Florida education officials say these women benefited from slavery. Here’s the truth. (The 19th)
Photos courtesy of Princeton University, Howard University and the 19th.
As the state draws ire for its new social studies standards, historians are shedding light on the life experiences of women like Elizabeth Keckley and Betsey Stockton.
By Nadra Nittle, The 19th, July 26, 2013
“Girlhood and its Sorrows” — the title of a chapter in Elizabeth Keckley’s 1868 memoir — does not prepare the reader for the horrors the famous dressmaker endured while enslaved as a teenager in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
To subdue Keckley’s “stubborn pride,” her mistress ordered the village schoolmaster to flog her with a cowhide and rope, and he obliged — until welts formed and blood streamed down her back. This was the first of a series of floggings meted out because her mistress, who had a “cold, jealous heart,” resented her beauty, virtue and grace. But the whippings weren’t the only cause of the adolsecent’s suffering.
“A white man—I spare the world his name—had base designs upon me,” Keckley recalls in her autobiography. “I do not care to dwell upon this subject, for it is one that is fraught with pain. Suffice it to say, that he persecuted me for four years, and I–I–became a mother.”
Despite the fact that Keckley, who would go on to become Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker, suffered “savage” beatings and sexual assault, she appears on a list shared Thursday by the Florida Department of Education’s African-American history standards workgroup as an example of one of the “slaves [who] took advantage of whatever circumstances they were in to benefit themselves.”