This Was a Thing, Not That Long Ago

I love history. Not the glossy stories with all the bad stuff removed that we were taught in school, but the real history of the world. My mom lived ninety nine years, her father almost one hundred and two years. Grandpa was born in 1886 so there's a lot of history I can relate to there. When I was a kid our family got two newspapers delivered to our house every day. The Sun-Times in the morning, the Daily News in the evening, and on Sundays Dad bought the Chicago American. It had the best comics. One thing that fascinated me was when a story would be published about a former Confederate or Union soldier dying. When we learned about the Civil War in school, it seemed so long ago. Way, way before our time and our parent's time. How could these people still be around? As much as that drew my interest, it was the thing that wasn't mentioned all that much that I found astounding. There were still people alive, real human beings that lived all around us, that had been born into slavery. People who had no say about their lives from birth to death, enslaved by our fellow countrymen. Those people weren't usually mentioned in those newspapers. On September 23, 1972, a man died of his injuries after being hit by a car. It is commonly believed that he was the last living person in the United States who had been born into slavery, in those same United States. I would have been twenty two years old in that year, but I do not remember seeing anything in the newspaper or on the evening news about that. There was a small obituary in the local Pittsburgh newspaper, but it seems not much else.