re: #249 wrenchwench

It seems so primitive. But it really wasn’t that long ago.

Not long ago at all. There are still many people walking around who’ve sat and talked to ex-slaves, in person, about what their lives were like.

slaves born in the early 1850’s were of age to understand when that’s just how it was and all you had to look forward to, then the war, then emancipation and reconstruction and on into Jim Crow. When those ex-slaves were in their 80’s and 90’s, in the 1930’s and 1940’s, they went to schools to talk to 1st and 2nd graders and answer their questions. Those children are now in their 70’s and 80’s. We still have 20 years left that there will be people among us who’ve discussed antebellum Georgia or South Carolina with eyewitnesses.

And of course, the same holds true for children whose daddy gave them a slave companion for their 5th birthday present.

It makes me smile to think some of those slave children lived long enough to see Brown v. Board. A handful might have even made it all the way to the Civil Rights Act.