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The timeline can be navigated with the “Scroll Left” and “Scroll Right” buttons or by dragging the pointer to a date on the timeline waveform (located at the bottom of the screen on the desktop version and on the left of the screen on mobile). To filter by a particular topic and see a smaller section of the data, make a selection on the dropdown “Filters” menu or click “Search” to do a keyword search. Hover over the abbreviated filter tags in the blue boxes to see the complete name of the filter, or click a filter to display all the data with this tag. If you want to take a deeper dive into a specific topic by viewing a narrative essay page and a curated timeline, click on “Stories.”

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A woman with a child walks towards two other figures. Eliza tells Uncle Tom that he has been sold and she is running away to save her child.
Illustration in Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852).

Formerly enslaved Black women refuse to leave their children behind.

1850s

SLA
CHIL
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Illustration in Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852).

During the 1850s, New Orleans newspaper advertisements for escaped enslaved people indicate that out of the 151 Black women who escaped slavery, none of them left their children behind.