The newspaper story called her an “old colored lady.â€
It said Ruth Cox Adams lived at 410 Second St. in Norfolk. It said she “first saw the light of day from a little Maryland cabin.â€
It said she knew John Brown, the martyr, and the abolitionists Stephen F. Foster, Samuel Bowles and Maria Baker.
And one more, Frederick Douglass, who called her his beloved adopted sister.
“Fred Douglass,†the 1894 story in the Norfolk Weekly News said, “is the last of a class of men who, twenty years before the first gun blazed above Fort Sumter, had stirred the northern heart to a realization of the terrible wrong of human slavery.â€
Adams — mother, grandmother, widow, freedom lover and former slave — died in Lincoln in 1900, her home in the last years of her long life.
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She was a seamstress and a woman of faith who championed the rights of African-Americans and was buried in an unmarked grave at Wyuka Cemetery, where her bones rested for more than a century, forgotten by history.
And then her name appeared in another Nebraska newspaper — a story in the Lincoln Journal Star about a rosewood box lined with soft green and donated to the Nebraska Historical Society.
It had been a gift to Adams from the famous abolitionist, the 2002 story said. The man who had called her Harriet, after his mother and the little sister he’d lost to the slave trade. The man who welcomed her into his home, where she lived as a free woman, reading and penning letters for his wife, Anna, and helping look after the couple’s children while Douglass traveled the world on a crusade for equality.
Douglass had sent a letter with his wooden gift in 1847, postmarked Belfast, Ireland: "My own Dear Sister Harriet, I am not unmindful of you, although I did not write to you by the last steamer. I always think of you among the beloved ones of my family. ... I shall send a beautiful work box to you which I bought in London and gave six dollars for it ..."
Years after its owner’s death, the sewing box went west with Adams' descendants, along with braided locks of hair from Douglass and his children, old letters, a Confederate dollar, a small wooden cross worn smooth.
In 2002, many of the artifacts were donated to the historical society by Alyce McWilliams Hall, a relative of Adams living in Los Angeles. A woman who knew the stories that surrounded that sewing box — taken out and shared by Adams and the women of her extended family, year after year.
“She wanted Nebraska to hold this history for her family in the hope that we would continue this tradition of educating families, communities, and the public in general on African-American history and culture,†said Abigail Anderson, who met Hall as an intern conducting research on the city’s black community of the early 1900s for the Lincoln Planning Department.
Hall would return to Lincoln at the dedication of a bronze grave marker at Wyuka in 2008, a celebration attended by generations.
In the last decade, more has been written about the friendship between Douglass and Adams — excerpts of their letters printed in newspapers, historians exploring Douglass and his commitment to the political empowerment of women in light of his kindred relationship with Adams.
A black woman who spent 30 years separated from her mother and brother, both sold into slavery. A wife who lost her husband in 1869. A mother who mourned the death of a daughter. A widow who sewed to support her two surviving children as they moved from town to town chasing work, finally landing in Nebraska in 1883.
Lincoln would be home for five years. A house in the German-Russian Bottoms. Another at 715 C St., where her preacher son-in-law helped start Christ Temple Mission Church.
When Adams died, her granddaughter shared the news with relatives: “I have learnt many beautiful lessons from her, especially one of patience. Through her four months of suffering not once did she become discouraged or impatient, nor did she ever say one cross word. ... It seems so lonesome now that we hardly know what first to take hold of.â€
Douglass had been lonesome for Adams, too, long before her death.
The pair had lost touch after her marriage and travels, but during an anti-lynching speech in Omaha, he read that story from the Norfolk paper — and sat down to write.
“I am now very glad to know that you still live and have not forgotten what we were to each other in our younger days. ... I am now 77 years old — and am beginning to feel the touch.â€
He invited her to come east and live once again with him and his family.
She gratefully declined.
“I thank you very much in deed on the kind offer you maid me to make my home under your roof as long as we both shall live ... but my dear Friend that is too much happiness for me to expect now in this life for I too am growing old ...â€
Douglass died the following year.
A famous man who had read a small-town newspaper story that called his Harriet’s declining years happy ones.
“She is tenderly cared for by her daughter and son-in-law. For fifty years she has been a member of the church, always looking cheerfully forward to the time when the Master makes the final summons for her to join the friends of years ago who devoted their earthly career to the freedom and elevation of the colored race.â€