Juliet - From Slavery to Inspiration is a book that will make you cry and make you cheer. Freed in her former owner’s will in 1848, Juliet discovers that the old man’s son and his siblings have presented to the court an Articles of Agreement that revoked Juliet and her family’s freedom. In a court trial titled Bennett Russell and Others vs. Negroes Juliet and Others Juliet is hired out for 8 long years while the court battle raged for what seemed a lifetime to Juliet. Represented by a local attorney named Richard E. Parker, Jr., he was able to place enough doubt in the mind’s of the slave owning jurors where they could not come to a unanimous decision as to the validity of the Articles of Agreement that attempted to revoke the freedom of Juliet, her family and others. But Parker would not remain Juliet’s attorney longer than 3 years. In 1851, the presiding judge died and Parker was was appointed as the judge in the very court Juliet sought her freedom.
Parker would later be remembered as the presiding judge in the trial of John Brown in 1859. In 1856, the jury finally rendered a verdict accepting the Articles of Agreement as the last will and testament. Juliet and her entire family were sold to the highest bidder in the same year. Juliet was never heard from again, but her journey was continued by her daughter Harriet who spent her entire life with the grandson of the man who had first enslaved Juliet and then tried to free her in his will. Harriet and her two children had been purchased at the auction by Bennett Russell’s sister who knowingly or not, had purchased her own daughter in law (although interracial marriage was illegal until 1967 in Virginia) and grandchildren. From this union between a white man and a slave, until the end of the civil war, would produce a grandchild named Ella Phillips Stewart who would become the first African American woman to graduate in 1916 at the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy and become not only one of the first licensed African American women to practice pharmacy in the United States. She would go on to serve in the Eisenhower administration and serve 6 years as an educational and cultural representative of UNESCO, traveling to many parts of the world. This historical novel is based on actual events, actual persons and will entertain, enlighten and INSPIRE all who read it.