*A Black lady named Henrietta Wooden was born into slavery in Kentucky between 1818 and 1820. After being handed from one household to a different, she finally sued certainly one of her enslavers and gained.
As Enterprise Insider experiences, Wooden was first enslaved with the Tousey household in Kentucky. She was offered a couple of decade later for $700 to an abusive service provider named Henry Forsyth in Louisville.
Wooden was a young person when she was offered once more to a French immigrant, William Cirode, in New Orleans.
Be taught extra about her backstory by way of the YouTube clip above.
Right here’s extra from Enterprise Insider
“When Cirode deserted his household attributable to authorized points, his spouse, Jane, moved again to Cincinnati, the place she rented out Wooden as a home servant.”
Fearing debt collectors, Jane Cirode declared Wooden free at an Ohio courthouse in 1848. This legally meant Wooden might work as a free Black lady. She remembered that interval of her life as a “candy style of liberty.”
However freedom was short-lived. 5 years later, Zebulon Ward, a Kentuckian deputy sheriff who Cirode’s daughter and son-in-law, Josephine and Robert White, employed to seize Wooden in Kentucky, kidnapped her. Wooden was as soon as once more enslaved “illegally” for 16 years by the Civil Warfare.
When she returned to Cincinnati in 1870, Wooden sued Ward for $20,000. On the time, she estimated that yearly she labored as a slave was value $500 in labor prices.
In 1878, Wooden gained her case after an all-white jury voted in her favor eight years after submitting her lawsuit. However Ward, a rich man, was ordered to pay solely $2,500. In line with Enterprise Insider, it stays essentially the most vital sum ever awarded by a US court docket for reparations.
Wooden’s case is basically forgotten in historical past however was coated extensively by newspapers in 1878. The New York Occasions ran an article headlined “An Unsettled Account.” Within the article, it was urged that extra previously enslaved People would possibly search reparations.
“The USA Authorities could also be requested to make good the lack of these whose property was instantly clothed with the best of manhood,” The Occasions wrote. “However who will recompense the tens of millions of women and men for the years of liberty of which they’ve been defrauded? Who will make good to the 1000’s of kidnapped freemen the agony, misery, and bondage of a lifetime?”
READ MORE: Why California Reparations was a FAILURE. #AB3121 (Opinion) | WATCH
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