New York Times article about a work of our Professor, Eto Otitigbe
From New Your Times:
“CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — “Can we forget the crack of the whip, cowhide, whipping-post, the auction-block, the hand-cuffs, the spaniels, the iron collar, the negro-trader tearing the young child from its mother’s breast as a whelp from the lioness? Have we forgotten that by these horrible cruelties, hundreds of our race have been killed? No, we have not, or ever will.”
So wrote Isabella Gibbons, a formerly enslaved Black woman, two years after the end of the Civil War. She was writing here in Charlottesville, where, in the 1840s, she had worked as a cook at the University of Virginia, on a campus designed by Thomas Jefferson, third United States president, shaper of the Declaration of Independence, author of the words “all men are created equal,” and lifelong enslaver.
Gibbons, who was owned by a university faculty member, a science professor, remained in Charlottesville after Emancipation. By the time she wrote, in 1867, she was a teacher in a Black primary school. She may well have continued to teach until her death in 1889, though the facts of her later life are uncertain.”….. read the full article here
