African-American Lives 2: Tina Turner

Milestones in Tina Turner's ancestry: Between 1790 and 1860, 1 million slaves are forced to move from the upper South to the deep South to create the cotton kingdom. Among them is Lucy Kimbro, Tina Turner's great, great, great grandmother, who is born in North Carolina and forced to move to Tennessee. 1805 Tina Turner's great, great, great grandmother Lucy Kimbro is born into slavery in North Carolina. In the same year, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison is born in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Garrison will advance abolition through publishing anti-slavery articles in his newspaper, "The Liberator," and forming the Anti-Slavery Society in 1832. Between 1870 and 1888, Logan Currie, Tina Turner's great, great grandfather, marries over 50 African American couples. 1866 Tina Turner's great, great grandfather Logan Currie signs a labor contract in Madison County, Tennessee, with Jesse Currie, the man that owned him during slavery. In exchange for land and the resources to cultivate it, Logan promises to grow grain and cotton. Such arrangements came to be known as sharecropping. 1889 Benjamin B. Flag, the older brother of Tina Turner's maternal great grandfather, George Flag, sells one acre of his land for a school, Flag Grove School House, in Haywood County, Tennessee. 1939 Tina Turner is born Anna Mae Bullock in Haywood, Tennessee.