Alexander also has another connection to today’s culture. According to DNA, Alexander’s great-granddaughter is the paternal grandmother of “The Greatest,” boxer Muhammad Ali. Ironically enough, author Greenleaf Eliot also has a connection; he is the grandfather of famous playwright and poet (and the person we have to blame for Cats), T.S. Eliot.
Ayuba Suleiman Diallo was a prominent merchant from Senegal before he and his translator were captured by Mandinka slave traders in 1729 and brought to Maryland. Diallo was eventually freed after his owner was convinced of his nobility by Rev. Thomas Bluett and a letter Diallo wrote to his father. This letter had caught the attention of James Oglethorpe, the director of the business that captured Diallo, the Royal African Company. After his freedom, he was brought to London and became part of the region’s elite circle. In a dark twist, he himself became an interpreter and slave trader for the Royal African Company until his death in 1773. Even though he sent fellow Africans to harsh fates, his account of slavery, published by Bluett, is considered vital in understanding the horrific nature of the slave trade.
Dred Scott is the man behind the famous case Dred Scott v. Sanford.
As we know, the Dred Scott case involves Scott, an enslaved man, suing for his freedom as well as that of his family. In the suit, he asserts that he, his wife, and his family were free after having lived in the free state of Illinois with his owner before returning to the slave state of Missouri and then completing the journey in the free Wisconsin territory. However, the case has a longer history than what we are taught in the schoolbooks.
Scott was an enslaved man who was owned by John Emerson and his family. It’s the Emersons’ move between Missouri and Illinois due to John Emerson’s military duty that is the basis for Scott’s case. But reportedly, after his owner John died, Scott attempted to purchase his freedom from Emerson’s widow. She refused, compelling Scott and his lawyers to file individual suits for Scott and his wife, Harriet. The courts in St. Louis agreed that the case should move forward, and, by 1850, Scott had actually won his case on a state level. But the verdict was reversed in 1852 by the Missouri Supreme Court, which invalidated the state’s “once free, always free” doctrine.
By this time, Emerson’s widow had given estate control to her brother, John F.A. Sanford. Sanford was a New York resident, and, since he wasn’t bound by Missouri law, Scott’s lawyers filed a case against Sanford in US District Court. Even though the court ruled in Sanford’s favor, the case advanced to the Supreme Court.
Unfortunately, the case failed, with the US Supreme Court ruling that no Black person could claim US citizenship nor could they petition for their freedom. Particularly, the ruling made by the majority and written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, hinged on the Fifth Amendment, which declares it unconstitutional to be held for a crime barring a correct indictment by police. Slaves, it was argued, are property and therefore not American citizens. As non-citizens, slaves also had no ground to sue for their freedom in court.
Overall, Taney’s ruling was a backward attempt to keep racial prejudices intact; his opinion did state that Black people could be citizens and even vote in certain states. But in his view, state citizenship wasn’t equal to national citizenship. However, if you’re a citizen of a state, you’re thereby a citizen of the United States. But Taney claimed that while Scott might have been free in one state, he wasn’t free in Missouri, where he resided. Ironically, Scott and his family were emancipated merely three months after the Supreme Court decision. Their freedom was granted by the Blow family, who had sold the Scotts to the Emersons in the first place. Scott lived the rest of his life working as a hotel porter in St. Louis, and Harriett worked as a laundress. Unfortunately, Scott died just a little over a year after gaining his hard-fought freedom in 1858. His cause of death was tuberculosis. Incredibly, the Blow family continued to care for Scott after his death, giving him a proper burial.
Scott wasn’t the only person in American history to sue for freedom. Hundreds of slaves waged such lawsuits before the Civil War, and Elizabeth Key Grinstead is one of those litigious enslaved Americans. She became one of the first Black people in the North American colonies to successfully sue for her freedom. The lawsuit, filed in 1656 in Virginia, was for her freedom as well as the freedom of her infant son. Similarly, Elizabeth Freeman successfully sued to be freed by her owners Colonel John Ashley, the judge of the Berkshire Court of Common Pleas, and his wife. Freeman and her sister were wedding presents, in fact, since Ashley’s new wife was the daughter of Freeman’s former master, Pieter Hogeboom. The newly minted Mrs. Ashley was a cruel mistress to Elizabeth, known as “Mum Bett,” and her sister. For instance, when Elizabeth tried to protect her sister from one of Mrs. Ashley’s strikes, Elizabeth received a wound on her arm that never healed. Instead of shielding it, she instead kept it visible so everyone could see her mistress’s cruelty.
It is Colonel Ashley’s own words that gave Elizabeth the keys to the freedom she so desperately wanted. Colonel Ashley was part of the committee that wrote the Sheffield Declaration in 1773, stating that “mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.” These words compelled Freeman to seek lawyer Theodore Sedgwick for help. In 1781, she actually won her case in the Berkshire Court of Common Pleas, but Ashley refused to release Freeman. That August, the case, Brom and Bett v. Ashley, went to the County Court of Common Pleas of Great Barrington, where Sedgwick argued that Massachusetts actually outlawed slavery per the state’s constitution. The jury sided with Sedgwick and, finally, Freeman was a free woman. Freeman used her liberty to become a healer, nurse, and midwife. She also worked as a paid domestic to Sedgwick and his second wife, Pamela. Within the home, she became a rock for the family, even helping Pamela through her severe depression. She bought her own house to live with her children. By the time she died in 1829, she had a lineage of grandchildren and great-grandchildren to carry on her legacy.
Interestingly enough, the “Brom” included in the case was the name of another 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