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For months McCain Library at Southern Miss became a second home of sorts for Matthew
Germenis who was tasked with researching several years of runaway slave advertisements in Mississippi
beginning in 1834. I ended up focusing on the Mississippian, which was a newspaper,
weekly newspaper, published in Jackson. And I read every issue between 1834 and 1838.
The information has been added to a large scale research project lead in part by Dr.
Douglas Chambers, titled documenting runaway slaves. A collaborative effort that includes
advertisements both here in Mississippi to the Caribbean, and will soon span the deep
south from Texas to Georgia. Wherever there was slavery and newspapers there were runaway
slave advertisements. And we are going to create the world's repository for these important
primary source materials. The research team comprised of professors and students from
Southern Miss and other universities across the south have documented three-thousand advertisements
and identified more than ten-thousand-five-hundred runaway slaves. Providing some of the most
vivid descriptions of individual slaves ever recorded. It gives us the opportunity to imagine
a flesh and blood person in this situation and how they resisted. And while the advertisements
were first and foremost aimed at capturing slaves, oftentimes with a reward attached,
Dr. Chambers says they provide historians with a wealth of information about the individually
enslaved person. These were unconscious sources, if we think of it that way, they had a very
specific purpose. Try to capture a slave that ran away, but they wind up telling us so much
about the individual and the world of slavery. The anthology will soon be available as a
researchable online resource for academic researchers, genealogists, and history buffs.
From The University of Southern Mississippi, I'm Layla Essary.