Some Abolitionist Enslaved People

In 1820, Elihu Embree launched The Emancipator, the first U.S. newspaper dedicated to the abolition of slavery. But this antislavery advocate was also an enslaver.
As we celebrate the legacy of people like Embree, who had the conviction to take a stand against the atrocity of slavery, we must also acknowledge the complexity of their legacy and the lost stories of those they enslaved.
To find out more about how Embree felt about this contradiction and what documents tell us about an enslaved woman he owned, Nancy, click the link in our bio for the full story.
We are The Emancipator, a reimagining of the first abolitionist newspaper in the United States, for a new day. We are here to explore solutions to racial inequality, to capture your voices, and bring hope of a better future. We are proud of the conversations we’ve started and the projects coming ahead.
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" Stamped from the Beginning" by Ibram X. Kendi gives a lot of detail about that time in history and how even the Black spokespeople had conflicting views on both racial hierarchy as well as slavery.

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Using statistics and quantitative data, Wells concluded that “this idea of rape and even criminal behavior is not so much connected to lynching, but that lynching was a means to keep blacks-who were very economically competitive at this point-to keep blacks down,” Giddings says. She also found that in some cases, the “rape” black men were accused of was actually consensual sex with white women.
These conclusions incited a riot while Wells was in Philadelphia. It was too dangerous for her to return to Memphis, so she decided to stay in the north. Over the next several years, she traveled widely in the United States and Europe to talk about lynching. It was in Chicago, though, that she found her new home.
Wells saw the potential for “a real political vanguard in Chicago,” Giddings says. There were many black political organizations and newspapers, as well as a fair amount of interracial activism for the period. Chicago was also where she met Ferdinand Barnett, a widowed lawyer and journalist who supported women’s suffrage. She married him in 1895, changing her last name to the hyphenated “Wells-Barnett”-a pretty unique move at the time.
Wells-Barnett lived in Chicago for the rest of her life. She founded the city’s first black women’s club, the first black kindergarten and first black suffrage organization. After women in Illinois won state voting rights in 1913, her suffrage organization helped elect Oscar De Priest as the first black alderman on the Chicago City Council.
“She really is very, very important to the political and civic life of Chicago,” Giddings says. Decades later, the city government formally recognized Wells-Barnett’s contributions. In July 2018, Chicago named a street after her. That same month, activists raised $300,000 to erect a monument to Wells-Barnett, who remained politically active in Chicago until she died in 1931.
“At the very end, a year before her death, she runs for a [Illinois] State Senate seat as an Independent,” Giddings says. “She doesn’t win. But she’s again creating paths for not only blacks but for black women particularly and for women in general.”
source, HISTORY COM