My top 5 "runaway slave" ads

Banned Histories of Race in America

So, Florida teaching standards now say that enslaved Black folks actually benefitted from slavery because they learned valuable skills. Now, the opposite is true, but they sure love to spread myths about slavery in this country. Those myths are usually some version of “Black people just passively and patiently embraced enslavement until us whites took it upon ourselves to free them out of the goodness of our very big hearts.”

Of course, the roughly 200,000 “runaway slave” ads in the newspapers of the time tell a very different story. Freedomonthemove.org has a database of about 10,000 of these notices and today I’m going to share with you my top five “runaway slave” ads!

Peter

If a Black person escaped slavery, the racism of their former captors sometimes had a benefit: enslavers were so racist they often couldn’t actually see what Black people looked like. This lead to desperately hilarious moments like when this ad can only describe Peter as, “smiles when spoken to,” and “has a scar on his face, but not recollected where.”