University of Nebraska Project Shows Slavery Lawsuit History

UNL's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities have compiled and digitized court documents from more than 500 freedom suits and published them in an online database titled "O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C., Law and Family," through a grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The project focuses on slavery in the 1820s and 1830s, said project manager Kaci Nash, when African-Americans were held as property by a wide strata of Washington society.