Most people think slavery only happened in the South... but in 1851 nearly 500 Mormon settlers brought dozens of enslaved people to California, a state where slavery was already illegal, and never told them they were free.
👀 One of those enslaved people was a woman named Biddy Mason who walked 1,700 miles on foot from Mississippi, took her enslaver to court when she finally learned the truth, and died one of the wealthiest women in Los Angeles. There is a monument in San Bernardino honoring the men who built this city... but there is nothing honoring the enslaved people who built it?‼️🤔
HAPPY DECORATION DAY TO BLACK AMERICAN DESCENDANTS OF CHATTEL SLAVERY ONLY! never let history forget that memorial’s day was a black American holiday bastardized by white America.
Louisiana Gumbo has strong Indigenous roots through the Choctaw (and possibly other American Indian tribes) of the American South, particularly via filé powder base which took the place of sassafras leaf powder.
The Choctaw dried and ground young leaves of the sassafras tree (Sassafras albidum, native to eastern North America) into a powder called kombo (or similar terms). They used it as a seasoning, thickener, and for medicinal purposes in stews long before European contact. French colonists and enslaved Haitians/Africans in Louisiana learned this practice from the Choctaw in the early colonial period (1700s), incorporating it into evolving gumbo recipes.