Last night, I was watching Ken Burns' excellent documentary, "Baseball", when an interview with Buck O'Neil was aired, preceded by mentioning his birth and his being the grandson of a slave. For those that don't know, Buck O'Neil was one of the last surviving players from the old "Negro Leagues" of baseball. What made me think, however, was how he only died recently (2006) and he was the grandson of a slave, therefore, surely met and knew many former slaves in his youth. So, I thought, there are surely people still alive today who met and knew people who had been slaves in the United States. How fascinating, I thought, to think that if I'd met O'Neil, and shook his hand, I'd be shaking a hand that had shaken the hands of many people who had once suffered under American slavery. O'Neil was born in 1911, only 6 years earlier than my own still-living grandmother. I had previously considered how my grandmother was a living connection to the past, and that she may have met someone in her youth that had met, or perhaps seen, a living Abraham Lincoln.

A web search, out of curiosity, brought up several conflicting claimants as the "last living former slave" to die in the U.S. One that seemed legitimate was a woman born a slave in 1861 that managed to survive for 122 years, dying in 1983, when I was already ten years old. So it isn't out of the question that people I personally know may have known former slaves, as well. Since January 1, 2013 will mark the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, I think it would be a fascinating project for someone to put together a "living history" of slavery, it's abolition, and the aftermath, by interviewing people that knew and remember the very people that went through it. There is still a living memory of slavery, though it is only second-hand at this point. We are not that far removed when you think about it. Perhaps it's because there is still that living memory of slave-owners, as well, that we still have the lingering, obsolete, backwards attitudes towards race that can't seem to be completely shaken.