The Accidental Slaveowner with Mark Auslander

The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race & Finding an American Family, by Mark Auslander.
The book explores how a story of a single enslaved woman, whose life was intertwined with some of the most dramatic episodes in Methodist history, has been told, retold and struggled over across 160 years in African American and white families. Part history, part anthropology, and part detective story, The Accidental Slaveowner traces, from the 1850s to the present day, how different groups of people… Show more have struggled with one powerful story about slavery. For over a century and a half, residents of Oxford, Georgia (“the birthplace of Emory University”), have told and retold stories of the enslaved woman known as “Kitty” and her owner, Methodist bishop James Osgood Andrew, first president of Emory’s board of trustees. Bishop Andrew’s ownership of Miss Kitty and other enslaved persons triggered the 1844 great national schism of the Methodist Episcopal Church, presaging the Civil War. For many local whites, Bishop Andrew was only “accidentally” a slaveholder, and when offered her freedom, Kitty willingly remained in slavery out of loyalty to her master. Local African Americans, in contrast, tend to insist that Miss Kitty was the Bishop’s coerced lover and that she was denied her basic freedoms throughout her life.

Show less