For nearly two years, Pleasant Plains Baptist Church in Ashford has ministered to the laundry department at Southeast Health in Dothan, seeking to be the hands, feet and voice of Jesus to those who work there.
Not every person of color in the South was enslaved.
It is a point Marvin Tupper Jones, the executive director of the nonprofit volunteer preservation and research organization Chowan Discovery Group, explains in detail. A native of what he describes as the Winton Triangle in Hertford County, Jones traces his heritage to the late 17
th century.
Marvin T. Jones
“My oldest named ancestor was from India. William Weaver shows up around 1690,” he told Coastal Review. Weaver was the father of biracial children who were free.
“These were not enslaved people,” he said.
Citing the late Dr. Ira Berlin, a scholar and historian who studied slavery and race in America, Jones said that at the time it was not uncommon for European men and women to have children with partners of a different race. A professor of history at the University of Maryland, Berlin died in 2018. His books and research are widely credited with changing perceptions of the Black experience in Colonial and antebell