Ads Against African Americans

625 Words3 Pages

Slavery in the United States was an atrocious and very inhumane way of treating African Americans. This atrocity started in 1619, springing forward an almost two and a half century long era of hate, persecution, and evil-doings to the Africans brought to the United States from Africa. However, in 1863 President Abraham Lincoln passed the Emancipation Proclamation that declared all slaves free. After this new found freedom, one would think that the African Americans’ problems were solved, but for many, one big problem still remained. This problem was that of finding their loved ones, and the possible solution to this problem was to post ads in the Southwestern Christian Advocate’s “Lost Friends” column. The people that the writers of the ads were mostly …show more content…

It must have been really tough for them to have been torn away from the people that they love. Also, many of the writers have been separated from their family for a very long time. In one of the ads, the writer had been separated from her brother for about ten years. There was even an ad were a family had been split up for about twenty five to thirty years! That is an extremely long time to be separated from your family members. The writers of the ads don’t even know if their family that they’re inquiring about is alive or not. They are just holding on to the little bit of hope that they have left to find them. Another astonishing aspect of these ads is the distance between the writer and the place that they are making their inquiries. For instance one writer made inquiries about family members in Virginia, but he