Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2021/Spring/105/Section 88/Roxie Dann

Overview
Roxie Dann was a Black maid and former slave after the American Civil War during the time of. She worked her entire life, but still struggled financially. Her entire family died before her, leaving her alone during the Great Depression. In December of 1938, she was interviewed by W.B. Sedberry for the.

Early Life
According to her interview, “Aunt” Roxie Dann was a Black maid born in Scotland Neck, North Carolina in 1856. She was born as a slave along with her parents, grandmother, and twelve siblings. Her mother died when she was young, and her father escaped from the plantation when he was about to be sold. She was six or seven years old when the American Civil War ended, though she and her grandmother stayed on the plantation as sharecroppers. She was known as “Roxie Higgs,” having taken her master’s name before getting married.

Adult Life and Career
Dann moved around many times and worked throughout her life. She and her grandmother moved to Halifax, North Carolina where she met her husband, David. They got married when she was less than sixteen years old. They had three children and moved around for work between North Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas, and Texas. After a Black man was lynched nearby in Arkansas, they settled back in North Carolina. Dann worked at Peace College as a maid and nurse for twenty-two years, later working as a maid at the Y.M.C.A. but retiring when she was too old to reach the beds. She also worked as a nurse for a baby. All three of her sons died of illnesses, her youngest son not even living to be a year old, and her elder sons William and David Junior living long enough to go to St. Augustine's University for school. Her husband died some time after William’s death. She bought a house from a captain named Moody before she was thirty-two years old and kept it her whole life, living as the only Black person in her neighborhood.

Racial Discrimination
After the Civil War, economic exploitation and healthcare disparities kept the majority of African Americans in low-paying jobs with a low quality of life. Once slavery was ended, many former slaves stayed on plantation lands as sharecroppers. The employment of these former slaves was limited by the black codes, a restrictive set of laws that kept African Americans in the lowest-paying jobs. The majority turned to sharecropping, which kept them working on plantations for only a small portion of the crops they grew. This system exploited Black labor and kept Black people in poverty, limiting their options even after they were freed from slavery.

The exploitation caused by slavery and the black codes would affect Black employment long after the codes were repealed, as the Black population largely remained landless and working in agriculture and other low-paying jobs. Black people were lifted up the bare minimum in society, out of the bonds of slavery but still kept at the bottom.

Economic exploitation is not the only hardship that African Americans faced in this time; healthcare disparities highlighted how African Americans were receiving little to know medical attention, with many deaths being recorded as having unknown causes. This links to the exploitation of Black labor as “real illness was defined not with reference to how one felt but solely in terms of whether one could work." African Americans were essentially treated as property meant to do work; their health otherwise was not of concern.



Racial Violence & Lynching
The white majority used racial violence as a means of control over Black people even after the Civil War, with their most frequent tactic being lynching. Groups of white people, such as slave patrols before the Civil War and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) afterward, used violent methods like hangings to keep Black people in an inferior status and to limit the extent of their new freedoms. The KKK would visit Black people who did something as simple as voting.

There were more than 4400 victims of lynching on a racial basis between 1877 and 1950, the majority of whom were killed in the 12 Southern states. The deadliest states included Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana. Corresponding with the introduction of Jim Crow laws and their enforcement, lynching increased between 1890 and 1900.

Lynching functioned as a tool of domination and control before and in the height of housing segregation. Essentially, lynching was an extremely violent and harmful “means of social control used in the face of racial threats to economic, political and social hegemony." This violent act continued well into the twentieth century, exacerbated by the media’s use of rhetoric based in white supremacy and lynching for political gain. Racial violence like lynching kept Black people, particularly in the South, confined and controlled, both spatially and in society; this confinement and control directly contributed to the injustices faced by Black people in the United States today.