Name Annie Burton | ||
Annie Burton's Story
Annie L. Burton (c. 1858 – ?) was an African-American memoirist, whose life's story is captured in her 1909 autobiography Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days. Her date of death is uncertain.
Contents
Biography
Annie Burton was born into slavery on a plantation near Clayton, Alabama, and was liberated in childhood by the Union army. Her father was a white man from Liverpool, England, who owned a nearby plantation and died in Lewisville, Alabama, in 1875.
Moving North in 1879, she was among the earliest Black emigrants there from the South during the post-Civil War era, supporting herself in Boston and New York by working as a laundress and as a cook. In her autobiography Burton relates that the end of slavery not only signaled a time for African Americans to start a new life, but also a time to redefine their lives: "Burton's Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days details not only one woman's quest from slavery to physical freedom but also her journey from a proscribed role to the creation of own free identity."