|
|
Product Description
The riveting, little-known story of Mary Mildred Williams―a slave girl who looked “white”―whose photograph transformed the abolitionist movement.
When a decades-long court battle resulted in her family’s freedom in 1855, seven-year-old Mary Mildred Williams unexpectedly became the face of American slavery. Famous abolitionists Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Albion Andrew would help Mary and her family in freedom, but Senator Charles Sumner saw a monumental political opportunity. Due to generations of sexual violence, Mary’s skin was so light that she “passed” as white, and this fact would make her the key to his white audience’s sympathy. During his sold-out abolitionist lecture series, Sumner paraded Mary in front of rapt audiences as evidence that slavery was not bounded by race.
Weaving together long-overlooked primary sources and arresting images, including the daguerreotype that turned Mary into the poster child of a movement, Jessie Morgan-Owens investigates tangled generations of sexual enslavement and the fraught politics that led Mary to Sumner. She follows Mary’s story through the lives of her determined mother and grandmother to her own adulthood, parallel to the story of the antislavery movement and the eventual signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Girl in Black and White restores Mary to her rightful place in history and uncovers a dramatic narrative of travels along the Underground Railroad, relationships tested by oppression, and the struggles of life after emancipation. The result is an exposé of the thorny racial politics of the abolitionist movement and the pervasive colorism that dictated where white sympathy lay―one that sheds light on a shameful legacy that still affects us profoundly today.
20 black and white illustrations
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America
- Pictures with Purpose: Early Photographs from the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Double Exposure)
- They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
- Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow
- Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War
- Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation
- Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America
- The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
- Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence
- Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide
*If this is not the "Girl in Black and White: The Story of Mary Mildred Williams and the Abolition Movement" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link
.
Details were last updated on Sep 14, 2024 11:08 +08.
