Slave Descendant Unites With Plantation Owner for Heartwarming Dinner 181 Years After Families Lived

It was a meeting 181 years in the making as Nkrumah Steward, a slave descendant, and Robert Adams, a plantation owner, sat down with their families to enjoy a lovely dinner on the same South Carolina property where Steward’s family was once owned.
“This was not about the past,” Steward, 44, of Canton, Michigan, told ABC News of the surreal experience. “This was not about, ‘Let’s try to fix things that we can’t ever change.’ This was about, ‘My name is Nkrumah Steward,’ and ‘My name is Robert Adams, pleasure to meet you, cousin. Let’s get to know each other.’”
The two men, one black and one white, are indeed cousins, linked by years of history that Steward has chronicled on his blog.


Courtesy of Nkrumah Steward
“Tonight my family and I were dinner guests at Wavering Place, an old plantation founded in 1768 near Hopkins, South Carolina where four generations of my grandmothers lived and worked as slaves when they were emancipated in 1865,” Steward wrote in a Facebook post that has now been shared nearly 400 times. “The reason I was there tonight was because 181 years ago, in 1835, Joel Robert Adams and my 4th great grandmother, one of his slaves, Sarah Jones Adams had a daughter, Louisa. Louisa had Octavia. Octavia had James. James had my grandfather JD. JD had my mother Linda.“And now 181 years later, after almost two centuries, my mother and father, my two sons, my wife and myself sat down in that very house and broke bread with the descendant of those who owned members of my family,” the post continued. “We are cousins by blood. And tonight we took the first steps together towards also becoming friends.”

Steward said the response to his post has been “99.9% overwhelmingly positive, but there has been some anger from both sides, from small, small, small people that don’t understand why I even went,” he explained. “They see me smiling with my cousin, and say, ‘You forgot all the things that happened on that plantation.”

Courtesy of Nkrumah Steward
However, for the two families now coming together as one, they are focused on collectively moving forward as friends.“Robert is a descendant of people who owned my family. He didn’t own anybody,” said Steward. “I am a descendant of slaves of that his family owned. I have never been a slave. This is about history. This is about family. There is nothing he can do or I can do that can change the fact that I have relatives who may have died on that plantation. This was about seeing a physical place that my relatives walked, regardless of the condition.”