A Georgia planter left his estate to his daughter by an enslaved girl, and his white relatives lost their challenge in 1887

David Dickson was one of the eight richest planters in Hancock County. When he was 40 he raped Julia Frances Lewis, a 12-year-old girl he enslaved. Their daughter, Amanda America Dickson, was born on 20 November 1849. She was raised in the house of Dickson's mother and stayed legally enslaved until the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865. Dickson died suddenly on 18 February 1885. His will gave about 500 acres to Amanda's two sons and the entire residue to Amanda for life, "free, clear and exempt" from the control of any husband. The estate held about 17,000 acres in Hancock and Washington counties. His white heirs, 79 relatives by one historian's count, contested the will for undue influence, fraud and public policy. The probate judge upheld it on 6 July 1885, and a Hancock County jury did the same that November. On 13 June 1887 the Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed in Smith v. DuBose. It held that the Fourteenth Amendment made Black citizens equal in civil rights, so what a white woman and her children could inherit, a Black woman and her children could inherit. Amanda moved to a house at 452 Telfair Street in Augusta. She married Nathan Toomer in 1892 and died on 11 June 1893, aged 43, without a will. In 2020 a restoration of the Telfair Street house began, and in 2021 a marker there joined the Georgia Civil Rights Trail.