Today, the sheer sadism witnessed on American plantations in the middle of the 19th century seems almost unbelievable.
However, it was all too real, and all too common. The scene described above took place in Louisiana in about 1850, and was recounted by none other than Platt himself, whose real name was Solomon Northup (he’d been given the name Platt by his owner).
Northup wrote about his terrible experiences in a book published in 1853 called 12 Years A Slave, which shocked the American public, and, according to some historians, helped to bring about the American Civil War, in which President Abraham Lincoln led the Yankee North to victory against the South, partly because he was determined to end slavery.
Northup’s story was rediscovered in the late Sixties thanks to a white academic and journalist called Susan Eakin, who had long campaigned for black rights in her native Louisiana.
Many years earlier, a Cross had been burned on her front lawn and a fire started at her back door because she had invited black students to sing at a local auditorium.
However, she was undeterred from her civil rights work, which included republishing an annotated version of Northup’s book, having spent almost her entire life unearthing the original court documents and bills of transfer — essentially ‘receipts’ for a slave — that supported his tale.
‘I did what I thought was right,’ she said. ‘I was not trying to win some popularity contest.’
And now, 160 years after the book’s publication, Northup’s story has been filmed by the award-winning British director Steve McQueen.
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