Many Black Americans still labor under an enduring myth, not of their own making, that the lives and lived experiences of their distant ancestors are unknowable, lost to the grinding void of transatlantic enslavement. It’s a myth underpinned by white history-making, in a land that mandated a decennial census but deliberately chose not to name the enslaved until after the Civil War.

Read more via Scalawag: Data-Mining the Plantation: Unearthing the paper trail of enslavement.

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