A Miami-Dade man, 83, believes his father was among the last Americans born into slavery

Wilbur Bell, 83, believes he is a living son of slavery in America.

Family history has Bell’s father, Cornelius, born in Georgia on May 18, 1865. That was weeks after the end of the U.S. Civil War but months before the 13th Amendment abolished slavery nationwide.

Bell said the possibility of his father being born into slavery had never come up until decades after his death in 1961. Bell’s parents separated when he was 3, and he only saw his father during occasional visits. It was only after looking at his father’s obituary years later that Bell realized he was possibly only one generation removed from a family member’s enslavement.

“I had his obituary. I was looking at the dates on it,” he said. “That’s when I put it together.”

Bell’s potential direct connection to U.S. slavery remained mostly a family historical footnote until this weekend, when CNN aired a story about the lifelong Perrine resident’s quest to confirm his father’s birth in the waning days of legalized enslavement in the United States. Last month, Bell and his daughter traveled to Homerville, Georgia, for some in-person genealogical research that yielded some emotional moments but no definitive answers.

The national coverage brought accolades for Bell, a great-grandfather who already had a high profile in his South Miami-Dade community. Miami-Dade named a county park after Bell, a long-serving elected member of the Redland Community Council and a community activist, in 2021. On Tuesday, he received a county proclamation honoring him and his family.

“I’ve had a good life,” Bell said in an interview after the ceremony. “I’ve never been hungry. I’ve always had a clean place to sleep.”

A comfortable life in Perrine after a difficult start

When Bell was born, his mother was 36 and his father was 75.

Bell described his father as abusive, which led his mother to move him and his siblings from Lake City, Florida, to Perrine when he was 3. They didn’t have much money, and Bell and his brother took jobs riding a garbage truck. Bell was 10, earning $11 a week.

In Dade County’s segregated school system, Bell said he was used to getting the white school’s discarded textbooks. He said he didn’t hold a new textbook in his hand until geometry class in 10th grade.

After attending Florida A&M University in Tallahassee for two years, Bell joined the Air Force and was stationed in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.

He also got started in what would be a lifetime practice of buying real estate, building a duplex on a lot he bought in Perrine. His family lived in one side, and Bell rented out the other. In 1969, while stationed at the Homestead Air Force Base, he used his savings to launch Bell’s Short Stop in Perrine, a convenience store that started with a cigar box for a cash register and is still open 55 years later.

He ran for county mayor in 2011, appearing on the ballot as Wilbur “Short Stop” Bell. While that race didn’t work out, he’s held his seat on the Redland council since the 1990s. He helped found the Economic Development Council of South Miami-Dade, an economic-development organization, after Hurricane Andrew devastated the area in 1992.

A civics advocate, Bell recited the preamble of the U.S. Constitution from memory during an interview Tuesday and recalled visiting a high school recently and asking the students if anyone there knew it, too. One boy did, saying his father taught him the words.

“I went into my pocket, and I came up with a $50 bill and handed it to him,” Bell said. “I told him: ‘You earned it.’”

On CNN, Wilbur Bell explores his family’s history with slavery

Hours after the CNN story first aired Saturday morning, Bell received a congratulatory text from Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava. The county commissioner representing Perrine, Kionne McGhee, had Levine Cava declare June 18 “Cornelius Bell Family Day” and presented Bell with a proclamation before the board’s regular meeting started Tuesday morning.

“In our midst is a young man whose father — whose father — was born before slavery was abolished,” McGhee told the audience.

The proclamation came a day before Miami-Dade offices will close for the county’s fourth annual celebration of Juneteenth, a federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. The holiday’s roots trace back to June 19, 1865, when U.S. troops led by Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger landed on the shores of Texas and began enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln two years earlier.

A military decree, the proclamation declared enslaved people in Confederate territory as free but left in place slavery in Union states. Slavery was only fully banned once the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in December 1865 by Georgia, the last state needed to make it the law of the land.

The Emancipation Proclamation would have freed the Bell family in theory once it was issued, but the presence of Union troops would likely have been needed to actually end their enslavement, said Erin Stewart Mauldin, an associate history professor specializing in Southern history at the University of South Florida.

The end of slavery, she said, came scattershot throughout the South, even for nearby cities.

“It really depended on where you were,” she said. “Tampa was freed a year before Tallahassee was.”

Homerville sits in Clinch County in southern Georgia, about 20 miles from the Florida line. Given Union dominance throughout much of Florida and Georgia by the start of 1865, Mauldin said there was a good chance that slavery had ended in that part of the state by May of that year.

Even so, Mauldin said the historical records of Clinch County suggest slavery may have endured there later than elsewhere in Georgia in the weeks after war’s end. Records show the majority of Clinch men joined the Confederate Army and that the county took in Southerners fleeing Union-occupied territory.

With no battles fought in that area, Union troops may not have been there by May 1865 to enforce emancipation. And while Congress authorized federal offices to assist enslaved people in March of that year, there was no Freedmen’s Bureau nearby to hasten compliance with the end of slavery in Georgia, she said.

“The end of the war did not necessarily mean the beginning of freedom, especially in isolated places like Clinch County,” Mauldin wrote in an email. “The use of violence to force labor continued, as did the control of freedpeople’s movement by former enslavers and the lack of wages or other remuneration for work. It took the Constitutional Amendment to begin the process of making emancipation permanent and assured.”

Christopher Lawton, a Georgia Tech history professor, said the timing of when Bell’s father was born likely wouldn’t have mattered for the kind of upbringing he experienced in post-war Georgia. “Even as a toddler several years after the war, every single person he knew would have been through the life experience of enslavement,” Lawton said. “It would have been a childhood defined by slavery.”

At Tuesday’s ceremony, elected officials pointed to Bell’s family history as a jarring reminder of just how recently enslavement was a part of American life — at a time when Florida’s reworking of classroom instruction on slavery has led to claims that the state is minimizing the horrors of enslavement.

“History is meant to teach us,” Commission Chair Oliver Gilbert said. “But for it to teach us, we have to study it. And not just the parts that we like.”

This article was updated with additional comments from Erin Stewart Mauldin, a University of South Florida associate professor of history.