*Originally published in Rewire News Group
While Underground tells the fictional stories of enslaved women such as Ernestine (actress Amirah Vann), don’t think for a second that real-life enslaved women didn’t endure the depicted brutalities and worse. Slavery is the grisliest true story there is.
"Yet, women in bondage experienced a particular terror. Not only were these women valuable for the manual labor they produced, but slaveholders sought to exploit and control their reproductive capabilities too. Enslaved women were forced to give birth not to babies to be loved and welcomed as additions to their families, but as a source of free labor for slaveholders. This perversity was designed to strip away the humanity of Black women’s childbearing, reducing it to breeding for the master’s financial gain."
Read the entire story here.