This is Karen Hunter and welcome to the hub. Let me tell you about Annie Minerva Turnbull. She was born August 9,

1869. She was born to two people who were born in bondage.

Actually, they worked on a plantation together in Kentucky.

They had nine children together during their bondage years.

Her dad actually literally walked off the plantation

and joined a union army during the Civil War.

Before he did that, though, he led his wife

and their nine children to the Underground Railroad into Illinois to freedom and

went back whooped that ass and became free.

What's really crazy for me, Annie was their 10th child, she was not born in bondage, of course, in 1869.

But one of the first acts that her father, Robert Turnbull,

did when he was emancipated was that he went to City Hall

in Illinois and applied for a marriage license.

That's not what I'm going to talk about today, but I do want to take a slight detour because

there's this notion that

black men don't take care of their children or marriages is a thing of the past or that

it's not in our DNA because of slavery for us to have

strong family bonds.

I say hockey puck or I want to say something that's a curse,

but I won't, you know, because it is BS.

Because the reality is, even though this man wasn't,

didn't own himself, he had such a bond with with this

...