American Slavery’s Legacy of Family Separation with DeNeen Brown
Professor DeNeen Brown is an award-winning journalist for The Washington Post and an associate professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. In this episode, Paul and Professor Brown discuss the legacy of American slavery and family separation, and in particular, the way generational trauma connects the past to today.
How did you become interested in uncovering the history and legacy of slavery?
I feel like I’ve always been interested in learning more about the cruel Institute of slavery in this country, the United States, which as you know, goes back more than 400 years to 1619 when the pirate ships arrive on the shores of what is now called Virginia. “20 and odd Negroes” were traded for food in what is now the colony of Virginia.
This history of slavery has intrigued me and led me down research holes, where I have tried to comprehend what my ancestors, who were enslaved Black people, in this cruel institution might have experienced. I am also interested as a researcher and a descendant of enslaved Black people in how they were treated. The idea of resilience: How they were able to survive? What happened after the end of the Civil War? How were Black people able to survive after that? I’m interested in the Reconstruction period, and then this cruel period, which historians called Jim Crow, that comes around the turn of the century in the early 1900s, when the Ku Klux Klan grew in numbers, and then a really terrible Reign of Terror was implemented against Black people and Black communities across the United States.
In summary, the question of what happened during enslavement, the question of what happened to enslaved Black people, the question of what happened generations after the Civil War, continue to intrigue me and fuel my research.
Pieces of history are often overlooked in place of other narratives. Is there a specific case or story about how families were separated as a result of slavery?
I’ll answer your question this way. The Smithsonian’s African American Museum of History and Culture opened in 2018. I visited the museum and, depending on whether you’ve gone to the museum, it is a powerful museum. Its collections and exhibits just leave you wrenched as you make your way through the museum. As you enter the museum, you descend the escalator, and the way they’ve created the exhibits, you begin your tour in the belly of a reconstructed slave ship that’s making its way across the Atlantic.
You hear in the audio in the exhibit the screams in the house of these enslaved Africans, the weeping of mothers, fathers, men, women, and children, you experience the true despair. According to the curators, this exhibit was designed intentionally to make people feel uncomfortable. It’s crowded. It’s dark. It’s just a horrible place to be, so you feel that coming out of that exhibit.
You make your way through the history of enslavement in this country. So I remember stopping at an exhibit that depicted a Black woman, on a slave auction block, and she’s crying out. A white man is whipping her as she reaches for a baby that has been ripped from her arms. The caption on this exhibit explained that the more she cried, the more the white man whipped her back. That’s exhibit was called “The Weeping Time.” I remember standing for a long time looking at this picture of this woman who was being torn away from her child.
It said as this child was torn from the arms of the mother, a former enslaved Black man by the name of Henry Bibb was interviewed as part of a narrative. He said later, “as the child was torn from the arms of its mother, amid the most heartrending shrieks from the mother and child, on the one hand, and the bitter oaths, and cruel lashes from tyrants on the other, the mother was sold to the highest bidder.” Enslaved mothers and fathers, these Black men and women, lived in constant fear that their children might be torn away from them at any moment. Black families lived in this emotional and physical prison of slavery, knowing that their sisters could be sold the next day, their mother might be sold, to a cruel master down the road or even deeper into Mississippi or Louisiana.
This cruel institution of slavery was not only physically barbaric, it was emotionally barbaric. The people who constructed slavery wrote these false notions that enslaved Black people had no feelings like they couldn’t love, or they viewed them as not capable of human emotions, which I as a researcher many years later find, is just another layer of cruelty.
Enslaved Black people lived in constant fear that their family would be torn away from them at any moment. One woman who was a witness to a slave auction said in a 1930 interview, night and day, you could hear men, women screaming — mom, pa, sister, brother — taken without any warning. This quote just struck me: She said, “People was always dying from a broken heart.” It’s emotional stories that really rip at your very core. Even hundreds of years later.
Even after Emancipation and Juneteenth, how were families continuing to be separated?
As part of my research, as a reporter with The Washington Post writing about Black history, I came across a story about what historians call “last seen ads.” The story was written in 2017. It explains that after the Civil War ended, hundreds and thousands of formerly enslaved Black people started placing advertisements in newspapers across the country explaining that they were looking for their loved ones who had been taken away from them during slavery.
I remember going back and reading the original ads, and again, they were heart-wrenching. One of the ads that I wrote about was placed by a woman named Elizabeth Williams, who placed an ad in 1866 in The Christian Recorder newspaper in Philadelphia. The headline was “INFORMATION WANTED by a mother concerning her children.” She wrote four column inches, summing up her life, hoping the rich details would help her find her children. She listed their names — Lydia, Allen, and Parker — and explained in as many words as she could, what happened when they were “formerly owned together” by a man named John Petty, who lived in Woodbury, Tennessee.
In this ad, she explained how her family was split apart when they were sold, again and again, taken into captivity. She says “Any information concerning them will be gratefully received by one whose love for her children survives the bitterness and hardships of many long years spent in slavery.” That was one of the things that I wrote about. They’re called “last seen ads” or lost ads that started appearing in newspapers around 1863 during the Civil War, and many of them after the Civil War ends in 1865.
One of the experts on this told me that they were like real-life tweets. So much of what we know of enslavement was written by white people or white historians. These are words of enslaved Black people, in their own words, telling you of the horrors of slavery and the horrors of being separated from family members, separated from mothers.
In the ads, mothers looked for their children. Children looked for their mothers. Fathers placed ads for lost sons. Sisters look for sisters. Husband sought their wives; wives tried to find their husbands. The ads showed in real time the destruction slavery wrought on Black families, tearing people apart and scattering generations, like leaves in the wind.
I explained that the ads often gave detailed physical descriptions of the missing people’s names. You can see how these enslaved Black people just memorized as many details as they could about the faces of their children that were taken from them. They tried to explain the seasons that they were taken from. You can tell that they held on to these memories, like witnesses to a crime. Trying to memorize the faces of their children, memorizing the details of who took them away, memorizing the dialogue and the conversations of the people who rip them from their arms.
The story is one of the most heart-wrenching stories that I came across as a reporter. As a mother myself, I think that’s why I cried because I can feel the pain even more than 200 years later, of people whose children were sold away from them.
In many of these last seen ads, the families never ended up being able to be reunited. Is that your understanding as well?
Most were not reunited. As you know, a baby might be ripped from her mother’s arms during slavery, and then that baby might be sold from family to family, not knowing who her mother was. And her name might have been changed by those who presumed to own that child. So it was hard to reunite people.
It was against the law for enslaved Black people to learn to read and write. That was another cruel function of slavery. The records were not kept well and neither was the reunification process. It’s very much like what we see now happening on the border, where these babies are taken from their parents, and the babies can’t say, you know, “this is my mom’s first and last name and middle initial, and ID number. And this is my address.” The baby doesn’t have that skill yet to say who his or her mother or father was. The current situation at the border mimics a similar pattern to what happened during slavery when these children are ripped from their parents. No careful records were kept about who their parents were. There were some success stories from these last seen ads where families were united.
Sometimes the ads lead to happy endings. On August 26, 1886, an ad ran in the Southwestern Christian Advocate newspaper, which did not charge for publishing letters from subscribers. It said, “I found my mother through the dear Southwestern newspaper. God bless you and your paper, it resurrects the forgotten, the lost can be found.” This ad was written by a woman named Elsie Boone, who wrote a letter to the editor in 1886, saying that she actually found her mother after placing an ad in this newspaper.
This recurring family separation — Native American residential schools, family separation at the US-Mexico border — how does this all connect throughout American history?
The Trump administration’s crackdown on families at the border, where some children younger than 18 months are separated from their parents, as their parents are sent to federal jails, harkens back to the experience that enslaved Black people had during enslavement and afterward.
There’s another piece of this history that many listeners don’t know because of the way history is taught in the United States, but this issue of separating families is just rampant in US history. From 1870 until literally the 1970s, First Nations families were torn apart by the US government. When I say First Nations, many people call them Native Americans. In my reporting, both here in the United States and in Canada, they call themselves simply people. In Canada, they call themselves First Nations, and I’d like to use that term.
The children of First Nations people were taken away as these governments, both in the United States and Canada (it also happened in Australia,) came to try to “civilize” these people who have lived on the land for thousands of years. As part of that so-called “civilization” process, they would rip the children away and send the children to residential schools, far from their families, far from their mothers and fathers.
At these residential schools, which are often run by cruel teachers and headmasters and headmistresses, many of the children were whipped if they spoke their language. In many cases, their hair was cut, which was often against their traditional cultural rules. They were made to wear so-called Western suits or Western dresses, and placed in these educational institutions that taught them about Western history and tried to basically rip their culture or any memory of their people from them.
You might be able to make a connection between what happened to First Nations people and also what happened to enslaved Black people during slavery. You find government institutions trying to change people, trying to transform them, trying to take children away from their families as young as possible and indoctrinate them into these Western cultures.
You find that generations upon generations of both enslaved Black people and First Nations people find generational trauma that has been documented. When I was a foreign correspondent in Canada for The Washington Post, I wrote about the impact of residential schools on children, but also on their parents. According to my research, some of the societal issues that First Nations people are experiencing today — in terms of malnutrition, the suicide rate, the alcoholism rate — is directly attributed to the separation of families. What researchers found is that when these children went away and were indoctrinated in residential schools, they did not learn what it was like to be a parent. So when the residential schooling ended, and they were sent back to their communities, and they went on to have children themselves, they just had no education about what it was like to be a parent because they had spent their childhood in these cruel institutions. They suffered from these family separation policies implemented by the United States government, the Canadian government, the Australian Government, and many people are still suffering from those really cruel policies of family separation.
Do you see any common themes in terms of organizing and action, linkages between slavery and family separation?
The best way to answer that is with how we started this conversation, where I’m talking about how this cruel institution of slavery was left out of textbooks. What was the impact of that? The impact of both enslavement and then the miseducation of people after slavery ends is something that we’re still feeling many generations later.
I’d like to answer this question by explaining what slavery did to Black people. To enslave Black people in this country, what Europeans did was try to dehumanize them. Some people don’t know that the Constitution at one point described enslaved people as three-fifths of a person. Any first-grader knows three-fifths is not whole. Five-fifths is whole.
Literally written into the Constitution of the United States is that enslaved people were not considered to be whole, were not considered to be human. As a result, they tried to continue to dehumanize them with policies and laws that they use to help justify slavery. Let’s fast forward to today. We look at the video of George Floyd lying on the street in Minneapolis, a Black man we watched in real-time because the bystander is recording this. We watched George Floyd die under the knee of a police officer. We watched the police officer put his hands in his pocket and look around as though you know he was just casually taking a walk as bystanders screamed for him to get off of George Floyd’s neck. We watched the officer press his knee on George Floyd’s snack as George Floyd cries out I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. We watched the police officer continue to press this knee on George Floyd’s neck, as George Ford is crying out trying to make this man understand that he’s human.
He’s talking about “I have a family. I want to learn as well.” He cries out for his mother in his final moments. This video is eight minutes long. Then we see in real-time the life seep out of George Ford’s body, and finally, he’s dead. So what we’re seeing in that video is a Black man lying under the knee of an oppressor who seems to not care for his life. Who seems, in that eight-minute video to D humanize the black man who’s lying beneath me. We see, in real-time, the Black man crying out what many Black people in this country have been crying out for more than 400 years: We are human.
Again, 400 years after the first enslaved Africans arrived on the shores, Black people are still crying out to be recognized by the oppressor as human. I often tell my students when you cut me, I bleed. This is a very important point that I’d like to make here. Race is a fallacy. It’s a social construct. Literally, all people are part of one race, the human race. If you do your research, you will find that all people are African, all people are descendants of Africa. Literally, we are all descendants of Africans. What governments, historians, and scientists have tried to do is draw dividing lines amongst us to separate us by the notion of race.” Race is a fallacy, but racism is very real. Answering your question, what happened with George Floyd was a continuation of oppressed people crying out to the oppressor to recognize their very humanity.
Watch the trailer for Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer, DeNeen Brown’s documentary.
Tune in to Episode #33, contact us at dividedfamiliespodcast@gmail.com and follow us at @DividedFamiliesPodcast.