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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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The U.S. census lists enslaved Black people with their disabilities.

1850

The Story of Disability Justice
DCRJ
SLA
MHP

The category for listing disabilities is defined as "Deaf & Dumb, Blind, Insane, or Idiotic.” Slaveholders include disabilities as a census category in order to track the "soundness" of enslaved Black people's physical and intellectual capacities. Slaveholders diagnose Black abolitionists as being of "unsound mind," listing this as the reason for uprisings and abolitionists' lack of ability to "see the benefit" of contributing to a slave labor economy.