I'm Ashley C. Ford, and this is Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast about joy and justice produced with Vox Creative.

Let's get into it.

Come take my hand and walk there with me.

I know a place where we can be free.

There is a light shining for you. I want to tell you a story about a black woman named Belinda Sutton.

But first, we have to go back to the year 1775, back before the United States was even

called the United States, back when it was still just known as the United Colonies.

Can't you see you will be free?

Belinda Sutton was 63 years old in 1775, the year when she finally became free. She'd been enslaved since the age of 12,

kidnapped from her home in Ghana, and sent to work for the Isaac Royal household in Massachusetts.

When her white masters fled during the Revolutionary War, they left their slaves to figure out

their own emancipation. So that's what Belinda did.

With the help of abolitionists, Belinda wrote a petition to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts

advocating for a pension. The petition reads like a somber poem with passages like,

Her frame bending under the oppression of years, while she,

by the laws of the land, is denied the employment of one morsel of that immense wealth, a part

whereof had been accumulated by her own industry. In other words, she'd spent decades working for one of the richest families in Massachusetts,

and her labor contributed to their immense wealth. Wasn't she entitled to a piece of that fortune?

And in 1783, when Belinda was 70 years old, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts agreed she was entitled to a pension.

Little is known about the rest of Belinda's life after that, but her story is one of the earliest examples of the state paying reparations for slavery.

Belinda Sutton's story is pretty unique.

There have been other examples of reparations in America for other historic wrongdoings.

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