Times Regrets ‘Slave Mistress’ in Julian Bond’s Obituary |
Times Regrets ‘Slave Mistress’ in Julian Bond’s Obituary
The New York Times
2015-08-20
Margaret Sullivan, Public Editor
After Julian Bond’s death on Saturday, The Times published a lengthy and well-written obituary summing up the life and work of the civil rights champion. But many readers were bothered by a single sentence in the front-page article:
“Julian Bond’s great-grandmother Jane Bond was the slave mistress of a Kentucky farmer.”
Many readers wrote to me to protest the phrase, on the grounds that a slave, by definition, can’t be in the kind of consensual or romantic relationship that the word “mistress” suggests. One of them noted it wasn’t the first time the phrase had appeared in a Times obituary…
Read the entire article here.
Tags: Jane Bond, Julian Bond, Margaret Sullivan, New York Times, Roy Reed, The New York Times