Annie Burton

Annie L. Burton (c. 1858–?) was an African-American memoirist, whose life's story is captured in her 1909 autobiography Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days. Her date of death is uncertain.

Biography

Annie Burton was born into slavery on a plantation near Clayton, Alabama, and was liberated in childhood by the Union army. Her father was a white man from Liverpool, England, who owned a nearby plantation and died in Lewisville, Alabama, in 1875.

Moving North in 1879, she was among the earliest Black emigrants there from the South during the post-Civil War era, supporting herself in Boston and New York by working as a laundress and as a cook. In her autobiography Burton relates that the end of slavery not only signaled a time for African Americans to start a new life, but also a time to redefine their lives: "Burton's Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days details not only one woman's quest from slavery to physical freedom but also her journey from a proscribed role to the creation of own free identity."