slave, a man named Brom who was also a slave in the area. It’s unknown as to how he became involved in the case, but it’s believed that Brom was also in Ashley’s household. At any rate, the case also allowed for Brom’s freedom. However, we don’t know what became of him. Let’s hope he had a better life than the one he led before the case.
Enslaved people also made their way into high office. Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley was a former Virginia slave who bought her and her son’s freedom in 1855 and eventually became the personal modiste (a personal stylist and dressmaker) and confidante for the First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. She also became a civil activist and author, who published her memoirs on living in the White House called Behind the Scenes, Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. While in the White House, Keckley and Fredrick Douglass organized educational programs and relief initiatives for emancipated slaves.
Archibald Grimké was the son of slave Nancy Weston and her owner Henry Grimké in Charleston, North Carolina, but went on to become a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Archibald and his brother Francis lived as free Black men before his half-brother, Montague, employed them as servants. After suffering abuse at the hands of Montague, he escaped and hid with relatives until Charleston surrendered to the Union during the Civil War.
After attending Lincoln College in Pennsylvania, Grimké became one of the first African American students at Harvard Law School in Massachusetts, later establishing a Boston-based law firm. He also acted as consul to Santo Domingo (the Dominican Republic) and, in 1903, he became the president of the American Negro Academy until 1919. He helped found the NAACP in 1909 and became the president of the Washington, DC, chapter in 1913. In 1919, he was given the NAACP’s highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. Grimké died in 1930.
Estevanico, who was also known as Esteban the Moor, Esteban de Dorantes, Estebanico, or Mustafa Azemmouri, is believed to be one of the first Africans to reach the continental United States. As a boy, he was enslaved by the Portuguese and later sold to a Spanish nobleman. He was aboard the Spanish Narváez expedition to establish a colony in Florida in 1527. He was among the few to survive the trek through Florida, with many of the three hundred men dying along the way from attacks by Florida’s Native Americans and the state’s harsh jungle. The survivors made barges and tried to sail away to Mexico, but only eighty people survived after the boats capsized near Galveston, Texas. The Native Americans in Texas were friendly at the outset, but eventually enslaved the remaining explorers, and, after five years, only four of the eighty survived, including Estevanico.
Estevanico became an explorer of the American Southwest, traveling with Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, and Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, the remaining survivors, through New Spain (what is now the US Southwest and northern Mexico) to Mexico City to meet up with Spanish forces. Estevanico and the other survivors became medicine men after living with another Native American tribe, and the four men became known as healers, earning the nickname “The Children of the Sun.” Estevanico also became fluent in several Native languages.
Estevanico led a reconnaissance party back through the Southwest for the viceroy of Mexico. But it’s believed he was killed by the Zuni in their city of Hawikuh in 1539 because his trademark medicine gourd was trimmed with owl feathers, a bird that’s thought to be a symbol of death to the Zuni.
Harriet Ann Jacobs escaped from slavery to protect herself from sexual threats put forth by her owner’s father, Dr. James Norcom. She lived as a fugitive for ten years before she was freed by Cornielia Grinnell Willis, the second wife of her employer, poet and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis. She became an abolitionist and an author, writing her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which included the sexual trauma she and other Black female slaves experienced from their masters. Unfortunately, the book would fall from the public eye until the 1960s and 1970s, when the civil rights movement and women’s movement gained traction.
Hannah Crafts, also known as Hannah Bond, is the author of The Bondwoman’s Narrative, thought to be the first novel by an African American woman, as well as the only one written by a fugitive slave woman. The novel was written in the late 1850s but was only rediscovered and published in 2002 after Harvard professor Henry Lewis Gates Jr. purchased the manuscript.
The slave “Fed” renamed himself John Brown and became an author with his book of memoirs, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England. The book, which was published in London in 1855, contained the dictated accounts of Brown (written by the secretary of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society’s secretary, Louis Alexis Chamerovzow) and how he managed to escape from Georgia to England. His memories include abuse, loss, familial separation, medical experimentation, and more. Brown eventually lived a full life in London, marrying a local woman and working as an herbalist. He died in 1876.
Jordan Winston Early was born as a slave in 1814 in Virginia and lived with his maternal aunt, an astronomy-loving uncle, and an older woman known as “Aunt Milly” on his plantation before he became a minister at the young age of twelve. When he and his family were taken to Missouri by their masters in 1826, he was emancipated and began his journey toward becoming an African Methodist Episcopal Church preacher in 1836. After expanding the AME Church in St. Louis, Illinois, Indiana, New Orleans, and Tennessee, Early became a deacon in 1838 and established the first AME Church in St. Louis in 1840.
Jupiter Hammon is known as the first African American poet to be published in America. Born into slavery in New York on Henry Lloyd’s estate, Hammon was educated along with his master’s children and worked with his master at his businesses. His first work, An Evening Thought, also known as An Evening Prayer and An Evening’s Thought: Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries, was published in 1760 and used to preach to Lloyd’s slaves. In 1787, he spoke to New York’s Black community at the African Society of New York City called “An Address to the Negroes in the State of New York.” Despite his celebrity status, Hammon was never freed. He was buried in an unmarked grave on his master’s estate.
Lewis Adams, formerly a slave in Alabama, took his passion for education to found the Tuskegee Institute, now known as Tuskegee University, one of the prominent HBCUs in America. Born in 1852, Adams became proficient in reading and writing and became a polyglot even though he had no formal education. He was a Jack of all trades as an expert in tin-smithing, shoe-making, and harness-making. His Tuskegee Institute, which opened in 1881 as the Tuskegee State Normal School, came at the right time for freed Blacks after the Civil War and during Reconstruction, when Black people were in need of gaining different skills to make a living. To show just how interconnected Black leaders were throughout history, the first principal of the Tuskegee Institute was none other than scholar Booker T. Washington.
Omar ibn Said was a wealthy Senegalese Islamic scholar and writer who was captured and enslaved in 1807 in North Carolina. Even though he was never able to return to his Senegalese home of Futa Tooro, Said became an author in the US, writing a series of books on theology and history and an autobiography that was published after his death in 1864. His account of his life in America includes escaping from his first owner, an abusive man named Johnson. He was put in jail and was later recovered by North Carolina governor John Owen and his brother Jim, whom Said described as godly people. He converted to Christianity and remained with his owner’s family until his death.
Paul Jennings was a slave who served President James Madison and his family in the Madison family home of Montpelier and in the White House. Jennings’ memoir, A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison, is thought to be the first memoir about life at the White House. It also provided one of many written accounts of how slaves interacted with their owners, particularly those whose morals seem antithetical to the tenet of slavery. Jennings was later able to buy his freedom via statesman Daniel Webster, and, after gaining his freedom and making a living as a “laborer” by completing clerical tasks, he visited
