"Amanda America Dickson"(1849-1893)

Was the daughter of a slave and her owner,became one of the wealthiest African-American women in the nineteenth-century America.She was born on November 20 or 21, 1849,on the Hancock Plantation of her father,the famous white agricultural reformer David Dickson (1809-85).Her

birth was the result of the rape of her slave mother,Julia Frances Lewis Dickson when Julia was twelve.At the time,David was forty and the wealthiest planter in the county.Amanda spent her

childhood and adolescence in the house of her white grandmother and owner,Elizabeth Sholars Dickson,where she learned to read and write and play the piano-the survival skills of a young lady but not ordinarily the opportunities of a slave.According to the Dickson family oral history,David doted on Amanda,and Julia quite openly became his concubine and housekeeper.In 1865 or 1866Amanda her first white cousin,Charles Eubanks,a recently returned Civil War (1861-65) veteran.The union produced two sons:Julian Henry (1866-1937),who married Eva Walton,the daughter of Isabella and George Walton of Augusta;and Charles Green (1870-ca.1900),who married Kate Holsey,the daughter of Harriet and Bishop Lucius of Augusta.Amanda left Charles in 1870 and with her sons returned to her fathers' plantation.At that time she and her children took the last name Dickson.From 1876-1878 she left the plantation to attend the Normal School of Atlanta  University.In the winter 1885 David died,leaving the bulk of  his estate Amanda and subsequently to her children after her death.Executors appraised the estate,which include 17,00 acres of land in Hancock and Washington counties, at $ 309,000.In his will David stated that administration of his will estate was to be left to the sound judgment and unlimited discretion of Amanda without interference from any quarter,including any husband she might have.A host of David white relatives contested the will,but the superior court of Hancock County ruled in flavor of Amanda in November of 1885.The disgruntled relatives then appealed to the George Supreme Court,which upheld the lower court decision in 1887.The higher court stated that the "rights of each are controlled and governed by the same enactments or principles of law"-in other words,whatever rights and privileges belonged to a bastard white child belonged to a mixed-race child as well.Before the supreme court decision,Amanda purchased a large house at 425 Telfair Street,in the wealthiest section of the then-integrated city of Augusta.By the time the courts settled the Dickson will case,she had firmly ensconced herself in this new home and decorated it with Brussels carpets, oil paintings,a walnut dinning table and chairs,and books.While white Georgians were establishing segregation as the ruling social order in the public sphere,members of the Dickson family went about their private lives.In 1892 Amanda married Nathan Toomer.Their marriage lasted until her death,of neurasthenia,or nervous exhaustion.Shotly there after Nathan married Nina Pinchback.The son of this marriage was Jean Toomer,the author of the novel Cane (1923).