Modern Day Slavery

In 2018, while working with a theater workshop for seniors, one of the seniors started telling the story of how as a child she was a slave.  I thought she had hit her head or was playing with ghosts.  I said to her, "Miss Ruth, slavery ended in the 1800's."  She continued her story to say that her family didn't know.  She said a man came to the house and told her grandmother that slavery had ended.  Ms. Ruthie is in her 70's.  If it happened when she was a child, she thinks she was no more than 10, it means that in the 50's Ms. Ruthie and her family were still enslaved.  Sounds incredulous!

Hear Miss Ruth tell the story, herself, fast forward to 54.30:

http://wpcommunitymedia.org/slater-center-presents/06262018-1833

It does sound more and more incredulous, doesn't it.

It wasn't that long ago, in 2003, that the world was introduced to Mae Miller and her sister Annie on Nightline.  Mae told the story of escaping in the 60's from servitude.   She told of whippings, being raped and working the fields without being paid.  She is quoted as saying that they ate as hogs, not like dogs because dogs had a special place. Read the Nightline story below:

https://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=129007&page=1#:~:text=Dec.,for%20no%20money%20at%20all.%22

Antoinette Harrell, the genealogist mentioned in the video above, calls herself the slave detective.  She researches, documents, visits and interviews people who still live on plantations with "masters."  These people are oblivious to the fact that they can leave and are deathly afraid to interview with her.   Please watch the video below.

https://video.vice.co m/en_us/video/vice-the-slavery-detective-of-the-south/5a947b9cf1cdb3764f3eee86

During a 2018 online Memoir Class, a fellow student wrote a paper, titled "The Hunt."  For the class, we had to read and critique other students' works.  In "The Hunt," she told about accompanying a colleague to a fox hunt.  She said her skin prickled when she realized it was being held on a plantation.  She noticed that in addition to herself, there was one other Black person, who sat regally on a steed and she felt proud to see him, among the genteel of the deep south in Charleston, South Carolina.  Her colleague pronounced that the gentleman on the horse and his family had worked the plantation for 200 years and had never left.  She bristled, however, it would worsen when the hunt started and she realized it wasn't a fox that was being hunted, it was the human MAN.  Her colleague explained that they couldn't use an actual fox because it would be immoral and illegal.  I was sickened reading it.  She wasn't writing fiction.  Remember, this was a memoir writing class.

The thousands of miles in the deep south, I am sure, still harbors masters with enslaved people.  Those still holding people in servitude need to be weeded out and brought to justice and labeled terroists along with their kinfolks, one and the same, the KKK, white supremacists and neo Nazis.