Chapter 1: Born Into Bondage (1861–1875)

Dinah Hawkins was born on March 10, 1861, in Danielsville, a small town nestled in Madison County, Georgia. Her birth came just weeks before the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter, marking the start of one of the most turbulent periods in American history. Dinah was born into slavery—her parents, Thomas Hawkins and Polly Newton, were enslaved on a Georgia plantation, and Dinah, like her siblings Lissa, Alice, and Thomas, began life as someone else’s property.

Though too young to remember the war itself, the circumstances of Dinah’s early life were shaped entirely by it. The Confederacy fought to maintain the very institution that denied her and her family their freedom. When President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Dinah was not yet three years old. Freedom for enslaved people in Georgia, especially in rural towns like Danielsville, would not come overnight. The Proclamation could not be enforced in many areas still under Confederate control, and it wasn’t until the war’s end in 1865 that Union forces and federal policy began to dismantle slavery in earnest.

Dinah's parents, like so many newly freed families, faced the monumental task of building a life from the ashes of bondage. The Hawkins family was officially recorded in the 1870 U.S. Census—the first national census to include African Americans as citizens rather than property. Eight-year-old Dinah appeared in the record living with her parents and siblings in Madison County. Her father, Thomas, worked as a laborer, likely on a nearby farm or plantation, while her mother Polly managed the home. Despite their legal freedom, the family’s reality remained harsh. Economic exploitation, rampant racial violence, and systemic injustice dominated the Reconstruction South.

Life in Danielsville after emancipation was a daily test of resilience. The Freedmen’s Bureau, established to help formerly enslaved people transition into free society, was underfunded and stretched thin in rural Georgia. The promise of “forty acres and a mule” never came. Instead, Black families like the Hawkinses often entered into sharecropping arrangements—a system that offered the illusion of independence but frequently left them trapped in poverty and debt. Dinah would have witnessed firsthand how little had changed in the social order, even as laws and amendments claimed otherwise.

Education opportunities for African Americans were scarce. Dinah likely received no formal schooling as a child. Her learning came from the world around her—watching her mother cook over open flames, her father work the soil, and elders recount stories of the “before times” when they had to whisper hope in the dark. She was shaped by a community that clung to faith, family, and the belief that one day their children would know something better.

At thirteen, Dinah was no longer a child by Southern standards. In the Reconstruction-era South, early marriage was common, particularly for young Black girls whose families needed the economic relief that came with joining households. On December 27, 1875, she married eighteen-year-old Wiley Strickland. Like Dinah, Wiley had been born into slavery and was raised during the upheaval of emancipation. Their marriage marked the start of a long partnership—one built not only on love, but on survival, sacrifice, and shared history.

They would begin their life together in the Georgia countryside, surrounded by cotton fields and memories of bondage. Theirs was not an easy life, but it was theirs. And from that foundation—two people born into slavery, bound together by resilience—they would raise one of the largest African American families in Clarke County, Georgia.

Chapter 2: A Teenage Bride and Sharecropper’s Wife (1875–1900)

“Marriage, Motherhood, and the Weight of the Land”

When Dinah Hawkins married Wiley J. Strickland on December 27, 1875, she was just thirteen years old. Wiley was eighteen, already seasoned by years of physical labor and the weight of responsibility that came early to young Black men in the post-Civil War South. Their union was not uncommon for the time—marriage offered stability in an unstable world, and for two children of former slaves, it was the beginning of a life built on shared determination.

They began their life together in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, where the fields stretched far and the land was hard but familiar. Like many newly freed families, the Stricklands entered into the sharecropping system. Though slavery had ended, the Southern economy quickly replaced it with a structure designed to maintain control over Black labor. Under sharecropping, Dinah and Wiley were allowed to farm a portion of a landowner’s property in exchange for a share of the crop. It was a cycle that left many Black families perpetually indebted and without a true stake in the land they worked.

By the time of the 1880 Census, Dinah was eighteen years old and already the mother of three young children—Willie, Olivia, and Wiley Jr. Her role was listed simply as “keeping house,” but the reality was far more demanding. She was the backbone of the household, managing everything from childcare and cooking to sewing, washing, preserving food, and sometimes even working the fields alongside Wiley. Life was unrelenting, and each day followed the rhythm of sunrise and harvest.

Their home would have been modest, likely a wooden cabin with no running water, no electricity, and dirt floors. Heat came from a fireplace or wood-burning stove, and water had to be drawn by hand from nearby wells or streams. Despite the hardships, their house was full of life. Dinah filled it with the voices of her children, the smell of cornbread and beans simmering on the fire, and the strength of a mother who never stopped pushing forward.

Through the 1880s and 1890s, the Strickland family continued to grow. Children came in close succession—Jones Soloman, Josephine, Professor, Alfred, Alice, Viola, Asberry, Rowena, Lorina, and Raymond. Over the years, Dinah gave birth to nineteen children. It was a legacy of love and labor, though not without sorrow. By the turn of the century, the family had already lost four of their children—each one a devastating loss that left quiet gaps in their bustling household.

For Dinah and Wiley, raising children during this time meant more than just providing food and shelter. It meant protecting them from a world that saw their Blackness as a threat. Georgia’s racial climate had grown increasingly hostile by the end of the 19th century. Jim Crow laws were being enforced with growing violence and regularity. Lynching and racial terror loomed as everyday threats for Black families—particularly those who dared to educate themselves, speak out, or seek independence.

Despite those dangers, Dinah and Wiley remained steadfast in their desire to build a future for their children. They instilled in them the values of hard work, self-respect, and the importance of learning. While Dinah and Wiley themselves had likely never been taught to read or write, they made sure their children were. Education became a quiet form of resistance—a promise that their family would not return to silence or invisibility.

As the century drew to a close, the Stricklands began to lay deeper roots in Clarke County. The decades of backbreaking labor had not brought wealth or ease, but they had brought a certain kind of dignity. In a world that often tried to erase Black families or split them apart, Dinah and Wiley had created something powerful: stability.

Together, they had weathered loss, poverty, and the harsh rules of a system designed to break them. And still, every season, they tilled the soil. Every morning, Dinah rose to begin again. Her strength was quiet but unyielding—the kind passed down from enslaved mothers to freed daughters, forged in kitchens and cotton fields, carried in the arms of the babies she raised.

Their journey was far from over, but by 1900, Dinah Strickland had already lived a life that many would have never survived.

Chapter 3: Roots in Sandy Creek (1900–1920)

“Thirteen Children, One Home”

At the turn of the twentieth century, Dinah and Wiley Strickland moved their growing family to the Sandy Creek District in Clarke County, Georgia. After decades of renting land under the crushing system of sharecropping, the Stricklands managed a major milestone—they now lived on a farm that was mortgaged, not rented. It wasn’t a full escape from debt, but it was a step toward ownership, toward something they could eventually call their own.

Dinah was thirty-nine years old in 1900, and already the mother of ten living children. Her days were long and physically exhausting. The census recorded her occupation as “farm laborer,” a designation that barely scratched the surface of her responsibilities. She cooked over open fires, washed clothes by hand, preserved food, made soap, and doctored colds and fevers with herbs and poultices passed down through generations. She also worked the fields—planting, weeding, and harvesting when needed—while nursing babies on her hip or tending to toddlers underfoot.

Wiley continued farming full-time, and together they raised their children in a world still bound by segregation, poverty, and white supremacy. But inside the walls of their modest home, there was love, structure, and ambition. Dinah held her household together with unshakable discipline and care, ensuring her children were clothed, fed, and taught to contribute. Even the youngest had duties, and every able hand—regardless of age—played a part in the survival of the family.

By 1910, they had settled on Danielsville Road in Sandy Creek, a short stretch of country roadway lined with modest farms and the homes of other Black families trying to make their way in the rural South. Dinah, now fifty, had given birth to nineteen children. At least twelve were still living, though several had already grown and moved away. Seven remained in the home, including sons and daughters who helped run the farm.

Though they still lived under the shadow of Jim Crow, the Stricklands carved out a space for themselves—a sense of order and pride that could not be legislated away. Their home was part of a vibrant Black farming community where neighbors helped one another during harvest, shared stories after church, and leaned on one another during times of grief. In a world that often sought to silence or erase them, community was survival.

Faith played a central role in Dinah’s life. The family attended the local African Methodist Episcopal Church, where they found not only spiritual refuge but a deeper sense of identity and purpose. The church was the cornerstone of the Black community in Sandy Creek. It was where children were baptized, where marriages were blessed, where the names of the dead were read aloud during Sunday services. It was also where ideas were shared—about literacy, about dignity, about freedom.

Education was one of Dinah’s quiet but determined priorities. She had never learned to read or write, and perhaps Wiley hadn’t either, but they were committed to ensuring that their children could. Every child that passed through their household attended school, if only for a few months at a time. They learned from community teachers—often barely older than their students—who worked with cast-off books in one-room buildings with dirt floors and broken windows. Still, they learned. And in doing so, they carried Dinah’s deepest hopes into the next generation.

Life in Sandy Creek during this period was hard, but it was steady. The family’s daily rhythm followed the cycles of the land: planting in spring, hoeing and praying through summer, harvesting in autumn, resting—somewhat—in the winter. Dinah preserved food through canning, dried herbs, quilted scraps into blankets, and raised her youngest children alongside her oldest grandchildren.

She also prepared her children for the world beyond the fields. She knew the time was coming when some would leave—seeking work, education, or freedom from the oppressive racial climate of the South. She didn’t stand in their way. She packed lunches, folded clean clothes, and kissed foreheads as they boarded trains to cities she had never seen, whispering silent prayers for their safety.

Between 1900 and 1920, Dinah Strickland weathered the full weight of motherhood, labor, and survival in the Jim Crow South. She bore the grief of children lost, the pride of children grown, and the endless labor of trying to keep them all fed, safe, and grounded.

What she may not have realized then was that her life was part of something much larger. She was raising a generation that would carry the family name through wars, migrations, and revolutions. A generation that would leave the soil of Georgia for the factories of Michigan and the classrooms of the North. A generation that would break cycles because of the roots she planted on a dusty road in Sandy Creek.

Chapter 4: The Journey North (1920–1930)

“From Cotton Fields to City Streets”

Sometime between 1920 and 1926, Dinah and Wiley Strickland made a life-altering decision—one that would uproot their decades of toil in rural Georgia and carry them north to Lansing, Michigan. They were no longer young. Dinah was in her sixties and Wiley not far behind. Yet, they became part of a sweeping historical movement known as the Great Migration—a mass exodus of African American families from the rural South to the urban North in search of better opportunities and safer lives.

For more than forty years, Dinah had lived within the boundaries of Georgia’s red clay farms, raising children, harvesting cotton, and surviving under Jim Crow. But by the early 1920s, the South was growing more hostile. Racial terror was rampant. Lynching, violence, and systemic disenfranchisement were not just threats—they were realities. The family had heard the horror stories: the lynching of Sam Hose in Newnan, the brutal murder of Mary Turner in Valdosta. Those memories haunted every Black family, even if they never spoke of them aloud.

At the same time, the industrial North was booming. Factories in cities like Lansing were hiring, especially with the rise of the automobile industry. Though discrimination was still present, it was not as codified or lethal as it was in the South. For their children—some already grown and moving north themselves—the promise of a steady paycheck, public education, and the chance to walk the streets without fear was enough to leave everything behind.

By 1926, Dinah and Wiley were living at 910 Ballard Street in Lansing. Their daughter, Professor Strickland, had already relocated from Chicago to Michigan, and several other children followed suit. The move north represented more than just geography. It was a declaration of hope. For Dinah, it meant starting over after decades of building a life in the soil of Georgia. For the first time, she was a city resident, far from the cotton rows and quiet country roads she had always known.

But the North had its own set of challenges. Dinah and Wiley were now elderly migrants in an unfamiliar place. They had left behind the land they once farmed, the church where they worshipped, and the neighbors who had become family. Lansing was colder, faster, and often unwelcoming to Black newcomers. Housing discrimination and job limitations followed them, even in this new place.

Then came Prohibition—a federal ban on the manufacture and sale of alcohol that created a thriving underground economy. For struggling families, especially those newly arrived and trying to stay afloat, the temptation to earn income through illegal means was strong. In 1926, Wiley was arrested for public intoxication. The following year, both he and Dinah found themselves at the center of a more serious legal matter.

In March 1927, the Lansing State Journal reported that Dinah and Wiley Strickland had been arrested for violating liquor laws. Wiley was charged with illegal possession, and Dinah was accused of selling liquor from their home. During their arraignment in municipal court, both requested formal examinations. Their bond was set at staggering amounts—$1,200 for Wiley and $1,000 for Dinah—equivalent to over $30,000 combined in today’s money.

It was a humiliating and stressful ordeal for two aging parents who had once built a reputation on hard work and moral strength. Whether they were guilty or simply swept up in the chaos of Prohibition is unclear, but what’s evident is that survival remained a constant challenge, even in the so-called land of opportunity. Economic necessity likely played a role. After all, Dinah and Wiley were responsible not only for themselves, but for helping their children and grandchildren adjust to life in a new state, in a new world.

Despite these hardships, the family persevered. In 1930, Dinah and Wiley were living at 1407 Olds Avenue in Lansing with their grandson, Rufus Young. Wiley, now well into his seventies, had found work as a laborer at a foundry—backbreaking labor for any man, especially one of his age. Rufus, still a teenager, worked as a bootblack in a shoe parlor, likely helping support the household. The house they owned was valued at $9,000 at the time—a significant sum that reflected their persistence and desire to create stability in unfamiliar territory.

Even as their bodies aged and their surroundings changed, Dinah and Wiley never lost the spirit that had carried them from Georgia’s cotton fields to the heart of Michigan’s industrial rise. They brought with them the traditions, the discipline, and the quiet dignity that had defined their lives in Sandy Creek. Their Lansing home may have looked different, but its foundation was built from the same values they had lived by for decades: faith, family, and fierce determination.

The 1920s had tested them in ways they had never anticipated. But as they entered the next decade, they did so with a lifetime of wisdom—and a legacy already growing in the voices and footsteps of their children and grandchildren.

Chapter 5: A Life of Quiet Resilience (1930–1945)

“From House Full to House Quiet”

By 1930, Dinah and Wiley Strickland had lived through slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and the trials of Prohibition. They had raised a sprawling family and made the journey from Georgia to Michigan in their later years—a move that many would have never dared. Now in their seventies, they found themselves in a slower season of life, yet still bearing the weight of responsibility.

Their home on Olds Avenue in Lansing had become a new gathering point for extended family. With so many of their children and grandchildren now living in Michigan, the Stricklands were anchors in a northern city that had begun to feel like home. Though no longer on a farm, the rhythm of their days remained purposeful. Wiley, remarkably, still worked as a laborer at a local foundry—a punishing job for a man of his age, but one he carried out with pride and endurance. Their grandson Rufus, who lived with them, helped provide for the household by shining shoes at a local parlor.

Gone were the days of crowded bedrooms filled with squirming toddlers and the smell of hot cornbread drifting from the hearth. Many of their nineteen children had grown and moved out to start families of their own. Yet the house never stayed quiet for long. There were visits from grandchildren, Sunday dinners that stretched into evenings, and family stories passed around like heirlooms. Dinah had become a matriarch in the truest sense—her hands worn from decades of labor, her spirit unshaken, her voice soft but respected.

Throughout the 1930s, the country fell into the grip of the Great Depression. Lansing was not spared. Jobs were scarce, and the cost of living strained families of all sizes. Yet Dinah and Wiley pressed on. They had lived through worse. For a couple who had once picked cotton to pay off seed debt, the economic collapse of the 1930s was just another storm to outlast.

By the time of the 1940 Census, Dinah and Wiley were living at 1211 West Maple Street in Lansing. The house was quiet now. The constant clamor of children had faded to memory, and the two of them lived alone for the first time in decades. After raising nineteen children and welcoming more than seventy-five grandchildren into the world, they now shared their final years in the comfort of each other’s presence.

Their life together spanned more than six decades. What began as a marriage between a thirteen-year-old girl and an eighteen-year-old boy in the backwoods of Georgia had grown into something monumental—a living legacy of perseverance, family, and quiet faith. Dinah and Wiley had lived through eras that changed the nation. They had survived as individuals, as parents, and as partners. And in 1945, that partnership was honored and celebrated in a way that few others ever experience.

That December, newspapers across Michigan—and even beyond—published articles commemorating Dinah and Wiley’s 70th wedding anniversary. Their story, once private and local, now reached readers across the state. The Columbus Ledger, the Herald Press, the Battle Creek Enquirer, the Ypsilanti Daily Press, and the Herald Palladium all took note of the milestone. The headlines celebrated a couple who had not only remained married for seventy years, but had done so against all odds.

The world they were born into had tried to strip them of everything—freedom, opportunity, and family. Yet there they stood, side by side, their union stronger than the systems that tried to break them. Wiley and Dinah’s love was not one of flowery letters or grand declarations. It was a love forged in hard soil and tested by fire. It was patient, enduring, and deeply rooted in the everyday acts of living, raising, and surviving.

Their anniversary was not just a personal milestone—it was a historical testament. To have lived through slavery and seen the next generation walk free. To have raised children who could read, vote, and move freely in a world that still bore the scars of injustice. To have outlived hunger, war, and displacement, and still sit beside one another in a modest home in Lansing—that was the story that resonated.

Even as their bodies slowed and their voices softened, Dinah and Wiley remained symbols of what it meant to endure with dignity. Their home had once echoed with the footsteps of thirteen children and countless grandchildren. Now it held the peace of reflection and the quiet hum of a long life well lived.

But time waits for no one. And though their love endured, the final chapter of their journey was drawing near.

Chapter 6: The Final Chapter (1946)

“A Matriarch’s Farewell”

After more than seventy years of marriage, after raising nineteen children and seeing generations grow up around her, Dinah Hawkins Strickland’s journey came to a close in the fall of 1946. She passed away on November 18 at her home in Lansing, Michigan, at the age of 85.

Her death certificate recorded the cause as cerebral thrombosis—a stroke. After a lifetime of enduring hardship, raising children, and working tirelessly to keep her family rooted, her body simply gave out. But her spirit had endured for more than eight decades, through seasons of suffering, joy, change, and history itself.

In the months before her death, Dinah had lived through one more season of recognition—the celebration of her 70th wedding anniversary with Wiley. For many couples, reaching a golden anniversary is rare. To reach seventy years together, especially for two Black southerners born into slavery, was a feat nearly unimaginable. She and Wiley had begun their life together in a world that considered their love—and their personhood—illegal and disposable. And yet, she lived long enough to be recognized in newspapers across the Midwest for the very endurance that once had no name.

Her obituary didn’t run in major headlines. There were no monuments erected, no televised eulogies. But her funeral, held at the family home in Lansing, was a deeply personal and intimate farewell—a room likely filled with children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who owed their very existence to her resilience. Friends and neighbors, old church friends from the AME congregation, and community members who knew the Stricklands as pillars of their neighborhood would have come by to pay their respects.

Dinah was laid to rest at Mount Hope Cemetery in Lansing—a serene and historic resting place in the city where she had spent her final years. Her grave may be simple in appearance, but its meaning runs deep. Beneath that soil lies a woman born into slavery who lived to see her family become homeowners, wage earners, students, veterans, voters, and professionals.

Just months after her death, Wiley joined her in rest. He died in January 1947, only weeks after Dinah passed. It was as if, after seventy years of marriage, he could not go on without her. The two who had endured so much side by side were once again united—this time in stillness, after a lifetime of movement and struggle.

Dinah’s legacy didn’t end with her burial. It lived on in every branch of her family tree—through sons and daughters who moved north and west, through grandchildren who found their way into schools, churches, factories, and offices, through great-grandchildren who would one day read about her name in census records, newspaper clippings, and history projects. Her story was one of quiet power. Of a woman who was never afforded fame, but whose life moved like a thread through the changing fabric of America.

From the plantations of Danielsville to the backroads of Clarke County, from the cotton rows to the city sidewalks of Lansing, Dinah Strickland lived a life that defied erasure. She was the living link between enslavement and emancipation, between hardship and hope.

And though the world didn’t stop the day she died, a light passed from one generation to the next.

Her story, now retold, will not be forgotten.