I was proud to be interviewed on NPR's 1A on WAMU on October 8th — even though for a shorter time than planned, as the technology failed partway through. However Karen carried on admirably and told the story of our connection, The picture above is of us sitting on the steps of Pickett House during our visit to Montgomery.
Read MoreIn a rave review of the video series The Good Lord Bird, the New York Times proclaimed in its headline “the necessity of John Brown.” As a muse, John Brown is having a moment. The militant white abolitionist already has a string of successes behind him, having inspired acclaimed literary works from Russell Banks’ Cloudsplitter to Tony Horwitz’s Midnight Rising to James McBride’s 2013 National Book Award-winning novel The Good Lord Bird.
Read MoreAnn Banks’ great-great-grandfather A.J. Pickett was a slaveholder. Karen Orozco Gutierrez’s great-grandfather Milton Howard was one of the people he enslaved. Five generations later, the two women–one from New York City, one from Iowa–met in Montgomery, Alabama, to explore the disturbing truths of their shared past.
Read MoreOne descended from an enslaver, the other from the people he enslaved. Together, they traveled to the Deep South to learn their families’ pasts. We were an odd couple, Karen and I, when we first arrived at the Montgomery County Archives in Alabama. These days, descendants of both slaves and slaveholders come to the archives seeking the truth about their past. Rarely do we arrive together.
Read MoreBronze and granite memorials to the Confederacy dominate town squares and courthouses across the South. Many people now call for their removal while others maintain this would be “erasing history.” As the debate persists, other testaments to white supremacy remain mostly unacknowledged: public swimming pools that in the 1960s were shut down, filled in, paved over to keep out Black swimmers.
Read MoreSome of them anyway. The Belles are an invitation-only organization of teenage girls who dress up in hoop-skirted dresses and are presented at Arlington House, a former plantation home, the only one in Birmingham. As reported in the Washington Post, some Belles and former Belles say that, in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, they have come to see the organization as racially problematic. One ex-Belle, Emily Owen Mendelsohn, organized a Change.org petition to disband the Belles which has gathered 1600 signatures.
Read MoreRecently I attended a Zoom panel hosted by Coming to the Table, the racial justice organization that brings together descendants of enslavers and descendants the enslaved to share family stories. The session was called “How Researching Family History can be so Emotional.” Among the panelists was a woman named Leslie Stainton, whose Georgia forbears were slaveholders. As she talked, the outlines of her story were familiar to me. She’d inherited boxes of family papers which she then avoided for years. Once she finally opened them she could no longer ignore their contents and she began researching the enslavers in her family.
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