Henrietta Wood

Henrietta Wood was born into slavery in northern Kentucky between about 1818 and 1820, the property of the Tousey family. She never knew her exact age, saying only that she could not quite tell it. After Moses Tousey's death in 1834, she was sold to a Louisville master, Henry Forsyth, who subjected her to harsh treatment, and then passed to William Cirode, a French merchant, to settle Forsyth's debts. Cirode carried her to New Orleans, and later his wife brought her north.

Her freedom came not from any of the men who had bought and sold her, but from Jane M. Cirode, who legally manumitted Wood on April 15, 1848, with the act recorded in court. For several years Wood lived and worked as a free domestic in the Cincinnati area — until 1853, when relatives of her former owner hired the deputy sheriff Zebulon Ward to seize her. She was lured across the Ohio River, taken, and sold back into bondage, held on plantations in Mississippi and Texas through the Civil War.

Freedom restored, Wood did what few in her position dared: she sued. In 1870 she brought Wood v. Ward in federal court in Cincinnati, seeking restitution for her stolen years. In 1878 a jury found in her favor and awarded her $2,500 — the largest sum ever granted by an American court as reparations for slavery. She collected the award in 1879.

With that hard-won money she helped her son, Arthur Simms, purchase a home and study law; he became one of the first Black graduates of Northwestern University's law school. Henrietta Wood died in Chicago in 1912. Stolen twice and silenced never, she made a court of the nation answer for what was taken from her — and left her family standing in the freedom she reclaimed.