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-Despite our perception
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that the past is something that has passed,
the past is very much a part of the present.
It becomes a matter of convenience psychologically
for us to sort of cast certain things into the past,
trying to discard it.
The reality is that those things have
not only a direct influence,
but continue to play themselves out in the present.
- people that look like you and I
to be able to walk the streets...
-The wealth disparities that we have
and our tolerance for inequality,
our tolerance for violence...
is intimately connected to slavery
and what comes after slavery.
-Why slavery anyway?
Why does slavery come about?
It is a very long way from here to West Africa, even by plane,
so why would someone go that far to pick up boatloads of people,
millions of people, and transport them back here?
It turns out if you can get enough slave population
to produce cotton,
sugar, tobacco, other agricultural products,
and then trade them to Europe, you can make a lot of money.
These plantations were part of a system of international trade,
people coming from Western Africa,
people coming from Western Europe,
agricultural products going back there,
finished products coming back here,
and around this whole process of slavery,
you get shipping, you get banking,
you get international insurance.
There's a whole series of other industries to develop around it.
At the point of agricultural production,
you have people who are making quite a bit of money.
There are a lot of fortunes to be made.
-Florida was a very dynamic and diverse place.
It was not this Disney World, Donald Duck society,
where everything was rosy.
Florida had a history similar to Alabama and Georgia.
You had 45% of enslaved people in Florida,
and that 45% produced
90% of all the cotton in Florida by 1860.
Cotton, which made Florida the most money,
would not have been the product of choice
had it not been for the labor of enslaved persons.
They were indispensable to increasing Florida's economy.
And Florida's economy would not have grown so quickly...
had it not been for enslaved persons.
-How else are great capitals to be employed in agriculture,
in a new country, without slaves?
-The roots in the center of Florida's panhandle,
once known as Middle Florida, are not unique.
As the Southern story goes,
European explorers stumbled across the area,
conquered or expelled the indigenous people here,
and claimed the rich, fertile land as their own.
In the 1800s, wealthy planters from the Upper South
with family ties and political connections
joined the battle to conquer the indigenous populations
in an effort to dominate this new territory
known as Middle Florida.
-Their whole purpose for coming here
was to remove the indigenous people by force
and change the uses of the land
into extensive cotton cultivation.
The land becomes the property of the federal government.
Florida's a United States territory,
and so the land was surveyed and put up for sale.
From 1820 to 1860, you had what we call
the second mass migration of slaves.
The first mass migration was moved from Africa
to the Americas, particularly to the colonies.
But that second mass migration was from the Upper South...
Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina,
and even some from Georgia to the Lower South.
-In 1828, William Nuttal would forcibly march
40 of his enslaved workers from Virginia to his plantation,
El Destino, in Jefferson County.
Like many planters, Nuttal chose
to bring a disproportionate number of men.
Consequently, husbands, wives, and children
were permanently and tragically separated.
-The colonel was going on a trip to buy land
in this place called Florida.
Just before we left, the colonel sold my mother and brother.
I cried when I had to leave my mother and brother.
-Page's master taught him to read and write.
He taught Page to read and write
so that Page could work in his general store.
His mother and brother were sold on the auction block
to raise the money that the master needed
to make the trip from Richmond to Tallahassee.
The trip took about seven to eight weeks.
Whites rode in wagons, and the slaves walked.
They would stop after 20, 25 miles each day,
after which the slaves would pitch the tents
and put things ready for the evening.
They would cook,
and then, sometimes, they said although they were tired,
their owners made them entertain them by dancing and singing
and if someone could play the banjo or some other instrument.
-Another example of forced migration can be found
with Hardy Croom,
who would use proceeds wrung from the labor
of his enslaved people
to purchase 2,400 acres known today as Goodwood Plantation.
He would then forcibly march his enslaved people
for 29 straight days from North Carolina to Tallahassee.
-Tallahassee really originates in the period of enslavement
after Florida becomes a part of the United States.
Before that time, there really wasn't a Tallahassee.
Tallahassee doesn't start until 1821.
The original intent, or the intent of a lot of people
who arrived very early on
after Florida becomes a part of the United States,
the thinking, at least among many of the early arrivals,
was that Tallahassee would be the new Richmond.
It didn't quite work out that way.
This was a place different from Richmond...
Lots of mosquitoes, lots of wild animals and other things
that at least initially,
it actually made it pretty tough going.
-They found a very hostile environment.
They had to deal with mosquitoes and yellow fever
and what they call the yellow jack.
They also had to deal with an environment
that was pretty violent.
If someone infringed upon your honor
or questioned your motives or your integrity,
the first thing you'd want to do was to duel them.
That was rampant.
-Over time, the plantations did develop.
A small plantation might be 500 or 600 acres.
Some of them are 5,000 or 6,000 acres.
It was mainly the plantation system
and growing cotton and tobacco and other agricultural products
that allowed them to accumulate a great deal of wealth.
-The money to be made with slave labor would turn Leon
and the four other surrounding counties...
Jefferson, Gadsden, Jackson, and Madison...
Into the cotton belt of Florida by 1860.
The enslaved population would make up
almost 70% of Leon County.
-Many people want to come to a house like this
and they want on the front porch a woman in a hoop skirt
and a banjo being played,
and that's what they think they want to see.
And, you know, that's not what went on.
There are plantation houses
who wish to tell their stories after emancipation.
That way, they escape
having to be involved with enslavement.
Too many of these houses focus on the wealth.
I use the term the language of power,
which were the things they could put out.
Well, one of the languages of power here was the enslaved.
-By 1850, the Goodwood plantation
would have nearly 200 enslaved men,
women, and children.
For all of their labor,
a scant amount is known about these enslaved.
Little to no information is recorded about them
outside of the financial value they represented as chattel.
-We use this phrase in modern economics
where we talk about human capital,
and we mean skill.
But taken literally, the enslaved population
was a population of human capital.
-The real wealth was in enslaved people.
They had a term for enslaved people... "walking cash."
-Women generally sold less than men.
At one point, in some places,
babies might be sold by the pound.
-During the panic of 1837, the average slave was $800.
When cotton increased in price during the 1850s,
the average prime fieldworker increased from $800 to $1,500,
so it depended on the economy, much as today.
You can get a car, if the economy is bad,
cheaper than you can get a car when the economy is better.
The prices go back up.
Slave prices were the same.
-To finance his plantation operation,
Hardy Croom would continue to sell his enslaved.
In 1832, Croom would travel to Louisiana
and sell five women and three men for $4,000.
He would also sell a 10-year-old boy for $350.
He would write to his brother...
-You will see that Negroes are high here.
-The value of those people collectively exceeded
the total value of land in Leon County
in the time period that we're talking about.
-This race, so distinctly marked by nature with inferiority,
physical, moral, and mental,
has become a great class of laboring civilized people,
domesticated with the white race
and dependent on the discipline of that race
for the preservation of the civilization it has acquired.
-This house was built in the 1830s by enslaved craftsmen
who were the property of Richard Keith Call.
Very likely, the people who built this house
would have learned those trades while enslaved.
So they were typically in all the building construction
in Tallahassee at this time.
They were the property of individual people
who in the census would be listed as the copper workers
or the blacksmiths or the carpenters,
and the individuals who were listed in the census
as the carpenters are profiting
from the skills of these enslaved people.
So you have glasswork, you have carpentry work,
you have saw-mill work,
you have brick masons who are working.
There was also the process of felling old growth,
longleaf pine down near Saint Marks on the coast,
rough cutting those into things like the floor joists
that you can see in the basement,
making other cuts to get the floorboards or the trim
and then even wood workers whittling that down
into framing for the decorative elements in the house.
So it's a tremendous amount of work
that probably took, best that we can tell, at least five years,
so starting in the middle part of the 1830s
and concluding towards the end of that decade.
-Some 200 skilled enslaved Africans
contributed to Call's fortune.
Not only would they construct the grove,
but the port of Saint Marks,
the Tallahassee-Saint Marks Railroad,
the State Capitol,
and many of the plantations throughout middle Florida.
Bellevue Plantation was built with slave labor
and later purchased by Catherine and Achille Murat,
who was a nephew of Napoléon Bonaparte.
The labor and acts of indignation
forced upon the enslaved without their consent
often included sex,
as evidenced by the list of so-called mulatto offspring
serving as cooks and personal servants
on plantations.
Achille Murat himself referenced
a 15-year-old slave girl named Mary
he purchased for $500.
When Mary became pregnant by Achille through sexual assault,
she killed herself and her child.
-Another Frenchman, Marquis de Lafayette,
the famed military officer in the Revolutionary War,
also has ties to Tallahassee's early plantation life.
-Lafayette did not believe in slavery.
Lafayette owned a township,
which is now essentially the east side of Tallahassee.
It was 36 square miles.
He sent over about 90 Frenchmen, and the idea
was that these 90 free laborers would then come over
and work the land.
And, of course, he gets some money from them,
and they would outcompete the slave labor
because the idea is that
free people will work harder, faster, better.
That didn't happen.
They lasted for a very short period of time.
So he had a valuable tract of land,
but he didn't have this cheap labor force,
this forced-labor force, to work the land to make the money.
And so it didn't last very long,
and he ended up selling off huge chunks of this
rather large patch of land.
-Ironically, the sale of Lafayette's land
would allow many Tallahassee planters to expand
their enslaved populations and land holdings significantly.
-Francis Eppes, Thomas Jefferson's grandson,
is considered the founder.
He wasn't the founder.
He played a major role...
in creating what came to be Florida State University.
We know of the white benefactors.
We know of the people who donated money.
We haven't acknowledged that oftentimes,
the money that was used to build what became FSU
probably came from the labor of black bodies
and the buying and selling of black bodies.
I don't think the campus would have existed
without, you know, black labor.
White women, as well as black men and women,
you know, played a role in building this institution,
but oftentimes, we only hear of the great white man.
-Be it further enacted that if a slave shall go at large
without a written pass
from his or her owner, master, or overseer,
or shall fire hunt or shall keep a horse,
a boat, or a canoe, such a slave shall be punished
by the infliction of a number of stripes
not exceeding 100
at the discretion of any justice of the peace.
-Most of the laws that were passed during this period
were passed to govern the movement of enslaved persons
and free blacks more than anything else.
-An enslaved person, really, any black person,
had to be able to prove
that they had a right to be, you know, where they were.
If you were going to visit your spouse
or going to visit, say, a relative on another plantation
and you were stopped by a group of whites
and they ask you for your pass, you had to have a pass.
-Any white person could call upon that person for them
to prove that they were where they were supposed to be,
and if they didn't have that documentation,
they could be put into jail.
Any kind of violations of the slave codes
could result in lashings,
and literally, in Florida law, it would designate a number.
And so something as simple
as being off of the plantation without a pass
could result in severe physical punishment, violence.
-Sometimes, the owner would just take a gun out
and shoot you, and nothing would happen.
Who passed these laws, and who enforced these laws?
The very people who passed these laws
were the same slaveholders who enforced them,
and they decided whether they would enforce these laws or not.
When it boiled down to it, I read several cases.
The judge said enslaved persons were property,
much like horses and pigs, and at the end of the day,
the owner could do just about anything
he or she wanted to do with them.
-Different plantations were more or less strict about,
you know, selling people off
or maintaining relationships between spouses,
but the larger point is
the slave population never controlled that.
Somebody else controlled
whether or not your family would stay together.
Somebody else controlled
whether or not you would have your children around.
-James Page's master never... I found not one time
did he whip or have anyone else to whip a slave.
He made it very clear if slaves, in his word, "misbehaved,"
they were to be sold from the plantation,
so the threat of sale played on the psyche of many.
And many of them thought about how to approach resistance,
given the fact that they knew that if they were caught,
they could be sold.
-Families are institutions that represent continuities,
and even the emotional foundations of families
are very much a part of how we live
in the environment we find ourselves in.
Roles between the parents and children,
the interactions between husbands and wives...
Those patterns were very much set among African people,
as they are among all people.
Slavery completely disrupted that traditional practice,
from the rape of the woman to the destruction,
even the castration, of the father
to the responsibility
of providing leadership for the children
to preserve the messages of competence,
to preserve the messages of self-esteem,
to preserve the message of aspirations
for self aggrandizement.
All of those things had to be oriented away
from the natural parents,
who would teach them the love for themselves,
respect for themselves,
and self-determination to the master.
Me as husband, no longer feeling my responsibility
as a husband, as a father,
begins to build a kind of a psychological alienation
from the responsibility that goes along with that.
So you didn't want people to be independent.
You didn't want people to be self-serving.
You didn't want people to be concerned
about future generations or perpetuating who they were.
You wanted them to work as effective property,
and to a great extent,
that attitude continues to exist.
In many instances, that is perpetuated
by the economic system.
Men now, though they are not on the plantation,
they're in the prisons, and in the prisons,
they are not able to provide the kind of responsibility
and care for their families,
very much like it operated in slavery.
-You're in the Deep South.
You got the swamps, and it's a long way to Ohio.
I'm not saying that people didn't manage
to run away from Florida
and make it to the north or to Canada,
but it's difficult.
Most of the people who ran away were men.
They were probably young,
and they were also committed to dying, if need be.
-I tell you, for free blacks in middle Florida,
it was hell.
To go to another state, for example,
from Florida to Georgia, they would have to pay $200.
Many free blacks did not have $200.
That's probably equivalent today to thousands of dollars,
so you were stuck.
And it became harder
to free enslaved persons after 1830.
-One notable free person of color was George Proctor,
a builder in Tallahassee.
George Proctor would leave a lasting impression
in Tallahassee
through the buildings he constructed and sold,
along with other business relationships he cultivated.
In 1839, in order to marry his wife, Nancy,
who was an enslaved woman,
George would pay $450 of her $1,300 purchase price
and continue to make payments to secure her freedom.
Their union was fruitful, with six children,
and George's work sustained them.
But the triumphant story of the free colored Proctor family
would not survive the realities of the slave society
that was antebellum Tallahassee.
-There was a push to limit
the number of free blacks throughout Florida
because they thought that they could be instigators
encouraging enslaved persons to either fight or run away.
That was the main fear of slaveholders about free blacks.
-Financial hardships beset the area
due to a nationwide banking collapse,
but as a free colored man,
George had few to no options to escape financial ruin.
In addition to this predicament,
there is evidence of betrayal at the hands of whites,
which would ultimately result in George's wife, Nancy,
and their six children being sold into slavery.
One of those children, Bahamia,
was sold to John Finlayson of Jefferson County.
-I'll get my eyeglasses.
"State of Florida, Leon County, July 20th, A.D., 1860.
Know all men by these presents that I, Robert C. Williams,
for and in consideration of the sum of $1,050 to me
paid in hand by John Finlayson,
one certain Negro slave named Bahamia,
aged about 15 years,
and do warrant him sound in mind and body and a slave for life."
He was different from any other slave
that my granddaddy had bought.
He had been free, and he had learned to read and write
and was educated.
And the other slaves...
It was against the law to teach them to read and write,
so he was quite different.
And I'm sure my great-granddaddy,
being a smart man, used those talents.
The settlement of my great-granddaddy's estate...
I've got a list of them by name and age,
so I know exactly... and value.
It was the most distressing thing
to look at that settlement of his state.
The names of the slaves came down,
and then the names of the mules started.
And they had to make a mark
to show the difference where it was people and mules.
-Bahamia, born free, was sold into slavery in 1854,
11 years before the end of the Civil War
and nine years before the Emancipation Proclamation.
In fact, the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation,
May 20, 1865, took place at the Knott House,
a building built by Bahamia's father, George.
-My great-great-grandfather's name's Charles Rollins...
Charles Henry Rollins.
He is unusual in the sense
that he was born in 1831, 1832 in Tallahassee,
so he's an early Floridian.
His wife, Susan, is born in Georgia.
They marry about 1853, 1854,
and around that time, something unusual happens.
The person that he had been enslaved to leaves Florida
and goes back to Virginia,
and Charles Rollins begins to rent himself out.
He would be able to go from plantation
to plantation to find work,
and then he would pay a fee to the person
that he was still enslaved to.
He becomes literate
and develops a lot of connections
with the white population
that was in control of running the city,
and so one piece of land that he obtains very early on,
which the family still owns...
He gets as an exchange for his work
on the house of the Call family.
So this begins a process of wealth accumulation.
They rise up from the bottom
because they actually own a piece of land.
They're able to build a house on it.
When the Freedman's Bank opened up,
he was deposit number one.
The formerly enslaved population was now legally free,
but even that's not enough.
-They thought freedom really meant freedom.
Things may change on paper,
but in reality, things stayed the same.
-After blacks were set free with no money or anything,
the government initially talked about 40 acres and a mule,
but the government decided, based upon all the pressure
they received from former Confederates,
that this was not a good idea.
They could not have a steady workforce
if blacks had owned their own land,
so there was an effort after slavery
systematically to make sure
that blacks would not become economically independent.
When you keep people poor, they have no opportunity
in the system that we have designed,
the capitalistic system, to advance.
-They were in a very precarious situation.
So they don't own any property.
They can't read, they can't write,
they don't know where
the opportunities are in the rest of the country
because they've been enslaved on a plantation.
So they have an immediate problem.
They need food, clothing, shelter, they need a job.
-Many formerly enslaved blacks will find themselves back
on plantations working for the same people
who had enslaved them reputedly for wages,
you know, this time.
-What they know how to do is they know how to farm.
So they basically rent a piece of land from a large land owner.
In return for renting land
and in return also for living in a house
that's probably owned by the larger land owner,
they would grow a crop,
and then the larger land owner would get somewhere between
1/2 to 2/3 of the crop,
which, of course, meant that the family doing
the sharecropping would not ever really get out of debt.
-When you're a sharecropper or a tenant farmer,
you're always borrowing against your crop.
You never make enough to pay off your debts
at the end of the season,
and then you have to pledge not only your labor,
but the labor of your children and your wife
toward the next season.
So we talk about generational wealth,
we're talking about generational poverty here.
-All told, Reconstruction lasts from 1865 to 1877,
but in truth, the years of progress
are actually much shorter than that 12-year window.
-In Florida, the superintendent of education was a black man.
The secretary of state was a black man,
so there was great hope.
-This first big wave of now we can say
African-American political officials around 1868.
There's a lot of progress being made.
People are registering to vote.
Large numbers of formerly enslaved persons are in schools.
Church schools also doubled as regular schools
for people to learn how to read and write.
The church becomes this place
that it's not just religious worship.
It's a community center,
and it's also where a lot of the informal leadership is,
some of whom were people who were elites
during the period of slavery.
And then you have people who were formerly enslaved persons
who fought with the Union army,
and they become leaders in the process.
-James Page, formerly enslaved by John Parkhill,
would emerge as a preacher who supported education
and enfranchisement in every way.
The church he founded, Bethel Missionary Baptist,
remains active over a century and a half later.
-Mr. Riley's childhood began here in Leon County.
John Gilmore Riley was born on the Parkhill plantation.
He learned to read remarkably, though he was born into slavery.
This man lived 97 years.
He was secretary of the NAACP,
the first African-American principal at the first school
for blacks to provide a secondary education.
John G. Riley owned a lot of property all over Tallahassee.
I've had some younger people...
Our accountant even has said to me numerous times,
and others said, "How did these people..."
He said, "It's remarkable how these people
went through all of this oppression,
didn't have high education, some third grade, fourth grade,
but they became property owners.
They owned their own houses."
There was something about the mind set
of that earlier generation who didn't have what we had,
but that was that determination, that optimism, that aspiration,
that resilience, that fortitude that just kept them pushing
and doing all that they could to make a better life.
-The system of Jim Crow began... Again, people pick a year.
A lot of times, they'll say 1877,
when Reconstruction comes to an end.
The local white population didn't just sit back
and say, "Okay, we accept that these people are free."
You would get people who at one point in slavery,
right, they were legally enslaved,
and now there were these other economic arrangements
which had the same force of keeping people enslaved.
So you arrest people for some trumped-up charge.
You lease them out so that the local and state government
makes a profit,
and because they have a criminal record,
they can't vote.
Leon County, the African-American population
outnumbered the white population six to one.
So what do you do when you are outnumbered
and therefore, people will out-vote you?
You have to find a way of suppressing the vote.
That does not change from 1865 to 2020.
-In 1866, the Florida legislature determined
any person of color who was deemed to be wandering
or strolling about or leading an idle,
profligate, or immoral course of life
could be arrested and sentenced to 12 months of labor.
In addition, it was determined by the Florida legislature
that a felony conviction would result in
loss of voting rights for life.
The Ku Klux Klan also emerged to intimidate
and terrorize the newly freed men and women.
Unable to testify against whites in court,
black families had little to no protection from the terrors
and horrors perpetuated by the Klan.
-Social interaction meant that blacks and whites
were on equal status, and that just could not be.
-The law said that you had to be here,
you couldn't be there,
you couldn't have this job, you couldn't do that.
You had to defer to white people that you came in contact with,
if you came in contact with them at all.
-One of the enforcement mechanisms
of Jim Crow was lynching.
If you tried to become politically independent,
if you tried to become economically independent,
not only will we kill you,
but we will kill you in a very violent manner.
-It's justified in the Bible.
It was justified by scientists and anthropologists,
and even after the Civil War,
that this was an inferior race in a number of ways.
It says in the Bible
that slaves are supposed to be obedient.
Somehow, they never got out of the idea,
"Well, these people are not slaves.
They're emancipated."
-Four documented lynchings in Tallahassee.
Now, we know there were more than four, but only four
that we have records of... Pierce Taylor in 1897,
Mick Morris in 1909, and then in 1937,
Richard Hawkins and Ernest Ponder.
They were teenagers.
They were all taken out of Leon County Jail,
which was over on Gaines Street, on the edge of Cascades Park.
The same story over and over again.
A group of whites, you know, came to the jail
and met with no resistance in taking a prisoner,
and whether it happened in your community or not,
you were aware
of these incidents of violence taking place.
And again, it's fear.
It's the fear that is used to control blacks.
-So there was this pattern.
A lot of the lynchings happened to people
who, if you follow the story,
they had been successful in some way.
For instance, I think it was one of the Rollins men
who brought in the most cotton that year.
It wasn't too long after that that his barn caught on fire.
Luckily, they got the horses out and everything before it burned.
I remember very well the first electrocution
that impacted me because it was of a young man.
He was one of the Beard boys, B-E-A-R-D.
That was a large family of about eight children
that we went to school with,
and I just heard them talking about Abraham Beard
would be electrocuted that next week or whatever it was.
In my mind, it just seems like that was such a dark day,
like an overcast day,
and it ended up that the lady confessed
she did not tell the truth, that he did not assault her.
But it's too late.
-Tallahassee, when I first came here in '57...
horrible little town.
I hadn't planned to stay here
any longer than I possibly could get away with.
I wanted to go back home, which was up in New Jersey,
but the need was so great.
On Saturdays, people would come in from the country
to the office in wagons,
and they traveled from miles just to come in to see us
because there was no care for them otherwise.
We used to make house calls in those days.
People that ran the plantations contracted with us
to come out to see their workers,
which were people who were really very close
to being in in a situation of slavery,
and living conditions in those areas
was just horrendous.
And you just kind of felt defeated.
You had somebody with an illness
that you knew that back home in New Jersey,
I could take care of and the patient would be fine,
and with somebody that had no resources at all,
you could tell them what to do.
But it just was impossible for them
to follow your directions, so that became very frustrating.
It was always a kind of oasis made up of the universities,
and we all stayed in those areas.
It's only when we got outside those areas
that we got into the real militant evil kinds of Jim Crow.
-I mean, I remember my grandmother
just candidly telling me a story
about a guy getting essentially water-boarded by the Klan,
and she thought this is what was supposed to happen.
These were some uppity people
that were being put in their place.
She would refer to black folks as "servants."
I suppose that's the role that she had seen
African-American people in as servants,
and that was their place.
That was the natural order of things.
-I have a friend here who's my age
who was a child of the Confederacy.
He was raised in Mobile, Alabama.
It wasn't till he went off to university that he laughs
and said, "I didn't know the South lost the war."
"We wore uniforms, we celebrated. We had balls.
We had, you know, blah, all around the Confederacy,"
and he said, "It was when I went away to university that I went,
'Oh, my God, we lost the war.'"
You know, there's still people fighting that war.
-The civil-rights movement,
which was sparked by the kids on campus
who said, "We're just not going to take it anymore,"
went downtown and sat down and said,
"We're just going to stay right here,
eat at this fountain.
We're going to ride this bus," and so on and so forth.
It was their spark that started everything,
and it was led by the civil-rights leaders
like King and so forth and so on.
And it all started in Tallahassee from the Hill,
A&M and our our kids,
and in various university centers throughout the south.
-Others in the community would join in
with the students' efforts.
Many black churches served as meeting places,
among them Bethel Baptist,
the church founded by James Page
five years after slavery ended.
During the civil-rights movement,
Reverend C. K. Steele, the pastor of Bethel,
supported the bus boycott that would result
in the desegregation of busses in Tallahassee.
While advances were made toward civil rights,
many of the economic legacies of slavery would persist.
-The difference in the inequality
wasn't just because of differences in skills,
the differences in education, hard work,
and all of that kind of thing that we like to focus on.
You had policies in place that were systematically racist.
The effect of that is you get this huge racial difference
in wealth during slavery.
It's locked into place and increased during Jim Crow
so that by the time you get to the end of Jim Crow,
say, somewhere between 1965 and 1970,
the amount of difference in wealth is so vast...
that you will have this racial problem
locked in place for a very long time
unless you specifically deal with the wealth issue.
-The whole issue of the cumulative effect of slavery,
generations forward in terms of financial advantages,
wealth accumulation.
I mean, the variance of wealth accumulation
even today between black and white is like 10 to 1.
-Definitely in Leon County,
if you did a study of black property ownership,
one would be amazed at the acreage that blacks once owned.
-Having that land passed on one generation to the next,
it made it cheaper to acquire other kinds of wealth,
and that's part of what did not happen
for the overwhelming majority of the black population.
They didn't have that wealth to pass on
from one generation to the next.
-A lot of black families lost 30, 40, 60,
whatever acres through devious acts.
Some had tax problems, keeping up the taxes,
but then whomever's in charge can escalate those taxes
to the point that you tax me out.
Some were just blatant...
"I want your land."
My Uncle Lloyd was the last one owned the land,
and there was this white doctor.
He's trying to buy, taking cash money,
but Uncle Lloyd would say, "No, I don't want to sell my land.
I'm keeping it for my son."
Well, at 93, he took ill and was put into EMH hospital,
and the doctor went to the bedside with the paper
and had him to sign.
His wife, Aunt Lydia, at the same time
was in the nursing home behind EMH.
The doctor carried the papers there and had her to sign.
Now, we were able to get the signatures nullified
through Lawyer Parson
because he said it was illegally done.
But that's just an example.
-We are thinking about an institution,
a structure that has, in fact, passed on paper,
but in terms of its impact, it's still very much present.
-A lot of young white men walk with confidence.
They don't even think about it
because they don't have to think about it.
But I think black people, male and female, have to.
It's not necessarily tangible, but we've been conditioned,
whether we realize it or not,
that we have to behave in a certain manner.
-We know that trauma so alters the human psychology
that it actually could be transmitted from one generation
to the other,
that people continue to do things
to try to defend themselves against reexperiencing
the severity a trauma's all about.
For black people,
the depths of the hurt that occurred in slavery
are so great that it really becomes
a frightening thing to even approach it,
so for many generations,
black people didn't talk about slavery.
Today, even, it becomes a very difficult conversation
to conjure among people who could really remember.
White people will have to confront the pain
and the difficulty of the past that they want to deny.
Black people will have to look at the hurt
and the consequences of what we've done to deal with the hurt
and put that in the context, as well, of seeing
what we did in spite of the hurt.
-Today in Leon County and the surrounding area,
there is little physical evidence or information
regarding this painful shared past of enslavement.
While the names of the plantation owners
are present throughout the city
as street signs and neighborhood names,
historically, there has been little to no mention
of the 9,000 enslaved who lived and died here.
In the last few years,
there have been efforts made to include
the story of the enslaved at the few remaining plantations,
and the recent designation of Emancipation Day
as a paid holiday in Leon County
are positive steps on a 1,000-step journey.