JUBILEE: A Call & Response

New King James Version

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.

By Fabiola Cineas  Updated Jun 15, 2022, 6:34am EDT

Illustration by KaCeyKal! for Vox

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.

Isaac Franklin and John Armfield committed atrocities they appeared to relish

By Hannah Natanson, Washington Post

September 14, 2019 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

"Franklin and Armfield, who headquartered their slave trading business in a townhouse that still stands in Alexandria, Va., sold more enslaved people, separated more families and made more money from the trade than almost anyone else in America. Between the 1820s and 1830s, the two men reigned as the “undisputed tycoons” of the domestic slave trade, as Smithsonian Magazine put it."

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