Presents the story of slave Mary Mildred Williams, whose fair-skinned appearance rendered her the poster child of the American abolitionist movement and influenced the line where white sympathy was drawn and recognized. "The riveting, little-known story of Mary Mildred Williams--a slave girl who looked "white"--whose photograph transformed the abolitionist movement. When a decades-long court battle resulted in her family's freedom in 1855, seven-year-old Mary Mildred Williams unexpectedly became the face of American slavery. Famous abolitionists Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Albion Andrew would help Mary and her family in freedom, but Senator Charles Sumner saw a monumental political opportunity. Due to generations of sexual violence, Mary's skin was so light that she "passed" as white, and this fact would make her the key to his white audience's sympathy. During his sold-out abolitionist lecture series, Sumner paraded Mary in front of rapt audiences as evidence that slavery was not bounded by race. Weaving together long-overlooked primary sources and arresting images, including the daguerreotype that turned Mary into the poster child of a movement, Jessie Morgan-Owens investigates tangled generations of sexual enslavement and the fraught politics that led Mary to Sumner. She follows Mary's story through the lives of her determined mother and grandmother to her own adulthood, parallel to the story of the antislavery movement and the eventual signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. [This book] restores Mary to her rightful place in history and uncovers a dramatic narrative of travels along the Underground Railroad, relationships tested by oppression, and the struggles of life after emancipation. The result is an expose of the thorny racial politics of the abolitionist movement and the pervasive colorism that dictated where white sympathy lay--one that sheds light on a shameful legacy that still affects us profoundly today."--Dust jacket.

Prologue: Boston, May 29, 1855 -- Bondage. Constance Cornwell, Prince William County, Virginia, 1805 -- Prudence Nelson Bell, Nelson's Plantation and Mill, 1826 -- Jesse and Albert Bell Nelson, Washington, 1847 -- Henry Williams, Boston, 1850 -- Manumission. John Albion Andrew, Boston, 1852 -- Elizabeth Williams, Prince William County, 1852 -- Evelina Bell, Washington, February 1855 -- Becoming Ida May. Mary Hayden Green Pike, Calais, Maine, November 1854 -- Julian Vannerson, Washington, February 1855 -- Richard Hildreth, Boston, March 1855 -- Charles Sumner, Washington, February 1855 -- Sensation. "A white slave from Virginia," New York, March 1855 -- The Williams family, Boston, March 7, 1855 -- "Features, skin, and hair," Boston, March 1855 -- Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Worcester, Massachusetts, March 27, 1855 -- "The antislavery enterprise," Boston, March 29, 1855 -- Private passages. Private life, Boston, October 1855 -- "The crime against Kansas," Washington, May 1856 -- Frederick Douglass, Boston, 1860 -- Prudence Bell, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1864 -- Epilogue: Hyde Park, Massachusetts, 2017.