When a decades-long court battle resulted in her familyās 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, Maryās skin was so light that she āpassedā as white, and this fact would make her the key to his white audienceās 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 Maryās 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 exposĆ© of the thorny racial politics of the abolitionist movement and the pervasive colorism that dictated where white sympathy layāone that sheds light on a shameful legacy that still affects us profoundly today.
This book title, Girl in Black and White (The Story of Mary Mildred Williams and the Abolition Movement), ISBN: 9780393609240, by Jessie Morgan-Owens, published by W. W. Norton & Company (March 12, 2019) is available in hardcover. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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