u/AccomplishedLaw5793

I was going through the 1866 House Select Committee Report on the Memphis Riots and found Frances Thompson's testimony.

She was a formerly enslaved woman living alone in South Memphis. On the night of May 1st, seven men kicked in her door. Two of them were wearing police badges. They stayed for nearly 4 hours. They took $300 in cash — everything she had saved. She walked on crutches her entire life — cancer in her foot — and one month after that night, she walked into a federal hearing room and told Congress everything. Every name. Every detail.

What stopped me was one specific line in the record. The committee members were visibly affected by her testimony. One historian later documented her as one of the key figures whose words gave Congress the political will to move on the 14th Amendment.

She was approximately 36 years old when she died. Nobody was ever arrested.

What stayed with me was the crutches detail. She walked into that room knowing the men who attacked her were still free in Memphis. Still wearing the same badges.

Has anyone else come across Frances Thompson or Memphis 1866 records in their research?

I put together a short video going through the actual congressional documents if anyone wants to see them: https://youtu.be/acU4u31oTLo

I've been going down a rabbit hole of plantation records and found something I can't stop thinking about.

Jefferson's own private notebooks record her name at least 4 times. She delivered babies on that estate for 17 years — for enslaved women and Jefferson's own household.

When he died, his estate owed $107,000 in debt. He freed 5 people in his will.

She was not one of them.

I made a video going through the actual archived documents if anyone wants to see where this goes. What she built after — that part hit different.

https://youtu.be/xTM9COisHkA

A woman named Milla Granson ran a midnight school in Natchez, Mississippi for seven years undetected. Several of her students used what she taught them to forge their own freedom passes and escape North.

In Savannah, a seven year old girl walked to school every morning with her books wrapped in paper — because if anyone saw them, she could be beaten.

John W. Alvord's official 1866 federal report documented 740 schools across the South — most built by formerly enslaved people themselves. With their own money. Before the government arrived.

The law said they could not learn.

They built a system anyway.Sources: Alvord's 1866 Semi-Annual Report (National Archives), Susie King Taylor's 1902 memoir, Leonard Black's 1847 memoir, Federal Writers' Project Slave Narratives (Library of Congress)

https://youtu.be/TH_yHidFfJw

I came across a story recently and I’m still not sure how this even worked.

Apparently, an enslaved man in Charleston somehow took control of a Confederate ship during the Civil War… not a small boat, but an actual military transport vessel. From what I read, it had weapons on board and had to pass multiple checkpoints guarded by forts.

What’s confusing me is how he got past all that without being stopped. These weren’t unguarded waters.

Some sources say he even used signals and disguise to make it out.

I don’t want to get the details wrong, but if this is true, it sounds less like an escape and more like a full military operation.

I found a video that breaks it down step by step — especially the part where he reaches the Union side.

Here it is if anyone wants to see it:

https://youtu.be/wufb5QfsoYc