This Juneteenth I want people to know and remember Alfred Irving who was finally freed from chattel slavery in 1942 and Mae Louis Miller who was finally freed from peonage slavery in 1963.
Slavery was not "200 years ago," the last living former enslaved african american passed away in 2014 at 70 years old.
Chattell slavery in America did not go away, it adapted. It became peonage, sharecropping, vagrancy laws, "chain gangs" or convict leasing, and continues into the modern day prison system and the systematic incarceration of black and brown people and expanded to forced detention of immigrants in modern day America.
Do not believe the common narrative that the emancipation proclamation freed every slave. There are many more who were unable to tell their stories out of shame or fear of harm.
I reccomend that people read Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon or watch the 90 minute documentary / film adaptation
If nothing else please remember the names of the two people that American society wants you to forget.
You can listen to Mae Louis Miller tell her own story to NPR for free on the Internet Archive:
A Story Of Modern American Slavery
NPR's Allison Keyes talks to Mae Miller, who worked as a slave on a plantation near Gillsburg, Miss. She says her family was held there until about 1960 — almost a century after Congress abolished slavery in 1865. via NPR, December 26, 2003. Archived here via The Internet Archive.
Mae Louis Miller and her family never knew that the slavery and torture they endured was illegal, because they never had access to an education. They were lied to by their enslavers and told that everyone lived that way - that all African Americans were still enslaved. She and her family were finally freed when siblings of a previous generation, who had been separated and sent/sold elsewhere, managed to locate them and bring in trailers to sneak them out.
Mae Louis Miller and her family joined a federal class action lawsuit seeking reparations for United States chattel slavery. Unfortunately that lawsuit was dismissed in 2004 by US federal judge Charles Ronald Norgle Sr., a Reagan appointee. (Who is, at 89 years old, still a senior federal judge in Illinois, by the way, although as of 2022 he no longer hears cases. Can we fucking have term limits for judges yet??????????)
More on 20th century slavery emancipations, with updated historical and geneological cases, sources, and research, is explained by the geneologist who began uncovering these cases as she Vice (2018):
More than 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, there were black people in the Deep South who had no idea they were free. These peo
Historian and genealogist Antoinette Harrell has uncovered cases of African Americans still living as slaves 100 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The 57-year-old Louisiana native has dedicated more than 20 years to peonage research. Through her work, she’s unearthed painful stories in Southern states like Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Florida. Over a series of interviews, she told Justin Fornal about how she became an expert of modern slavery in the United States.
-By Antoinette Harrell, via Vice, February 28, 2018
