up two things regarding the slaveowners’ tactics. One: taking advantage of family members and getting them to testify against their children. And two, given the slave system that refused to acknowledge Black marriages, newly emancipated women were often denied their children and branded “loose women” because they didn’t have a husband or matrimony under chattel slavery was not recognized.
The horrible fact of this story is that one of Violet’s sons, who she was hoping to join her family, was fathered by her former white enslaver. This was not unusual, but can you imagine if plantation owners who impregnated Black women had treated the resulting children as their heirs and shared their riches, just think what we would have today in terms of generational wealth.
U: What about an exception to this very dreadful rule?
MFB: I found one exception tracing the Maples descendants and extended family, including a cluster of children fathered by Maples plantation owners. Clemmie Maples and her husband, Herbert Dixon, originally lived in Mississippi. Herbert was entreated with free train tickets to gather up his family and migrate to Kentucky to work in the coal mines. Herbert, suffering from black lung disease, couldn’t continue to work in the mines and migrated with his family to Illinois. Over a few generations, the children found upward mobility through education, migration, and civic engagement.
One of the children, Theresa, remarked one day to her mother, “All the children get out of school, and they come and sit in our yard because we have the only tree anywhere in this neighborhood when it’s hot.” This was the beginning of a youth and community center that remains today. And Theresa’s children learned from her and became active in civic engagement. One of them (Gloria Dixon) became the first Black Alderman in Harvey, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. They were the exceptions that prove what’s possible.
U: What spurred you to pursue this research?
MFB: I decided I would follow the formerly enslaved and their descendants to see what happened to them after slavery, not only as a result of abolition and passage of the 13th Amendment, but after Reconstruction in the 19th Century and beyond. My goal was to see how far we could go in finding out what happened to these folks. But nobody thought about the children. There were hundreds of thousands affected — an estimated 190,000. And the theft and travesty never ended.
Even with the 20th Century and the Great Migration, moving from the plantations did not resolve the inequality. Immigrants migrating from Sweden, and the Dominican Republic, and other places around the world fared much better than formerly enslaved Americans who went from the South to the North. The research and the book is a missing part of the Black American story, the slave descendants’ story that we live today. I always like surfacing missing pieces.
I would like people — Black and white — to ask themselves, why do Black people suffer so much disproportionate poverty, inequality, poor health, and limited opportunities? “Slavery After Slavery” provides answers. I hope this book is an acknowledgment that opens the door to reparative justice.
Gwen McKinney is the creator of Unerased | Black Women Speak, a website dedicated to narrative and content that amplifies Black women’s stories.
Source: Seattle Medium
