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Article

Flon, Catherine  

Curtis Jacobs

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
15 May 2020

was born in the French colony of St. Domingue, probably during the second half of the eighteenth century. The details of Flon’s genealogy are unknown due to the lack of personal information about people who experienced the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. She was the goddaughter and principal assistant to Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first ruler of the independent republic of Haiti, which suggests she was the daughter of enslaved Africans.

Flon was an enthusiastic supporter of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), during which time she served as a nurse, in a non-combatant but supportive capacity. Her unique place in the history of the revolution during the colonial war of independence (1802–1803), precipitated by the revocation of the decret du 16 pluviôse an II, an attempt to reestablish chattel slavery that resulted in the abduction of Toussaint Louverture.

The design of the Haitian national flag occurred ...

Article

Gardner, Eliza Ann  

Carol Parker Terhune

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

abolitionist and social leader, was born in New York City to free parents, James and Dorothy Gardner. Her father was a shipping contractor who made sails for large vessels. About 1845, while Gardner was in her teens, her family took up residence in Boston, Massachusetts, and opened its own business. Gardner attended the Boston Public School for Colored Children (also known as the Smith School, after the white businessman Abiel Smith, who donated funds). She was educated by leaders in the antislavery movement and developed an appreciation for their cause. The school was also used as a meeting place for the “colored citizens” to discuss issues of concern in their communities. During Gardner's time in Boston's only “colored” grammar school, Boston's African American community was fighting tirelessly to abolish colored schools and end school segregation using the Roberts v. Boston case as the catalyst Gardner ...

Article

House, Callie Delphia  

Mary Frances Berry

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

washerwoman, seamstress, organization founder, lecturer, and leader, was born into slavery in Rutherford County near Nashville, Tennessee. She had at least one sister, Sarah, and a brother, Charles. Her parents were slaves. Her father, Tom Guy, apparently served in the Union army. The 1880 Census lists her mother, Ann Guy, as a widowed washerwoman. Callie Guy had only a primary school education, probably attending Freedman's Bureau and church schools, but exhibited a high degree of literacy as an adult.

In 1883 she married William House, a laborer in Rutherford County, and bore six children, five of whom survived to adulthood. In the 1890s she was a widow, taking in laundry like her mother and other impoverished black women in the South.

About this time a new idea for political action surfaced in Rutherford County and other communities where former slaves ...

Article

Keckly, Elizabeth Hobbs  

Jennifer Fleischner

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

slave, dressmaker, abolitionist, and White House memoirist, was born Elizabeth Hobbs in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, the daughter of Armistead Burwell, a white slaveholder, and his slave Agnes Hobbs. Agnes was the family nurse and seamstress. Her husband, George Pleasant Hobbs, the slave of another man, treated “Lizzy” as his own daughter, and it was not until some years later, after George had been forced to move west with his master, that Agnes told Lizzy the identity of her biological father. While her mother taught her sewing, the skill that would make her name and fortune, it was George Hobbs who first instilled in Lizzy a profound respect for learning. Ironically, it was Armistead Burwell, who repeatedly told Lizzy she would never be “worth her salt,” who probably sparked her ambition to succeed and prove him wrong.

As a young girl Hobbs lived in ...

Article

Villanueva Osorio, Adolfina  

Yvonne Denis-Rosario

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

whose death at the hands of the police provoked protests and inspired artists, was born in Loíza, Puerto Rico, the seventh of seventeen children of Victoriano, a fisherman, and Martina. The family lived in Medianía Alta in the Tocones barrio. She married Agustín Carrasquillo Pinet, with whom she had seven children. After her father received a small plot of land in the Suarez sector from the governor of Puerto Rico, Roberto Sánchez Vilella, Villanueva Osorio stayed in the neighborhood of Tocones with her husband and children. They lived in the same space that her parents and siblings had lived in for decades, which was transferred to them in an agreement with the landowner, Veremundo Quiñones. When her birth family left, Villanueva Osorio stayed in the wooden house with her own family.

Quiñones s heirs called for the eviction of Villanueva Osorio from her lands ignoring previously made promises and filing ...