Bloodied and desperate, 14-year-old Mae fled into the woods under the cover of darkness.

It wasn’t the first time one of the Walls children had run. The time before, they’d tracked down 9-year-old Annie and begged her to please come back to prevent one or all of them from being killed as punishment. They had good reason to think that’d be the case. When Mae’s father tried to run, he was nearly beaten to death in front of his family to discourage any of them from doing it again.

So when Mae determined that she wasn’t going to pick cotton or clean houses anymore, drink from the same creek where cows bathed anymore, fight the owners’ dogs for leftovers anymore, and above all, wasn’t going to endure being raped alongside her mother anymore like she had since she was 5 years old, it was her father who tearfully beat her so that their owner wouldn’t kill her instead.

And that was how Mae Walls found herself shaking in the bushes in the dead of night on the side of a country road. A lady passing on a cart noticed and rescued the Wall family from their plantation that night… only to put them right back to work in the lady’s own home. When Mae turned 18, she bravely stood up to her masters once again and her obstinance landed her whole family in homelessness… but for the very first time, it was freedom.

And it hadn’t come to the Walls family until 1962.

They were 20th century slaves.

Mistakenly signing a contract he couldn’t read had indebted her father, mother and their 7 children to white landowners. Even though this practice had been outlawed 4 years after slavery was, the Walls family had been so isolated in rural Mississippi they never knew that black people had been emancipated in the first place, let alone that a Civil Rights movement had ever existed. In fact, it wasn’t until 2001 when Mae attended a public meeting on slavery reparations that she even learned that what her family had endured was illegal all along.

From Louisiana to Florida, historian and genealogist Antoinette Harrell, dubbed “The Slavery Detective of the South,” has discovered too many stories like Mae’s in her decades long research that began when she scoured for clues about her own family’s past in historical records. “Seeing my ancestors’ perceived value written on a piece of paper changed me. It also set forth the direction of my life. It was terribly painful, but I needed to know more,” Antoinette said.

That desire to know more led other Southern black families to entrust her with the stories they knew about their pasts, and those they hoped she’d uncover. In her 25 years searching the US National Archives Archival Recovery Program, The Library of Congress, state and local records, Antoinette Harrell has uncovered more than 30,000 case records, accounts from enslaved people, now-sealed FBI files, and even letters to sitting presidents documenting slavery in the South as late as the 1970s.

Even though she lived her early life hidden away from the world, before her death in 2014, Mae Walls’s story touched millions through her appearances and interviews everywhere from ABC News to People Magazine, and talk shows to civil rights rallies.

Standing on the same property where she once suffered unspeakable abuses, Mae whispered to Antoinette, “I told you my story because I have no fear in my heart.” It’s with that same fearless spirit that Antoinette continues uncovering the slave stories of the South today “because it needs to be done.”

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