There’s no freedom without reparations – By Fabiola Cineas (VOX) / June 15, 2022
Keeping the promise of “40 acres and a mule” might have transformed life for Black Americans. A movement to secure payments for descendants of enslaved people rages on.
Part of the Juneteenth issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was legally freed in 1848 in Ohio when she was about 30. She only basked in that freedom for five years.
In 1853, a white sheriff empowered by the fugitive slave law abducted Wood and sold her back into bondage, taking her on a journey from Kentucky to Mississippi and finally to Texas, where she’d toil on a plantation through the Civil War. Though President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Wood did not regain her freedom until 1866, months after Union soldiers traveled to Texas on June 19, 1865 — Juneteenth — to enforce emancipation.
Wood — whose pathbreaking story was only recently surfaced — returned to Ohio and sued her abductor for $20,000 (worth more than $440,000 today). In the lawsuit, she claimed that because she had been abducted, sold back into slavery, and lost wages (about $500 per year), she was entitled to payment.
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