Stolen from Africa & sold into misery... but America’s last slave was brave pioneer of civil rights
citizens. But she marched for 15 miles, at the age of 72, to the Dallas county courthouse to demand her rights.
“It was the same building which, 30 years later, would see the birth of the civil rights movements after African Americans were beaten back as they climbed the courthouse steps to demand the right to vote.
“Matilda’s actions were lost in history, she received no recognition and she died in poverty. But now we have discovered the last surviving slave had been demanding equal rights a long time before the civil rights movement which changed America.”
The more Hannah managed to find about Matilda’s story, the more remarkable was the person she found.
The day she was herded off the Clotilda and last saw her two older sisters, she was sold, together with her mum and 10-yearold sister Sallie, to a wealthy plantation owner called Memorable Creagh. Matilda, Grace and Sallie tried to escape the plantation soon after they arrived, but they were recaptured. And while the abolition of slavery in 1865 brought emancipation to Matilda’s family, they continued to work Creagh’s land, trapped in poverty as share-croppers.
While Grace was resigned to a life of servitude and apparently never learned English, what is known about Matilda shows she was a strong-willed woman, proud of her African heritage, who refused to be downtrodden or treated as a lesser human being. Instead of keeping her slave owner’s name, Creagh, she changed it to McCrear in order “to put her own spin on it and assert her indesecond-class pendence,” Hannah says. Matilda also refused to get married.
Instead, she had a decades-long relationship with a white, Germanborn Jewish man, a union that was virtually unheard of – and severely frowned upon – at the time.
Hannah says: “It was presumably a very secretive and covert relationship, but she had 14 children with him over a 25-year period, and 10 of her children lived to adulthood.”
The former slave also appears throughout her life to have worn her hair in a traditional Yoruba style and proudly carried facial markings from a traditional rite in Africa.
“She was clearly very proud of her West African identity,” says Hannah. “Her mum must have helped her keep her traditions alive.
“She had been robbed of most of her family and so much of her identity, but she was determined to hold on to her roots and ancestry.”
The journey she set out on aged 72 was typical of her spirit and tenacity.
Leaving her home in Mobile, she walked 15 miles along dirt roads to the Dallas county courthouse to make a claim for compensation enslavement.
For a former slave to be so bold in the Deep South in the 1930s was an affront to many and laughable to others, and the judge quickly dismissed her claim.
But the preposterous idea of claiming reparation for having been snatched from her country, sold and enslaved in the US caught the attention of the local media.
The article Hannah uncovered, oozing racism, read: “An old African woman in the Court House corridor, patiently waiting her turn to see the Probate Judge. Her name was Tildy McCrear.”
It went on: “She bore the mark of an African tribe on her left cheek. Tildy pointed to the symbol with pride. It was the crowning proof of her contention that she was a pureblooded African who had come to America aboard the last slave ship to smuggle in a cargo of Negroes
“Tildy believed that being snatched from her home in Africa, while yet an infant, called for a little reimbursement.” After the judge dismissed her for her claim and sent her away to live the rest of her life in poverty, she thanked him “with grand courtesy”, adding: “I don’t spec I needs anything more’n I got,” according to the article.
When she died nine years later, aged 83, there was no obituary and no recognition that America’s last surviving slave had passed away.
Moreover, her many children never mentioned to their own children and grandchildren the fact she had been a slave, nor that she had challenged the system a long time before the famous civil rights activists came along and changed history.
It was down to Hannah to break the news to Matilda’s grandson Johnny Crear, 83, about his grandmother’s incredible and heartbreaking story.
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alking about finding out how Matilda had been enslaved, he said: “I had a lot of mixed emotions. I thought if she hadn’t undergone what had happened, I wouldn’t be here. But that was followed by anger.”
Johnny witnessed violence against civil rights marchers himself when, in 1965, police brutally beat up demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge as they attempted to march to the state capital, Montgomery.
He was working at the local hospital where many of the protesters were treated.
He had no idea that, 34 years earlier, his grandmother had crossed the same bridge on route to court to demand her own rights as a former slave, snatched from her country at the age of two.
He had been told his grandma was “quite rambunctious”. Her funeral is one of his earliest memories.
“I was about three years old and I got away from my parents and almost fell in the grave,” he says.
“My wife was researching our family history and we could only get so far.
“The name Creagh would come up, but, as ours is spelled Crear, we didn’t make that connection. We didn’t know it had been changed.”
And after finally discovering the truth about his independent-minded grandmother, he said: “This fills in a lot of the holes we have about her. It doesn’t surprise me that she was so rebellious.
“It’s refreshing to know she had the kind of spirit that’s uplifting.”