Today I am choosing this ad to make a discussion about children missing, this ad stood out the most for me when surfing through hundreds if ads because of the attempts that this father (Henry Wright) had made to look for his children.
1. What do you notice? what do you wonder?
At first, when looking at the title of the ad, I could already see Wright's desperate to look for his children, but he didn't lose hope and continued searching for them. I also noticed he and his wife were also slaves, and when the ad was posted, it also mentioned that he was a "colored resident", not a regular resident. This ad was also posted regarding Knoxville, Tennessee in 1860. Whereas the slavery system was still in control even after African Americans gained the right to vote by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. I really feel like life was really rough back then for African Americans, even though they are granted the right to vote and there are some free Black Americans, but they were still somewhat controlled by White people. And who knows where those children would have gone to, they might have also been enslaved, sold, or even death, that's the scariest part of this post. Black Americans were never free despite the attempt by the Union, some were badly mistreated and tortured, and their lives weren't placed on the value scale because they don't even exist as humans in the eyes of a slave owner, but they were just mere tools to be used and exploited.
2. Time/Place:
This has brought me back to the Reconstruction and the Black Code period where people had started asking themselves: What is freedom? Some physical offenses were directed at Black Americans at the time, and there was a lot of confusion in both South and North of the country. The most highlighted period was from the 1860s to the 1870s where the 14th Amendment and the 15th amendment helped out African Americans. According to Module 2: "Reconstruction-era governments in the South established the region’s first state-sponsored public schools, serving both white and Black children (although generally segregated by race). They passed civil rights legislation, making it illegal for railroads, hotels, and other institutions to discriminate based on race." This has shown the strive for free Black Americans progressed greatly in the South during that time period.
3. Implications/Conclusions:
Even though American went through all those improvements, those were just some facts recorded in history, and this ad showed me the dark side of that time period, people are still missing and also being assaulted unknowingly; however, American did come a long way to slowly abolish the slavery policy.
Question: Why do you think those children were still missing?
In the post Autumn wrote, the ad she chose was written by a man whose name had been changed by his enslaver when he was taken from his family. Perhaps his children were also renamed, do not remember him, are not literate, or otherwise didn't have the resources to find and respond to the ad.