Matilda McCrear

• Born: March 1858 in West Africa
• Died: January 13, 1940 in Selma, Dallas, Alabama

Matilda McCrear was captured in West Africa when she was two years old, arriving in Alabama in 1860. She was then purchased by a wealthy plantation owner called Memorable Creagh — along with her mother Grace and sister Sallie.

To make matters worse, McCrear’s father and two of her brothers were left behind in Africa. Upon arriving in America, McCrear and her sister were separated from their mother and sold to another owner. All three attempted to escape their situation, but were immediately recaptured.

When the abolition of slavery in 1865 emancipated McCrear and her family, they had no other recourse but to work as sharecroppers and remain in their place. Her mother never even learned to speak English. Nonetheless, McCrear herself prevailed and tossed obedience by the wayside.

“Matilda’s story is particularly remarkable because she resisted what was expected of a black woman in the U.S. South in the years after emancipation,” said Durkin. “She didn’t get married. Instead, she had a decades-long common-law marriage with a white German-born man, with whom she had 14 children.”

Durkin called this relationship “astonishing” for its time, as the seeming incompatibility of race, class, religion, and social expectation didn’t matter to the couple. On top of that, McCrear — who did end up changing her surname to Creagh — retained her sense of cultural identity.

“Even though she left West Africa when she was a toddler, she appears throughout her life to have worn her hair in a traditional Yoruba style, a style presumably taught to her by her mother,” said Durkin.

In her 70s, the woman walked 15 miles to a county courthouse and demanded reparations for her enslavement. McCrear and a small group of other surviving slaves in the area had gotten to know each other by then, settling near Mobile, Alabama and speaking Yoruba with one another.

Unfortunately, racism in the Deep South in the 1930s was as ubiquitous as the humidity, leading her demand for compensation to fall on deaf ears. Even when she died a decade later, there was more shame befalling her name than commemoration.

“There was a lot of stigma attached to having been a slave,” said Durkin. “The shame was placed on the people who were enslaved, rather than the slavers.”

Source: https://allthatsinteresting.com/matilda-mccrear

Links:

• https://www.bbc.com/news/education-52010859
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_McCrear
• https://www.heritagedaily.com/2020/03/matilda-mccrear-the-hidden-st...
• https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/true-story-behind-americas-la...