“I can remember the scene as if it were but yesterday,” formerly enslaved Elizabeth Keckley wrote about her family separation. The sorrow was too much to describe. She recalled her father’s “last kiss; his wild straining of my mother to his bosom; the solemn prayer to Heaven; the tears and sobs—the fearful anguish of broken hearts.”
Americans have been shocked and saddened by the sight and sound of immigrant children being taken from their parents at the southern border. What we have witnessed is eerily similar to tactics used during other periods in US history, most notably, slavery. Enslaved children of all ages had vivid memories of family separations. Infants torn from their mother’s breast were put on the auction block. Some mothers tried to hide children under their clothing. Fathers held their children’s hands tight as tears streamed down their faces.
Keckley’s memories haunted her for the rest of her life. Her mother faced insults from their enslaver, who coldly said: “Stop your nonsense…your husband is not the only slave that has been sold.”
Scholars of slavery have uncovered this history, much of which is documented in a database I recently created of more than 8,000 enslaved people who were appraised and/or sold in the 18th- and 19th-century US. I found infants who were days old when they were auctioned off, without parents present.
Families like that of Rueben and Sally, who were sold in Kentucky along with their six children, remind us that family separation and sale are not new concepts. Hoping to stay together, bystanders said Sally ran with their infant in her arms and their five small children just behind her and begged Reuben’s purchaser: “Buy me and my children with my husband.” That did not happen. Six children lost their parents that day just as thousands of children have lost theirs along the US-Mexico border. To be sure, the immigrants trying to cross the border are not enslaved. But they are being housed in a similar fashion and their children’s experience is quite similar to that of enslaved children who went through the horror of being torn away from their parents against their will.
Some auctions contained stipulations to preserve families and advertised this in newspapers. At the Butler auction, one of the most recognized slave auctions in the US, held in Savannah, Georgia in the spring of 1859, advertisements claimed the enslaved “will be sold in families”. Until the sale, those being sold were kept at a racetrack and treated like “animals”, a term that echoes in the present. They referred to this period before the sale as “the weeping time”.
Despite claims of unity, more than 400 people were sold at that auction and families were separated with no care for their humanity. Enslaved children at the auction and many others like it said they were “cried off” from their parents. These scenes had a lasting impact on their lives. Reflecting on his family separation experience around age five, Josiah Henson was traumatized as an adult.
“I seem to see and hear my poor weeping mother now,” he said.
Today, we hear the cries of a six-year-old girl who was taken to a “detention center”, pleading to see her aunt. In the background, children call out for their parents. They are moaning, crying, begging Border Patrol agents to find their families.
One voice stood out: a child calling “Papa, Papa…” This child is a modern-day version of Keckley and Henson, except today, the parents have not been sold. They have been detained, charged and processed as criminals. The fate of their children remains uncertain.