Mae Louise Miller

Mae Louise Wall Miller (born Mae Louise Wall; August 24, 19432014) was an American woman who had been kept in slavery near Gillsburg, Mississippi, and Kentwood, Louisiana, until her family achieved freedom in early 1963.

Mae's story was unearthed when she spoke to historian Antoinette Harrell, who highlighted it in the short documentary The Untold Story: Slavery in the 20th Century (2009). The story inspired the 2022 film Alice.

In 2003, Mae and all six of her siblings joined a federal class action lawsuit seeking reparations to descendants of enslaved people from several private companies with lawyer Deadria Farmer-Paellmann. Mae stated to NPR that "maybe I wasn't free, but maybe it can free somebody else. There's a lot of people out there that's really enslaved and don't know how to get out."

Childhood in Slavery

Historian Antoinette Harrell states that Miller's father Cain Wall lost his own promised farmland after he signed a contract that he could not read which indebted him to a local plantation owner. The Wall family was forced to do fieldwork and housework for several white families attending the same church on the Louisiana-Mississippi border: the Gordon family, the McDaniel family, and the Wall family, the latter of whom may have been related as descendants of the Walls' likely owner, Drury William Wall Jr., who owned 10 slaves in St. Helena, Louisiana, in 1860.

Like most peons, the Wall family was not permitted to leave the land, was illiterate, and was under the impression that "all black people were being treated like that". They were repeatedly beaten by plantation owners, often including whips or chains. Miller would get sent to the landowner's house and "raped by whatever men were present". Mae recounted that she was threatened with violence to keep this abuse secret from her father. The Wall family obtained their freedom in 1961, which is sometimes inaccurately given as 1962 or 1963. Then 18, Mae refused to do housework for another family in Kentwood, Louisiana, and ran away after the owner threatened to kill her. "I remember thinking they're just going to have to kill me today, because I'm not doing this anymore." The family suffered PTSD from their experiences, along with other serious harms to their directly affected and kin. Harrell argued that "it just isn't worth the risk" to most former peons, so "most situations of this sort go unreported". Samuel later married Diana (born c. 1852), and the couple had seven children, among them a son named John.

In December 1897, John Walls (born December 1878) married Melissa (born March 1881). The newlyweds relocated briefly to New Orleans, where John worked as a day laborer, before returning to St. Helena Parish. There, John and Melissa raised a large family while cultivating a rented farm.

By 1930, John’s son Cain Walls had married Lela Mae Holden. The 1930 census records Cain as owning the farm on which he worked; however, by the 1940 census, both the farm and the family home were listed as rented, and his reported annual income was zero dollars.