that one of their relatives had gone from the cotton fields to the Pentagon,” she said. Conner was 13 when her father died in 1971. Her family lived in a close-knit Black community in Portsmouth ...

This story appeared in 'Black History In The Making,' a 16 ... We were in the American South and no one protected us. When the cotton was in the field, we couldn’t go to school.

Slavery spread from the seaboard to some of the new western territories and states as new cotton fields were planted ... This domestic slave trade devastated black families.

Between 1910 and 1970, 6.5 million blacks went North,leaving the South, the cotton fields, and sharecropping behind. By the end of World War II, much of cotton farming had been mechanized ...

"The world owes you nothing but an opportunity" was a favorite saying of Geneva Epps Mosley, her daughter Evelyn Plantillas said.