Girl in black and white: the story of Mary Mildred Williams and the abolition movement

Abstract

When a decades-long court battle resulted in her family's freedom in 1855, seven-year-old Mary Mildred Williams became the face of American slavery. A slave girl who looked 'white, ' Mary was paraded before audiences during a sold-out abolitionist lecture series held by Senator Charles Sumner, and her photograph transformed the abolitionist movement. Morgan-Owens investigates tangled generations of sexual enslavement and the fraught politics that led Mary to Sumner. In restoring Mary's story to history, she uncovers an exposé of the thorny racial politics of the abolitionist movement and the pervasive colorism that dictated where white sympathy lay. -- adapted from jacket

Contents

Prologue: Boston, May 29, 1855 -- Constance Cornwell, Prince William County, Virginia, 1805 -- Prudence Nelson Bell, Nelson's Plantation and Mill, 1826 -- Jesse and Albert Bell Nelson, Washington, 1847 -- Henry Williams, Boston, 1850 -- John Albion Andrew, Boston, 1852 -- Elizabeth Williams, Prince William County, 1852 -- Evelina Bell, Washington, February 1855 -- Mary Hayden Green Pike, Calais, Maine, November 1854 -- Julian Vannerson, Washington, February 1855 -- Richard Hildreth, Boston, March 1855 -- Charles Sumner, Washington, March 1855 -- "A white slave from Virginia," New York, March 1855 -- The Williams family, Boston, March 7, 1855 -- "Features, skin, and hair," Boston, March 1855 -- Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Worcester, Massachusetts, March 27, 1855 -- "The anti-slavery enterprise," Boston, March 29, 1855 -- Private life, Boston, October 1855 -- "The crime against Kansas," Washington, May 1856 -- Frederick Douglass, Boston, 1860 -- Prudence Bell, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1864 -- Epilogue: Hyde Park, Massachusetts, 2017.