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| A photograph of Frank Campbell was found in a scrapbook at Nicholls State University in Louisiana. The children with Mr. Campbell are unidentified. |
He was an enslaved teenager on a Jesuit plantation in Maryland on the night that the stars fell. It was November of 1833, and meteor showers set the sky ablaze.
His name was Frank Campbell. He would hold tight to that memory for decades, even when he was an old man, living hundreds of miles away from his birthplace. In 1838, he was shipped to a sugar plantation in Louisiana along with dozens of other slaves from Maryland. They were sold by the nation’s most prominent Jesuit priests to raise money to help save the Jesuit college now known as Georgetown University.
Mr. Campbell would survive slavery and the Civil War. He would live to see freedom and the dawning of the 20th century. Like many of his contemporaries from Maryland, he would marry and have children and grandchildren. But in one respect, he was singular: His image has survived, offering us the first look at one of the 272 slaves sold to help keep Georgetown afloat.
http://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/2017/03/12/race-related?nlid=38867499
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