President’s Day, which granted many in America time off, honors the nation’s first president, George Washington. Washington’s political legacy is well-known, but not the fact that he used his office to keep slaves in bondage despite laws prohibiting it. In an 2017 piece in the New York Times, University of Delaware associate professor of Black Studies and History and author Erica Armstrong Dunbar found that the Washington family owned slaves throughout their lifetime. She wrote about one of them Ona Judge, who escaped the Washington household in a book “Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge.” Although many states in the North were slowly distancing themselves from slave ownership, the Washingtons continued to use it as a means to maintain wealth and power. (READ MORE)(SOURCE: BLACKAMERICAWEB.COM)
