mamablack

Patsey, an enslaved Black woman, endured severe abuse at the hands of slave master Edwin Epps and his family.

I don't remember the moment I learned my late grandfather was Rosa Parks' paperboy, but the factoid added to the near-mythical ideation (and idolization) I had for the man — and his Blackness — as a brown girl trying to carve out a sense of self while growing up in a predominantly white region of upstate New York. My grandfather, William, was about 10 or 11 years old when he delivered the local newspaper to Parks and her husband in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1940s. There was