![]() ![]() Family was one of the few bright spots in the long night of slavery, and the auction was the event that ripped enslaved families apart. Slave trading was a lucrative business, yet for the enslaved people themselves, the auction block represented a particular horror - the end to life as they knew it. Franklin & Armfield, one of the largest slave trading firms in the country, was headquartered in the same building until it was sold to a partner of Price, Birch & Company. As the historian Steven Deyle puts it, slave auctions were “a regular part of everyday life.”Ī photograph, circa 1865, of the slave-trading firm Price, Birch & Company in Alexandria, Va. Thousands of sales took place each year, right in the hearts of American cities and towns, on the steps of courthouses and city halls. Then they were sold directly from the pens or marched to a nearby auction. Before being sold, the enslaved were often kept in pens or private jails, sometimes for days or weeks. The sales took place all over the growing nation - in taverns, town squares and train stations, on riverbanks and by the side of the road. But the enslaved were also sold in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey and at New York City’s 18th-century open-air Meal Market on Wall Street. Auctions and the sales of enslaved people could be found near or along the major ports where enslaved Africans landed, including Richmond, Va. This, along with the ban on importation of enslaved Africans that took effect in 1808, largely led to the rapid growth of the domestic slave trade. After the American Revolution, cotton production grew rapidly, and demand for enslaved workers on the vast plantations of the Deep South intensified. Sallie and her family were among the 1.2 million enslaved men, women and children sold in the United States between approximately 17, according to the historian Michael Tadman. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. ![]() And yet many details of her story have been lost: We don’t know exactly what happened to Sallie’s mother, or how much Sallie was sold for, or even exactly when the auction took place. We know that Sallie was sold at an auction held at the Smyth County Courthouse, a brick building that was torn down after the turn of the century, when Marion’s current courthouse was constructed. Thompson’s efforts led to the founding of the Mount Pleasant Heritage Museum - housed in a former black Methodist church that Sallie and other freed men and women founded after the Civil War - to preserve the history and culture of African-Americans in the county. This story was told many years later by Sallie’s granddaughter, Evelyn Thompson Lawrence, a local educator and historian in Marion. The tree became the place where she would recall the names and faces of her family members sold away a place where she could grieve, but also a place where she could find shade and respite from her sorrow. All alone, she would wrap her arms around the tree’s wide trunk and cry. For the remainder of her childhood, whenever she could, Sallie would slip away and find solace under a tall white-oak tree. Sallie, as she was called, was herself sold that day, but not with her mother: A man named Thomas Thurman purchased Sallie to take care of his sick wife. The auction took place in the mid-1840s, in the town of Marion, Va. Hweida didn’t know what rape was, but she would wake up with blood between her legs.Sarah Elizabeth Adams was around 5 when her mother was sold to a slave dealer in Lynchburg, Va. But at night the man would lay with the pretty young girl with wide eyes and long dark hair. She says he promised to treat her like his own daughter. Hweida also ended up in Raqqa, where she was bought by a 50-year-old ISIS militant. “They took us to the school in the village and separated the men. She spoke so quietly it was hard to hear her. They told us to convert (to Islam), but we wouldn’t,” Hweida said in a halting voice. She says more than half of the 80 girls in the slave market in that room in Raqqa were from Kuchu. Over the course of the next several months she was raped, beaten and starved. Farida ended up in Raqqa, where she was sold as a concubine. ISIS militants dragged away hundreds of Kuchu’s girls, women and children. Villagers estimate that around 500 men were executed. The men were then driven to the groves outside of the village, lined up and shot. Survivors tell NBC News that ISIS fighters entered Kuchu on August 3, stayed for several days, and eventually separated the men from their families. ![]()
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