FLIPd

Season 2, Episode 2: Margaret Garner: The Mystery Behind the Murder  

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It’s the story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved African-American woman in pre-Civil War America, residing in Northern Kentucky, who was notorious — or celebrated — for killing her own daughter rather than allowing the child to be returned to slavery. She and her family escaped their plantation in January 1856 across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati, but were apprehended before they could completely secure their own freedom.

Margaret’s story is the inspiration for the Nobel Prize winning novel Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison, which was adapted into a film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey in 1998, as well as a libretto for the opera Margaret Garner in 2005.