Reader Responses to Our Underground Railroad Issue

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/reader-responses-to-our-underground-railroad-issue.html

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In the March 5 edition of the Race/Related newsletter, we asked you to share explorations of your family history, after Monica Drake, travel editor at The Times, wrote about hers.

A selection of the responses follows.

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About 20 years ago I visited Laurens, S.C. to get a feel for the place where two sets of great-great-grandparents were born. I also wanted to understand why they left. I attended Sunday service in the small church they helped found. I stood next to their headstones right outside the church’s side door. I met another descendant whose parents elected not to move north or west as mine had.

Laurens is physically beautiful. It has shades of green we never see in Southern California. The people, both black and white, were friendly and helpful. In contrast, the city also boasted the only working KKK museum in the country. The robes and hoods were proudly displayed in the front windows. A cousin told me the Klan still marches through the city from time to time.

I remembered what I’d read about advances blacks made after slavery in South Carolina, both politically and financially, and the brutal backlash during Reconstruction. I know why they left and when I think about who I might have been, I’m glad they did.

Dee Dee Lonon, Carson, Calif.

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Last year I recreated my family’s journey during the Great Migration by traveling from Jackson, Miss. up to Detroit by train.

My late mother’s family lived in the Mississippi Delta until 1941, so I flew down to Jackson, rented a car, and drove to Lexington where my mother was born. I found a tiny, aging town square and an ominous, gray Confederate obelisk reading: “The men were right who wore the gray and right can never die.” I struck up a brief conversation with an older black man on the square whose name was Otha Redmond. My grandmother’s maiden name was Alga Mae Redmond. I asked if he was related to an Alga Mae and he said he didn’t think so, but I still wonder.

I also found the site of my grandfather’s Colored High School just outside Lexington. Tracking down these specific places was difficult as government record-keeping for black Americans was poor to nonexistent during Jim Crow and slavery. The white side of my family is brimming with accurate government documentation.

The next day I took Amtrak for 31 hours from Jackson up to Detroit and thought about what it would have been like to cross into Illinois during Jim Crow, then walk into what was moments before a whites-only car.

In Detroit I tracked down my mother’s childhood home and high school, but at this point in my life I hadn’t been able to find any maternal family members. I’d never met them and everyone lost touch when she left Detroit as a young woman. She recently passed away.

Five months later, a first cousin of mine in Detroit found me on Facebook via my Ancestry.com family tree. I was elated! She’d been doing the same genealogy research all this time, wondering if she’d ever find me. I met my long-lost family over Thanksgiving last year and truly feel like I’ve turned a new page.

Sarah Enelow, Brooklyn

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In 1950, when I was about five years old, my family traveled from Wilmington, Del. to Richmond, Va., for a family event, the nature of which I no longer remember. My parents decided I was too young to attend the event, so I was left in the care of an older cousin at my great-aunt’s house. While I was there, I was taken upstairs to meet Mary Jones. She was a very old African-American woman who was living in my great-aunt’s house. For whatever reason, meeting her made an impression on me, and I have remembered it these 67 years.

When my father was a baby, his family moved into his maternal grandmother’s home, and Mrs. Jones was their cook. When she became too old to work, she was guaranteed a home there for the rest of her life. She died in 1961. She was thought to have been about 100 years old.

The memory of meeting her spurred me to unravel my family’s genealogy and our involvement in American slavery. It turns out that John Veneable Hardwicke, my father’s maternal great-grandfather held three people in slavery in 1860: a young woman and her two young sons. I believe, though I cannot prove, that this young woman was Mrs. Jones’s mother and that Mrs. Jones was the last living person to have been enslaved by my family. Slavery was not all that long ago.

Subsequent research has uncovered the truth that one branch or another of my family held people in slavery from our arrival in the Virginia Colony in the 17th century until Emancipation. I know the names of about 40 of these people, and, of course there are more whose names I do not know. I have written a book containing this family history and my reflections on the legacy of slavery that I am attempting to get published.

Rev. Dr. Kenneth W. Collier, Santa Barbara, Calif.