Transcript
Into America
Uncounted Millions: Let’s Get Free
Adele Flateau: So, when you start reading all this history and how they were part of it, they were a small part of it, but in our history, it was like a big part, a big legacy of ours that we knew nothing about.
Trymaine Lee: So, without even knowing all this history, your family was being guided in some way to like --
A. Flateau: Yeah.
Lee: -- put the puzzle pieces together.
A. Flateau: Yeah. I mean it was just very, very emotional and really shocking.
Lee: I’m going to tell you a story. It’s about reparations, but I bet it’s one that you’ve never heard before.
Martin Luther King, Jr: America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check, which has come back marked “insufficient funds.“
(APPLAUSE)
Lee: For generations Black Americans have pushed for reparations.
Malcolm X: All of that slave labor that was amassed in unpaid wages, is due someone today.
Lee: An overdue payment.
Louis Farrakhan: It seems that America owes Black people a lot for what we have endured.
Lee: It’s an argument that’s been on the lips of some of our greatest leaders.
Stokely Carmichael: Are the liberals willing to share their salaries with the economically insecure Black people they so much love?
(APPLAUSE)
Lee: It’s been addressed at the local level.
Don Oliver: Then a demand was made that the church raise $80 million and turn it over to Black people. The demand came from James Forman, a militant who believes churches should pay Black people reparations for injustice.
Lee: And as a matter of national debate.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: The matter of reparations is one of making amends to say that a nation is both its credits and its debits.
Lee: Now, in 2024, perhaps a watershed moment.
Unknown: Reparations!
Crowd: Now!
Unknown: Reparations!
Crowd: Now!
Unknown: A vote by the Evanston City Council tonight, it has approved the first part of a plan to pay reparations to its Black residents --
Lee: Cities and states are taking action.
John Moroney: Racism and slavery in Boston, getting historic reconsideration.
Janelle Wang: California made history today. A state task force released its final list of proposed reparations for African Americans.
Lee: All mulling this question of what, if anything, is owed to Black Americans for slavery, Jim Crow, and the decades of racism and discrimination that came next.
Tammy Manasa: If America did not want us to demand reparations, they shouldn’t have brought us here.
Sheila Jackson Lee: Slavery is the original sin. Slavery has never received an apology.
Lee: This conversation isn’t new. It goes back to when slavery was still legal.
And now, a century and a half after the Civil War, we’re still having this discussion because America has never made amends to Black people and it’s not clear it ever will.
Mitch McConnell: Yeah, I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago, for whom none of us currently living are responsible, is a good idea.
Chuck Todd: A Pew Research poll taken in late 2021 found that by a more than two-to-one margin, Americans oppose reparations for African Americans.
Lee: The will for federal action might remain stalled, but it doesn’t have to be. The United States, despite denying restitution for Black Americans, has paid reparations in the past.
In 1946, the U.S. established the Indian Claims Commission, which later paid about $1.3 billion to several Native American tribal governments for seized land. And in 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill that gave $1.6 billion and an apology to the survivors of Japanese American incarceration during World War II. And going way, way back to 1862, as the Civil War raged and the country tore itself apart over the issue of slavery, the U.S. government paid out roughly a million dollars to white enslavers.
Yes, you heard me right.
In the middle of the Civil War nearly a year before the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862, ending slavery in the District, but also paying off D.C.‘s white enslavers. Reparations for slavery, but for white people. And that’s where our story begins.
John Flateau: So, the United States Congress passed a law to set up this commission and a mechanism so that emancipation would be processed, so that slaveholders would be compensated for their, quote, property.
Lee: This is John Flateau, a professor at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York.
J. Flateau: You had to apply, you had to fill out an application.
Lee: Now, the reason John knows so much about this history isn’t just because he is a professor. John is a direct descendant of a Black man named Gabriel Coakley, a man who was likely born enslaved, who was a prominent businessman in D.C. when the bill was actually signed. And while John was doing some research, Coakley‘s name came up somewhere unexpected.
J. Flateau: I kept searching on that surname Coakley and it just came up in the middle of the National Archives.
Lee: John was uncovering something that almost no one else knew.
So, you’re going through this documentation and then you see the name Gabriel Coakley connected to this act. What was going through your mind and what did you actually discover?
J. Flateau: What I discovered is that our great-great-great-grandfather was one of the applicants to the Emancipation Commission.
Lee: Now, I had certainly never heard this story or even considered the possibility. How did this Black man end up on this list in the first place? Who was he applying to be compensated for? And did he actually get paid? Was it possible that Gabriel Coakley, John’s ancestor, was the first Black man to ever receive reparations?
The implications are pretty stark. What could this story tell us about the ongoing fight for reparations in America, the movement we’re witnessing and wrestling with today in real time.
Kellie Carter Jackson: A Black entrepreneur in the 1860s that had several thousand dollars, the sky‘s the limit, like literally the sky is the limit.
Lee: What would it reveal about the power of legacy, repair and generational wealth, about possibilities and what could have been for Black America?
Sharlene Sinegal-DeCuir: It would‘ve been a game changer.
Lee: And all of that sent us down a rabbit hole.
Ishmael Childs: See if we can find his name --
Lee: Okay, which is --
Childs: We’re looking --
Lee: -- Gabriel Coakley.
Childs: We’re looking for Coakley.
Lee: Deep in the archives of the nation’s capital.
Are we going into the --
Childs: Oh, you’re definitely going into the depths.
Lee: To the vault.
Childs: You’re definitely going into the depths.
Lee: And around the country.
Desmond Flateau: Did grandpa ever find out any stories about what happened to his father?
Lee: To the bayous of Louisiana.
So, it’s another kind of wet, cool day in Louisiana, but I think we might have found another clue.
To the California Coast and back home again.
D. Flateau: It’s almost scary in a way, you know, to know that like things from like a hundred, 200 years ago can have such a direct influence.
Lee: What we discover was a fascinating tale of one family’s ingenuity and fortitude, determined to take what was owed to them, whether the government meant for them to have it or not.
J. Flateau: If he hadn’t done what he did 150 years ago, we might not be here right now.
Lee: I’m Trymaine Lee, host of “Into America.“ And this is “Uncounted Millions,“ a series about the centuries-long fight for Black America to be made whole and the story of an American family who showed us what could have been.
Act One: A Remarkable Man.
Before we dive into this story, maybe I should reintroduce myself. For those of you who are new to “Into America.“ I’ve been a journalist for more than 20 years in newspapers and on TV. Among other things, I’ve worked as a reporter in Trenton, Philly, and New York. I covered Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and was on the scene for the Ferguson uprisings.
Now, it’s always been important for me to tell stories about Black America and the ways in which Black people are often either left out of or misshapen by the mainstream American narratives.
I’ve had the great privilege of continuing that work for the past few years with “Into America.” But regardless of the issues I’m covering, whether it’s policing, poverty, housing insecurity, health disparities, on and on and on, just about every single one of those racial injustice stories can be traced back to the sins of slavery. And there’s this idea that I just can’t shake. That maybe things could have been different.
What if after the Civil War, the United States had actually taken the big, bold step to right its enormous wrongs?
Today’s massive racial wealth gap, inequities in education and health care and even in the quality of the air we breathe could have all been unimaginable, if only Black people would have gotten their due. So, this story of Gabriel Coakley and the possibility that a Black man somehow got compensated for slavery had my mind racing. And the first question I had to ask: who was this, man?
Are we just ringing the bell here?
Max Jacobs: I think so.
Lee: It’s a fancy bell. Look at this. Little cherubs.
I’m in Brooklyn on a fall morning, standing on the steps of one of those beautiful old brownstones with my producer, Max.
Good morning, sir.
Richard Flateau: All right, good morning.
Lee: How are you?
R. Flateau: Good.
Lee: I’m Trymaine.
R. Flateau: Okay. Pleased to meet you.
Lee: How you doing?
R. Flateau: All right.
Lee: Thanks so much for having us.
R. Flateau: Okay.
Lee: This is beautiful. And it’s in the neighborhood, so it wasn’t too far for me, so that’s a good thing.
Good morning, y‘all. How you doing?
A. Flateau: Hi. How are you?
Lee: All right. I’m Trymaine.
R. Flateau: Hi.
A. Flateau: Hi, Trymaine.
Lee: How y‘all doing?
J. Flateau: Hello there.
A. Flateau: So, is it Trymaine?
Lee: It’s Trymaine, yes.
A. Flateau: Okay.
Lee: Like Trymaine Hawkins.
J. Flateau: Recognize, in the flesh.
Lee: Yes, sir.
(LAUGHTER)
A. Flateau: Yeah.
Lee: Well, I’ve been --
J. Flateau: See you on the tube a number of times.
Lee: Yes, sir.
J. Flateau: We appreciate it. Enjoy --
Lee: The house belongs to John Flateau, but his siblings have made themselves at home.
A. Flateau: My name is Adele Marie Flateau, and I’m the three-times great-granddaughter of Gabriel and Mary Coakley.
R. Flateau: My name is Richard Antoine Flateau.
J. Flateau: John Flateau, I’m the fourth of seven children.
Lee: John Flateau is the oldest of the three. He’s a former political strategist and a professor at Medgar Evers College. Adele, close behind, is a former hospital administrator. And Richard, the baby brother, runs a real estate company just down the street. These descendants of Gabriel Coakley grew up close to where we’re all sitting now in a busy home in Bed-Stuy.
A. Flateau: And our parents had to work different shifts in order to manage such a large group of children. So, they had a good division of labor and, it was fun. I mean, you know, we did hang out a lot and we did have a lot of fights, uh, you know, but--
R. Flateau: Who pushed John down the stairs?
(LAUGHTER)
Who was that?
Lee: Uh-oh.
A. Flateau: I think that was me.
R. Flateau: Or pushed him out the window? You pushed him out the window?
A. Flateau: No, no, I didn’t push him out.
J. Flateau: No, no, I did it myself.
Lee: There are fewer sibling fights these days, but they’re still close. And today they’re excited to talk about their great-great-great-grandfather Gabriel Coakley, and all the history and lore surrounding his name.
Again, these stories abound in America, right?
A. Flateau: Yeah, yeah.
J. Flateau: Yeah.
Lee: Every step we took --
J. Flateau: Unfortunately.
Lee: -- every accumulation of wealth we get.
J. Flateau: We‘re just now --
Lee: Yeah.
J. Flateau: -- unearthing the real history.
Lee: This history is all pretty new to them. It’s a ball of yarn that they started pulling at about 15 years ago. A church down in D.C. reached out with news about their family.
A. Flateau: That’s how we originally got connected with St. Augustine Church.
Lee: Okay.
A. Flateau: Back in 2009, we went to, it was like their 150th anniversary?
J. Flateau: Yeah, 150th.
R. Flateau: Mm-hmm.
A. Flateau: And so Coakley was one of the main people. So they found us through that Coakley connection, St. Augustine’s Church.
Lee: They learned that the church was one of the most historic and the oldest Black churches in the city. And they had been co-founded by Gabriel Coakley, a community leader who had close ties to President Lincoln. They knew almost nothing about the name Coakley, and it was astounding to them that their ancestor was such a prominent figure in old D.C.
From that point on, Adele in particular, became somewhat of an ancestry sleuth, an amateur genealogist in the making. She hands me one of several packets she brought with her, the fruits of all that rabbit-holing.
This packet of discovery, it’s pretty thick here.
A. Flateau: Yeah.
Lee: You’re discovering all the --
R. Flateau: We haven’t even done the narrative yet.
A. Flateau: Yeah, yeah.
Lee: This isn’t even the -- wow.
R. Flateau: Yeah.
A. Flateau: Yeah, it’s quite amazing. And the fact that we have photos, you know, going back also, you know, on the front cover here, you see Gabriel Coakley, his wife. And then on the other side--
Lee: In the photo, Coakley has a short black and gray beard and he’s wearing a double-breasted coat and some sort of medal on his chest. There’s something just dignified about this man. There’s still a lot the family doesn’t know, but they’re digging and learning.
A. Flateau: He was born in 18 -- it’s probably 1825, 1826. We think he was probably born in District of Columbia, but we’re not sure.
Lee: What they are sure of is that from an early age, Gabriel Coakley was making moves.
J. Flateau: Gabriel was a successful business owner. He’s listed in, uh, those business directories a hundred something years ago. He either had an oyster bar, an oyster business, restaurant, business, et cetera, et cetera.
Lee: But how he actually got to start is still a mystery.
A. Flateau: Where did he get his funds from? How did he get into a business? How did he have the land, you know?
R. Flateau: How did he get emancipated?
A. Flateau: Yeah, we -- we don’t know. That’s --
R. Flateau: Yeah.
A. Flateau: -- that’s still a big mystery for us about Gabriel.
Lee: We do know Coakley was free before he reached his mid-20s. Now, if he’d been born free, he would‘ve been an outlier for the time. And if he somehow freed himself by running away, or say, paying for his own freedom, well, that would have been an incredible feat for anyone, but especially for someone as young as Coakley.
J. Flateau: He was an extraordinary, phenomenal man and accomplished in extraordinary times.
Lee: These were extraordinary times. And few know more about that moment in D.C. better than Dr. Chris Myers Asch, co-author of “Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital.”
Chris Myers Asch: In the late 1700s, this post-Revolutionary War period, you do actually see more plantation owners driven by economics because they find that their enslaved people aren’t as economically productive anymore. So, they allow enslaved people to buy their own freedom.
Lee: He gave us a few likely scenarios to help explain Coakley‘s story.
Asch: The plantation owner will make a deal with a business owner in D.C., for example. He hires them out for the season and says, okay, you can go work in the city for this guy. And you know, you can keep some of your wages. And I’ll keep most of them, but you keep some of them.
And so in this way, these hired out slaves were able to accumulate some forms of savings. Oftentimes, they did this with the knowledge of their owners and there’s kind of this agreement that eventually they would buy freedom. And this would often take, it could take 10, 20 years to save enough capital to do this.
And then, of course, you have people running away, absconding in the 19th century language. Sometimes they’re from surrounding plantations who run into the city to meld into the free Black community there. And sometimes it’s enslaved people within the city who just need to get out and start a new life elsewhere.
Lee: By the early to mid-1800s, D.C. was a unique place in America. Even though slavery was still legal, there was a sizable community of free Black people, living and working right alongside those who were still enslaved.
Asch: There is a free Black population in the city that grows and builds these institutions, schools, churches, benevolent institutions, and lay the foundation for what would eventually become, by the late 19th century, the largest, most educated, most prosperous Black community in the country.
Lee: This was the height of chattel slavery in the United States and few other places in the country would have had this extraordinary mix of free and enslaved Black populations, braided together like this. D.C. though was different. And that negritudinal line between slavery and freedom was often as thin as the skin between kin, literally.
While Coakley was a free man, the rest of his family were enslaved, and as such, considered someone else’s property. His sister, his wife, his kids, all enslaved.
Asch: We often think about slavery and freedom as being this bright line between the enslaved population, say, and the free population. But there might be a spouse who’s enslaved and a spouse who’s free. And you had free African Americans who would purchase family members out of slavery.
Lee: At just 20-something years old, Coakley did something extraordinary. He got his people free.
A. Flateau: Starting in 1850, he was able to start purchasing his family members, so well before the Emancipation Act. So, how this man in his 20s had the presence of mind to even, like, and the resources, you know, to begin this process to, you know, purchase each one of these people in order to protect them and keep the family intact, which is what he did.
Lee: The family tells me that the first order of business was to free his wife, Mary.
A. Flateau: Mary had been enslaved multiple times.
Lee: In 1850, he bought Mary’s freedom for $350.
A. Flateau: What they went through, we can’t even imagine. How do you pay somebody $350, you know, for your wife? But somehow, the family came through in some kind of way intact and able to progress, to keep going.
Lee: He wouldn’t stop with her. He also had a sister and six kids. Gabriel Coakley was a man on a mission. And he’d use every bit of calculus and cunning, ingenuity, and intelligence that he could muster to secure freedom for his people. That’s when we come back.
Act Two: Coakley Frees His People.
Like the family, I became obsessed with the story of Gabriel Coakley, which led us to D.C., where I met Dr. Lopez Matthews, the public records administrator for the District of Columbia. He’s basically the city’s head archivist.
Lopez Matthews: Welcome to the D.C. Archives.
Lee: Yeah. You know what? And this is kind of exactly where it should be, like this cobblestone. We’re in a historic alley --
Matthews: Well, turn the corner.
Lee: The D.C. Archives feels like a scrappier, more bureaucratic operation than the better-known National Archives. That one has the Declaration of Independence. But no doubt, this place has its own declarations of freedom.
Matthews: It was built in the late 1800s and then converted to the archives in the early ‘90s.
Lee: Wait, what was it back then?
Matthews: It was a horse stable.
Lee: Oh, wow. Those people would park their horses here and then --
Matthews: Yes, they would park their horses here and then go about their business throughout the District of Columbia. So a historic building for historic records --
Lee: Amazing.
Matthews: -- for now.
(LAUGHTER)
Lee: I love places like this where you can, like, smell it and feel it.
Matthews: Well, you can definitely do that.
(LAUGHTER)
Lee: There is a smell.
Matthews: Yes, there is.
Lee: Is it history?
Matthews: Well, it’s something.
(LAUGHTER)
Lee: Here we go.
Matthews: It’s all right once you get inside.
Lee: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having us.
Matthews: You see our statue of Abraham Lincoln.
Lee: This is Abe Lincoln?
Matthews: That is Abe Lincoln, a young Abraham Lincoln.
Lee: Now, I’ve never seen Abe Lincoln like this. My man doesn’t have a shirt on. He’s --
Matthews: No.
Lee: -- shoeless.
Matthews: Hey, they‘re trying to create an image. Say, you know, we nicknamed him sexy Lincoln.
Lee: Sexy Abe, look at him.
Matthews: That’s right.
Lee: Goofy, utterly ridiculous statues aside, Dr. Matthews tells me that the D.C. Archives, while technically just an archive of everyone’s business interaction with the government, is one of the richest repositories for Black D.C. history.
You just imagine whose hands these went through in this searching for things --
Matthews: Yes.
Lee: -- and looking for things and discovering things.
Matthews: Oh yeah, because these go back to 1792.
Lee: Wow.
Matthews: So, uh -- because they’re -- they started in the books, which document land record transactions in the District. So, if you’re selling parcels of land, sometimes they have enslaved people documented in these books because they were property as well. Because it does go back to the period of slavery, so.
Lee: Dr. Matthews hands us off to Ishmael Childs, a staff assistant, to see if we can find any records for Gabriel Coakley that might fill in some gaps.
We had a couple addresses for Gabriel and Mary Coakley from the 1860 census and business directories. The records were too old to search digitally and even too old to search with card catalogs.
Childs: You’re looking for way before that. So, we have to go to these, our books, our indexes, of which I pulled out a few for.
Lee: Okay.
Childs: So, we have to manually go through and see if we can find his name.
Lee: Okay, which is --
Childs: We’re looking --
Lee: -- Gabriel Coakley.
Childs: We’re looking for Coakley.
Lee: Ishmael had never heard of Gabriel Coakley, but he was intrigued.
I told him everything we knew. That a Black resident right here in D.C. gained his freedom as a young man and started some type of oyster business. And that by 1850, at just 24 or 25 years old, he had started to purchase the freedom of his family members, one at a time.
Ishmael and I went through the dusty books, page by page.
Childs: We have a Cloakey. That’s Cloakey.
Lee: Yeah, that doesn’t look -- that first L. And what’s -- there we are right there. Wait, what’s --
Childs: Look. Look at this.
Lee: That’s it.
Childs: There we go.
Lee: Is that it?
Childs: Yes.
Lee: Gabriel Coakley, boom.
Childs: Let’s see, look.
Lee: Look at that. Magic is happening.
Childs: There we go, let me find --
Lee: That’s amazing.
Childs: Let me find this book.
Lee: This far back, everything is analog. One book corresponds to another book on a shelf somewhere a couple floors away.
Childs: Yeah, let’s go with 9, NCT-9.
Lee: Can we come with you to where --
Childs: Oh, you want to come? Oh, come on. Let’s go --
Lee: Oh man. Yeah, I wanna come, man. I wanna come.
Childs: Okay, let’s go. Let’s go.
Lee: Are we going into the --
Childs: Oh, oh, you’re definitely going into the depths.
Lee: To the vault.
Childs: You’re definitely going into the depths.
Lee: So, we have to take the freight elevator to wherever we’re going. We’ve got to get in.
Childs: Oh, oh, yes. (Inaudible) it sounds off.
Lee: We pass rows and rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves with large spinning cranks at the end of each row. I mean, for real, it feels like some sort of Indiana Jones situation.
Childs: You said NCT-9?
Lee: Nine.
Childs: All right, I’m going to have to get a ladder.
I’m going to about right here. Now, if I fall, just reach your hand out. We are here.
Lee: If you take a -- if you take L, man, that’s for good cause, Gabriel Coakley.
Childs: It’s always a good cause. You said 9?
Lee: Nine.
Childs: Here you go.
Lee: That’s it.
We grabbed the book where we’d first seen his name. Then, it’s back down to the records room.
Childs: So, this might be the purchase of his --
Lee: Wait, what is though? Is that a person?
Childs: Yes. That’s who he bought. And, you know, those were also logged in as -- because they were property. So, it might be --
Lee: Right.
Childs: So let’s --
Lee: Let’s see. John, Ann M. Coakley was bought from Mr. John Larcombe.
Childs: That might be this.
Lee: And here we go, have --
Childs: This might be, this is 1857.
Lee: Flipping through the pages there was a frenzied energy. It was like sifting for gold. Nothing, nothing, then something bright and shiny.
Childs: Here you go.
Lee: Here we go.
Childs: Larcombe to Coakley.
Lee: Okay. This is bill of sale recorded 18th June 1857.
Childs: Yeah, so, that’s him buying his sister.
Lee: Right.
“Know all men by these presents that I, John Larcombe, of the City and County of Washington and District of Columbia, for and in consideration of the sum of $1 to me and hand, paid by Gabriel Coakley of said city, the receipt of which I do hereby acknowledge, have given, granted, bargained, sold, aliened, released, and confirmed; and by these presents do give, grant, bargain, sell, alien, release, and confirm unto the said Gabriel Coakley, a negro girl called Ann Mahala Coakley, the daughter of Nancy Coakley and Gabriel Stevens, together with all the right, title, interests, claim, property, possession, and demand, whatsoever of me, to have and to hold the said negro girl, and all and singular the premises above mentioned unto him the said Gabriel Coakley and his assigns forever.”
Breathtaking is the only word I can come up with to actually describe what it was like to find a tangible receipt of Gabriel Coakley buying a loved one’s freedom. But there’s another interesting detail you might’ve heard. He purchased his sister’s freedom for a dollar.
Now, here’s what makes that wild. In 1860, it would‘ve cost a human trafficker $1,000 to purchase a slave and more if you were buying that slave’s freedom, about $1,200.
So, it seems like there was some sort of major deal or discount, almost as if Gabriel wasn’t just any businessman. He was someone people wanted to do business with, someone who had influence, had connections and who could have made the seemingly impossible possible.
Childs: And I’m sure he could speak well enough to say. You know, he’s just not stepping in this saying I want my daddy’s records back. He explained to him, in a way, this is my family. You know how difficult that is to change their mind around? Larcombe had probably been a property owner or a people owner for years.
Lee: One of the addresses we asked Ishmael to track down for us is where we learned that Coakley had his oyster business. We found it in this 150-year-old newspaper ad. And it’s just a few blocks from the Potomac River.
Childs: But he was on the water, he had a great location to get oysters. He was sitting on the water, but he also saw, you know, back then, people were coming in on the water.
Lee: There were still people enslaved in the city.
Childs: Yes, that’s what I mean. They’re coming in on the water.
Lee: Right, right, right.
Childs: They’re still bringing in, you know, D.C. was kind of slow --
Lee: Mm-hmm.
Childs: -- in changing things around. He was key to a lot, I’m assuming, being down there, having his own business. I’m sure he had a lot of Blacks who wanted to work for him or did work for him, but he had a large family as well.
So he had to support the family, he had to. And he had to be a pillar in some way to that community because he probably was one of our first business owners. And I’m assuming before that, he was just pushing a cart of oysters up the street saying, you know, as they did with ice, oysters, oysters, as he pushed in and screamed.
But he did it to raise money to buy this family out and then get all the rest of his family out.
Lee: Dr. Matthews put all these in perspective.
Matthews: African Americans buying their family members was unfortunately a tactic that they had to do to keep their family together because many states started passing laws expelling free Black people. Like Illinois passed a law saying that free Black people who entered the state were subject to whipping and daily fines as long as they stayed in the state.
And so, to keep your family together, you had to purchase them.
Lee: What’s so threatening about the existence of free Black people?
Matthews: So, free Black people were threatening because they gave enslaved Black people the idea of freedom.
Lee: Mm-hmm.
Matthews: If you see someone who looks like you free, they’re like, wait. If he can be free, then I can be free. And then they start to push for their freedom and they’re no longer satisfied with their position.
Lee: The push for freedom heats up when we come back.
Act Three: What Is Owed.
Families like the Coakleys, freed on their own audacious volition, forced their freedom on an America that wasn’t just slow in recognizing African Americans as citizens, and as full human beings for that matter, but an America on the brink of war over the most basic, fundamental notions of freedom.
Yet, with precarious freedom on the horizon, pressing questions about what would be owed those who’d toiled, whose ancestors had been dragged from the bowels of slave ships and were worked, often, to death; those who helped build many of the edifices of democracy in places like Washington but had yet to stand among those mighty buildings as equals to white men. What would erecting a new freedom look like for Black Americans?
And freedom itself doesn’t equal healing, or repair even, or restitution. So, that question of reparations and making whole a nation in pieces was percolating, on the verge of boiling over.
By 1861, Gabriel Coakley had freed his entire immediate family. That same year, the Civil War would begin in an America torn between holding to its traditions of slavery and moving closer to its messy ideals of freedom. For some, the debate around abolition was about sin and morality. But for much of the country, it was a matter of dollars and cents.
Jackson: Everything about emancipation is about the economics of it. It’s about the money that is involved in it because slavery is a big business and people were not willing to liquidate their property wholesale.
Lee: Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley.
Jackson: So, emancipation is a highly contested conversation. I mean, if you think about just how polarized the country is during the Antebellum Period, there are Free-Soilers, there are what become, you know, the Republican Party, people who are staunch abolitionists, who do not want slavery to exist at all and want immediate emancipation. And then of course, there are slaveholders, you know, who will hear nothing of it.
Lee: By the end of 1860, southern states, starting with South Carolina, had begun to draft articles of secession. And by the Spring of 1861, the powder keg finally exploded.
On April 12, the South Carolina militia fired on Fort Sumter, near Charleston, marking the beginning of the Civil War. Despite revisionist claims that the Confederate states seceded over so-called state’s rights, it was about the right to buy, sell, and traffic human beings.
As stated in Mississippi‘s Declaration of Secession, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery -- the greatest material interest of the world.” And while the southern Confederate states refused to give up on their position, D.C. was also reluctant to give up slavery. At the start of the war, slavery was still legal in the nation’s capital.
Asch: The national government is -- is tearing itself apart over the issue of slavery.
Lee: Here’s history professor Dr. Chris Myers Asch again.
Asch: And so, a lot of the battles that happen on a national scale about slavery are really happening in D.C. and also about D.C. And many abolitionists said this is a moral taint on our country to have slavery in the very heart, in the symbolic heart of American democracy. This is symbolically wrong.
And so, abolitionists said, Congress, do your duty. Do your moral duty. End slavery in the District of Columbia.
Lee: With the war and the slavery debate seething, Lincoln seized the moment and came up with an idea that would forever change the shape of life in the District.
Asch: And what comes out of this jockeying is the D. C. Emancipation Act, which passes in April 16th, 1862. More than eight months before the Emancipation Proclamation, D.C. slaves are emancipated. They’re the first freed. But that emancipation bill called for a compensated emancipation. It called for compensation for slaveholders.
Lee: So, not the enslaved people but the actual enslavers got restitution.
Jackson: I had this conversation with my husband. And I was like, yeah, I’m going to be talking about, you know, compensated emancipation. And he’s like, oh, enslaved people got money, they got compensated?
And I was like, no, slaveholders got compensated.
Lee: It’s one of those jaw-dropping chapters in history often left out of our high school or college history books and rarely brought up in the contemporary conversation around reparations in America. But to hear Dr. Jackson tell it, it was a move that both politicians and enslavers managed to easily justify.
Jackson: People thought about, well, how do we compensate slaveholders for their lost property, for their lost wages? Because enslaved people were capital, they were like stocks. If you were low on cash, you sold an enslaved person.
And they had a precedent for this because when the U.K., when Great Britain frees or emancipate its enslaved population, they compensated slaveholders GBP 20 million.
Lee: By 1862, America was ready to do the same, thanks to the D.C. Compensated Emancipation Act.
Asch: Congress had allocated a million dollars, hundreds of millions in today’s money, to compensate up to $300 per slave because there were about 3,100 enslaved people in the District of Columbia at the time. And so, slave owners would go to the commission and file a claim for compensation.
Lee: This sounds a lot like reparations to me. Is this --
Jackson: It is reparations.
Lee: Is this reparations?
Asch: It’s reparations, absolutely. It’s reparations for slave owners, for the people who owned enslaved people.
Lee: Was this as -- this play as outlandish as it does now? Hearing that sounds crazy to me, and I’m sure to folks listening. But like, was that crazy then?
Asch: It does sound crazy. And to people like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens and some of the radical Republicans, yes, it was. But they were always a small minority, even within the Republican Party.
And so more moderate leaders, Abraham Lincoln among them, they very much believed in compensation. They thought this would ease the transition and that it would help slave owners resign themselves to the fact that that emancipation was going to happen.
Lee: While Washington was part of the Union, slaveholders in the District still held a lot of power.
Asch: Congress wanted to win them over. Lincoln wanted to win them over. He had this idea that white people in the South wanted to end slavery if they could make it economically worthwhile. And so, compensation was a gesture in that direction.
Lee: Nearly 1,000 white enslavers were compensated from the money that Congress had allocated. A report in “The Washington Post” estimated that the payout would translate to more than $29 million today.
But there’s another way to look at it. A political analysis showed that if you calculate the white reparations money as a portion of federal spending, that $1 million dollars from Congress would actually be valued at even more today.
Let’s put it this way. That million dollars was 0.2 percent of all government spending in 1862. If you look at the U.S. budget from last year, which was over $6 trillion, 0.2 percent of that budget comes out to over $12 billion, $12 billion, with a huge, big capital B.
What would Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, support for Black people emerging on the other side of bondage?
Jackson: So, people see emancipation sort of as a first step. But the second step is, okay, so what happens to Black people once freedom comes? Do they stay here? Do they go away? Where are they going to live? Where are they going to work?
And so, there are a lot of schemes, experiments created to sort of address this question.
Lee: The enduring idea from the Civil War era that we tend to hold onto today is the failed promise of “40 acres and a mule“ introduced by Union General Sherman in 1865, in the waning days of the war. But before that, there was another controversial proposal: send Black people back to Africa.
Asch: So, if you wanted to leave the country, Congress would support you and provide funding.
Lee: The Compensation Act actually set aside $100,000 for Black people, not for reparations but for removal.
Jackson: Enslaved people who were freed were given the option to get $100, but that $100 was only given if they agreed to leave the United States.
So, can you imagine that? You’ll get money, but you can’t stay here. You’ll get money, but how about you consider going to Liberia, or the U.K., or Canada? We don’t know what to do with Black people if they stay here.
Lee: President Lincoln was one of colonization’s loudest supporters.
Asch: But the vast majority of African Americans, free African Americans said, no, this is our country. We have -- our blood and sweat and tears are in the soil of this country. We deserve our freedom right here where we were born. So they resist the colonization movement pretty strongly.
Jackson: And it’s people like, you know, Black abolitionists, people like Frederick Douglass were like, no, we built this country. This is our home. We’re not going anywhere. So, how about we work on equality.
Lee: As Douglass himself says, there is but one destiny, it seems to me, left for us, and that is to make ourselves and be made by others a part of the American people in every sense of the word. Unification for us is life: separation is death.
Jackson: When we think about the physical and emotional ramifications, the trauma of being enslaved and now being sort of set free, there’s a real reckoning with what do I do with this? What protections do I have? What recourse can I take? And it’s a major question.
You’re still in this quasi position legally of trying to define your own personhood, when you are no longer enslaved but you are still not yet American.
And I think that is the struggle that all Black people deal with up until this present day. No, we’re no longer slaves. But what applies to us? What does that mean? Is there a dollar amount? Is there a political protection? Is there even an emotional apology, right? Is there sort of, like, even the performance of an apology is not there. So, you know, a lot of Black people are left sort of questioning what all of this means for them.
Lee: For people like Gabriel Coakley, it meant taking every opportunity available to snatch what security and justice he could for his family, even if it wasn’t meant for him.
Asch: When the D.C. Emancipation Act is passed and word comes out that folks can get compensated for their, quote/unquote, property, well, Gabriel Coakley and others say, well, wait a minute. I can do this.
Lee: Maybe reparations aren’t always something given, but something that’s taken.
Next time on “Uncounted Millions.” How Gabriel Coakley used the white man’s law to wrestle away full economic freedom for his family, even those not yet born.
J. Flateau: If you follow our family’s trajectory, our predecessors clearly appreciated that they were given a running start.
Lee: In some ways, do you consider the compensation you got to be a form of reparations for what at --
J. Flateau: Absolutely.
Lee: -- least his family had been through?
J. Flateau: Absolutely, unequivocally.
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If you love the show and are excited for this series, help spread the word. You can do that by rating and reviewing “Into America“ on Apple Podcast, or wherever you’re listening right now.
“Into America“ is produced by Max Jacobs. Our Associate Producer is Janmaris Perez. Catherine Anderson and Bob Mallory are the sound engineers. Bryson Barnes is the Head of Audio Production. Original music is by Hannis Brown.
Thanks to Claire Tighe for her recording help on episode one of this series. Aisha Turner is the Executive Producer of MSNBC Audio. And I’m Trymaine Lee. See you next Thursday for more of “Uncounted Millions.”