In 1853, Henrietta Wood was a free Black woman working as a domestic servant in Cincinnati when she was kidnapped by a white man named Zebulon Ward and sold as a slave. Taken to Mississippi and then to Texas, she remained a slave through the Civil War.
Wood eventually returned to Cincinnati, and in 1870 sued Ward for $20,000 in damages and lost wages. In 1878, an all-white jury ordered Ward to pay her $2,500, possibly the largest amount ever awarded by a U.S. court for slavery restitution. That $2,500 in 1870 has the equivalent purchasing power in 2020 of close to $50,000, according to the CPI Inflation Calculator.
The money Woods got was a lot less than she wanted, but it enabled her son to buy a house in Chicago and attend law school there. “Those assets and his long career as a lawyer made a material difference for him and his descendants,” New York Times reported.
