By Adrienne Joy Burns in the Yale Alumni Magazine, January/February 2022
My great-great-grandmother was born in South Carolina and was an enslaved person. When I did research about her, in Charleston, South Carolina, I was able to go and see a slave market—unlike in New Haven, where you cannot see the place where Lois and Lucy Tritton were sold as enslaved people in 1825.
That was when the last sale of an enslaved person occurred in New Haven. It was on the New Haven Green. Many of us have stood at a certain bus stop at Temple and Chapel, and very close to that bus stop is the place where Lois Tritton and her daughter, Lucy, were sold and then immediately manumitted. Lucy’s emancipation paperwork reads as follows: Continue reading.