60 Minutes - 5/15/2022: Bellingcat, Sharswood

Episode Date: May 16, 2022

On this episode of "60 Minutes," Leslie Stahl talks with the Miller family, who purchased a large house for family celebrations. Little did they know that property had a secret. Scott Pelley on the data mining operation in Europe trying to uncover and detail the war crimes in Ukraine committed by Russian forces. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Meet Tim's new Oreo Mocha Ice Caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side, or B-side, or Bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. Nearly everyone in Ukraine is a witness. This is actually the location where the woman was killed. Which is helping a data mining operation in Europe expose apparent Russian war crimes. I feel it's almost my duty that when we're faced with all this information showing terrible things that are happening, is to pull it out there.

It does involve risk, but then defending liberty, human rights, democracy involves taking risks. It's when we stop taking risks and we let the fear take hold that we see democracy die. Hey, we're going to gather in this room here mainly. The Millers are a large family that enjoy getting together. They purchased this historic house in southern Virginia near where they grew up to have a place for family celebrations.

This is an original room from the 1800s. But no one could have imagined how the history of the home and its grounds would change everything they thought they knew about their family's history. It's like a full circle, like it was meant to happen. To me, it was like it was meant to happen. This is God. This is where we're supposed to be. I'm Leslie Stahl.

I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. You've got unlimited access to

music, but time? Now that's limited. The PC Insider's World's Elite MasterCard gets you unlimited PC Optima points, free grocery delivery, and time back for what matters. Save time and earn $1,100 in average value each year. The PC Insider's World's Elite Mastercard. The card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit pcfinancial.ca for details. Value is for illustrative purposes only. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup.

Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. The war crimes in Ukraine are among the worst of the 21st century, but they are just the latest in a history of assassinations and mass murder at the hands of Russian President Vladimir Putin. We know this in large part thanks to a team of online data detectives that calls itself Bellingcat. Since 2014,

Bellingcat investigations have exposed Russia's undercover hit squads and tied Russian troops to atrocities. Suffice to say, the Russian government denies everything you're about to see in this story. But that's exactly where Bellingcat comes in. Bellingcat's founder, Elliot Higgins, has created a method of mining online data and social media to put the lie to disinformation and unmask Vladimir Putin. I feel it's almost my duty that when we're faced with all this information showing terrible things that are happening, is to pull it out there. It does involve risk, but then defending liberty, human rights, democracy involves taking risks. It's when we stop taking risks and we let the fear take hold that we see democracy die.

We can see a Russian armoured column. We met Elliot Higgins last month in London as Bellingcat was building a database of social media exposing apparent war crimes in Ukraine. Eyewitness accounts of attacks on neighborhoods, assaults on hospitals, and murders of civilians are being collected and published on Bellingcat's website for all to see. This is actually the location where the woman was killed. Nearly everyone in Ukraine is a witness with a camera.

Bellingcat is combining tens of thousands of social media posts to make them searchable by place and time. And we look at as many sources as possible and use those sources to build a picture of what happened, videos, photographs, satellite imagery. Then we look at the witness statements and the various allegations made by either side. Locations and times are corroborated with independent sources, including satellite images and Google Street View. The goal is to provide verified evidence for future criminal trials. It also means that we're collecting an archive of material that for future generations they

can go back and look at this material. I mean, it's often said that, you know, history is written by the victors, but it's being written now and it's being preserved now. Ukraine is the biggest project in Bellingcat's short career. Higgins started Bellingcat in 2014 as sort of an accidental activist. I was not someone with a professional background. I was doing this merely as a hobby. What were you doing for a living at the time? I was working for a company that housed refugees in the UK. I then worked for a company that manufactured pipes and then a company that manufactured lingerie. So I had a wide range of experience, but nothing that was directly related to conflict. On his off hours, the conflict in Syria fascinated him, especially how social media was exposing atrocities there.

You found your calling. Indeed I did. But his search for the truth began with a fairy tale. Where does the name come from? So Bellingcat comes from the name of a fable, Belling the Cat, and it's about a group of mice who are very scared of a very large cat. So they have a meeting and they decide to put a bell on the cat's neck, but then they realize that no one knows how to do it and no one is willing to volunteer to do it. So what we're teaching people

to do is bell the cat. Higgins belled his first predator in 2014 when Russia went to war in eastern Ukraine. Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was high over Ukraine on its way to Asia when a missile brought it down. 298 were killed. Everyone denied responsibility. But Higgins noticed in the hours before the shoot-down, there were many social media posts from bystanders who saw a missile launcher on a flatbed trailer traveling in eastern Ukraine.

We started discovering social media posts of people who had seen the missile launcher being transported. And we also had social media posts of people saying there's a rocket that's just been shot up from this direction. And we could actually use their social media profiles to figure out where they lived. Other posts were written by Russian soldiers homesick for family. Higgins found clues in each image, billboards, buildings, road signs, that let him fix the location and time of each post.

When he arranged all of the social media into a timeline, he could run the convoy backward to its starting point. Using all those videos, we were able to trace it all the way back to the military brigade it came from, the 53rd Air Defense Brigade. In Russia. In Russia. And we used their social media profiles, the soldiers and their family members and everyone around them to reconstruct basically their network online, which meant we could get their names, their ranks, their photographs, see who was in that convoy and who traveled to the border. So that allowed us to prove that Russia had provided the missile launcher that shot down MH17. Bellingcat published its findings and Russia imposed a new law. The Russian government passed a specific law banning soldiers from carrying mobile devices

during hostilities, which is dubbed in Russia the Bellingcat Law. Christo Grozev is executive director of Bellingcat, leading its 30 full-time researchers. His personal focus has been on Russian political assassinations. What have you learned about how Vladimir Putin operates? What we have found out is that none of these crimes could have been perpetrated without Vladimir Putin being in the know and not only aware but approving of all of these crimes. So in a nutshell, what we found out was that Putin is operating an industrial-scale assassination program on his own people.

Bellingcat's next big project, the Russian assassination program, started in 2018 after a Russian defector and his daughter living in Britain were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent. The British had passport photos and false names of two suspects, but nothing else. Grozev knew that Russia's government and commercial records are for sale on an online black market. So with the fake names, he bought the suspect's passport records. The passport numbers on the two passports were identical except for the last digit. The last digit, exactly.

So they were clearly made one after the other. Exactly. Suspicious, Kristo Grozev started data mining. Based on official records, it seemed as though both men were born at the age of 32. And there was an unusual stamp on the passport documents. There was a big black stamp on the corner of their file which said, do not provide information on this person. In case of a query, call this number. And sure enough, we called that number,

and it was the Ministry of Defense. When the Ministry of Defense answered, Grozev knew the would-be assassins were military intelligence agents. To match their faces to their true identities, he spent weeks combing yearbooks and photographs from Russian military academies. The end result was that we were able not only to identify the real identities and the affiliation

to the military intelligence, we were able to find a third and a fourth member of the same kill team that the British did not even know about. Over months, Grozev uncovered a network of Russian hitmen working throughout Europe armed with nerve agent from a government lab. He bought airline manifests and found some of the assassins' travel overlapped the campaign stops of Alexei Navalny, the top political opponent of Vladimir Putin. And we found a total of 66 overlaps, way beyond any statistical possibility for a coincidence. They'd been shadowing him for months, years.

They'd been shadowing him for four years. They started shadowing him the moment he announced his presidential aspirations in 2017, apparently being on standby for a possible assassination whenever they would get the signal. A signal came in 2020. On a campaign trip, Navalny was poisoned with that same nerve agent. He recovered in a German hospital, returned to oppose Putin,

and is now in prison. Bellingcat's investigation found assassins also tailed other Putin opponents. And we found, for example, that the team that had poisoned Navalny had tailed, at the minimum, 12 other opposition figures, three of whom had been killed, in fact, poisoned. Investigations like that are published on Bellingcat's website, which is blocked in Russia. Bellingcat is a non-profit foundation which has trained more than 4,000 journalists and war crime investigators

in its techniques of geolocation, verification, and data mining. We're headed into an entirely new era of human rights investigations and war crimes investigations more generally. Bellingcat trained Alexa Koenig's team at the University of California, Berkeley Human Rights Center. Koenig is the executive director of the center, which has used Bellingcat's techniques to expose atrocities in Myanmar and chemical attacks in Syria. They're showing the world that you don't have to be a large outfit like the New York Times

or the International Criminal Court to pull these disparate bits of information together and actually get underneath who's done what to whom and when. Still, Koenig says this new era is challenged by the fact that anyone with an Internet connection can be an investigator. The problem becomes how do you make sure they're right? That's always the risk, and I think one big concern in this space is the ethics of doing this work

and making sure that you don't get it wrong. Alexa Koenig's UC Berkeley Center recently worked with the United Nations to publish guidelines for witnesses who post evidence and for amateur investigators. Standards. Yes. Rules of evidence. Exactly. So a lot of people are being really innovative and creative about how to use a lot of digital

tools and techniques to ultimately solve these puzzles. But the problem is a lot of them are not trained as legal investigators. They're not thinking about things like chain of custody and how do you establish that something you grab from the internet hasn't been changed in transit and should actually be trusted as reliable once it reaches a court of law. So our work is hopefully designed around helping them do that in a way that maximizes that value for accountability. Ultimately, what is your hope for your Ukraine investigations? We already have been approached by the International Criminal Court. We've been approached by several prosecution authorities in Europe who want to initiate their own cases into war crimes.

And we not only hope, but we know that our database, our research now, will be used in a future, let's call it something like a Nuremberg trial. There may be no accountability for Russia in a courtroom, but the work of traditional journalists and Bellingcat's expanding database are overwhelming Putin's propaganda. You have exposed a number of Russian intelligence operations, some of which involve assassins, and I wonder if you fear for your own safety. You have to be careful about your own security. It's an extra level of paranoia.

It doesn't kind of rule my life, but you just have to be kind of hypersensitive sometimes to certain things. Why take the risk? Why you? If Russia is to sustain itself, it has to rule by fear. You can't just let that fear overtake you. If you're in a position to do something, if you have information, if you have the motivation and you have the strength to do it, you should do it. Ukraine will be the most thoroughly documented war in history.

Russia says no civilians have been harmed by its forces and scenes of atrocities are staged. But Putin's defense is a throwback to a previous century, analog denials in the age of the Digital Witness. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've

been searching for. Public Mobile, different is calling. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Just off the side of the road sat a grand white house called Sharswood,

silently holding secrets from the past, waiting for a new owner to uncover them. Sounds like the opening line of a Southern Gothic novel, but this story is about a real family and a real house, this country's history, and a man who found himself at the center of far more than he had bargained for. The man is Fred Miller, a 56-year-old Air Force veteran who was looking to buy property in his Virginia hometown for his large extended family's frequent get-togethers. He had never heard the name Sharswood, and yet this old house would lead him on a journey of discovery with surprises and revelations that seemed both impossible and inevitable all at once. These are the gentle hills of Pennsylvania County, Virginia, quiet rural farm country near the North Carolina border that once produced more tobacco than any

county in the state. Fred Miller grew up here in a close family that likes getting together regularly for birthdays, fish fries, and as his cousin Adam Miller told us, just about anything. We play games and we do like a lot of food competitions. I hear the food is mainly cake. Yes. Too many cakes. Fred's cousin Tanya Miller Pope and his sister, Deborah Coles, told us it's a big family. Fred's mother, Betty, and his aunt, Brenda, were two of 11.

How many cousins? Oh, come on. Oh, my. At least 100. At least 100. So no wonder Fred needed to find a big family. Exactly. So no wonder Fred needed to find a big house. Yes. It's a huge place. Exactly, yes. Fred lives in California, where he works as a civil engineer for the Air Force.

But he visits the family in Virginia often. One day, out of the blue, my sister called me and told me about a big house up the road for sale. This sister right here? Yeah. Karen Dixon Rexroth, Fred's baby sister, had spotted it. Me and my mom was riding past the house, and I saw the for sale sign. I said, oh, my goodness, we have to get this house. I called Fred. Fred, this house is for sale.

He's like, what house? I said, you know the house? The scary house, I call it. The scary house was less than a mile up the road from their mom's. They passed it every day as kids on their way to school. What did you know about Sharswood? Absolutely nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

No. You just knew it? It was a house. A big house. He was debating, should we put in a bid for it? I said, yes, absolutely. Let's do it. Did she twist your arm? Took all

the twisting she could do. I didn't want to buy it. But thinking his bid would be rejected anyway, he made an offer of just above the $220,000 asking price. Why did you think they weren't going to accept the offer? Well, I mean, initially to me, I thought that because I was black that they would never, surely they would never sell this house to someone that's black. So for us to be able to own this thing, I thought it would never happen

in a million years. So guess what happened? A million years. A million years. Yes, yes, absolutely. We used to always see this house out here. So in May of 2020, Fred Miller purchased the fully furnished house,

plus 10.5 acres of land, from a family called the Thompsons, who had owned it since 1917. The first time I drove up to the place, all I could do was stop at the edge of the road there and just look at it. And amazement, like, wow, this is mine. This is an original room from the 1800s. Karen says she got obsessed with the house, spending nights and weekends online researching its secrets.

A hiding spot, they say, was from the Civil War, so they would hide the valuables. A secret hiding spot. She discovered the house had been built around 1850 in the Gothic Revival style by a well-known New York architect. And she learned and told her family that its name had been Sharswood. Every day she was calling me with new information. I'm like, my goodness, okay, relax. Are you exaggerating?

No, I'm not exaggerating. But then Karen turned up something that stunned her. In the 1800s, Sharswood had been the seat of a major 1,300-acre plantation, one of the larger ones in the county. What did you think of you owning a plantation? I was a little bit, a little shocked by that, I would say, because I just wanted somewhere to have family gatherings. When I

found out that it was a plantation, and then I'm like, okay, Fred just bought a plantation. I was like, we own a plantation. It was just a feeling of just power. It was just a feeling of power. It was just a powerful feeling. It is. Powerful, but of course, plantation implies slavery. And before the Civil War, Pennsylvania County held more than 14,000 enslaved people, the state of Virginia just under 500,000.

I said, do you realize what this is? They didn't have a clue. Dexter Miller, one of Fred and Karen's many second cousins, knew something about Charswood because years ago he'd been co-workers with Bill Thompson, whose family then owned it. Bill joined us for a conversation on what used to be his childhood porch. You grew up in this house?

I did. This was my home. He inherited much of the farmland and still lives up the road. His sister inherited the house and sold it to Fred. You know, when Fred was buying the house, he did not think that the house would be sold to a black person. Why would you think that for you? Probably because, you know, we are in rural Virginia, right? Well, this is true. For years, Dexter and another second cousin, Sonia Womack Miranda, had been trying

to piece together the Miller family's origins, a notoriously difficult task for African Americans because records are hard to come by, especially before 1865. It really was a hobby. It was addictive. It was addictive. It really was. You were like private eyes. Yes. They'd been able to trace the whole Miller clan back to one woman. It's Dexter's great-grandmother.

It's my great-great-grandmother, Sarah. Sarah Miller, yes. They had found a picture of Sarah Miller. This is Sarah right here. And they'd gotten hold of her death certificate, which showed that she'd been born in Pennsylvania County in 1868, just three years after the end of the Civil War. And they found an even better resource,

one of their oldest living relatives, a beloved former schoolteacher named Marion Keys. Miss Keys, as everyone here calls her, is about to turn 90. Sarah Miller is the matriarch of the family. Yes, she was. Did you know her? Yes, I did. Well, tell us about her.

She would always be out there with a broom in her hand, and she would be waiting for us. Marion Keys remembers her great-grandmother, Sarah, as a force to be reckoned with. What she wanted you to know, you were going to know it. Was she persnickety, as they say? Yes, yes. Difficult? Stern? Very, very.

She didn't play. She didn't play. But we loved her. But that's where Miss Key's knowledge of Miller family history ended. She didn't know anything about the generations before emancipation. When you were growing up, what did you learn or hear from your parents about slavery?

Nothing. Nothing? Nothing. They did not talk about it. I don't know whether they were afraid, whether it was too miserable or painful, or they wanted to forget it. I don't know, but they did not talk to us about it at all.

And we didn't ask them questions about it. Why not? We were afraid to. We heard that again and again from members of the Miller family. Slavery wasn't mentioned at all. Was there almost a code? We don't talk about slavery, so nobody did? It was something that every Black person knew

you didn't talk about. The parents would tell you not to discuss grown people business. That's what they would tell you. The first time slavery was discussed was, I guess, in the 70s when Roots came, the movie Roots came about. That's the first time? Mm-hmm, I guess, in the 70s when Roots came, the movie Roots came about. That's the first time? When Roots was on television? Did you read about it in school?

Not much. His family also remembers Roots as pivotal. Yes. I think that's weird. That was an eye-opener. But even after Roots, you didn't go and say, what about our family? No, not at all. What held you back? I just didn't think they wanted to talk about it.

But didn't you want to know? I would love to have known. I would love to have known. Fred's purchase of Sharswood was about to give him a crash course in his hometown's slavery roots. It started with a call from two archaeologists who wanted to come do research. We're historic preservationists, and so, you know, we start from the idea that these places matter. Dennis Pogue once worked at Mount Vernon, Doug Sanford at Monticello. They asked if they could come explore Sharswood, but they weren't interested in the

ornate house designed by that famous architect. What they cared about was the dilapidated building with the tin roof past the big oak tree behind it. They suspected it had once been slave quarters. There were once hundreds of thousands of these buildings. These were one of the most common types of architecture in Virginia. Let me give you the running dimensions. But now these buildings are rare, with fewer than 1,500 believed to be still standing.

And Pogue and Sanford started a project to search for them. So one, two, three, four. Fred and Karen invited them to come investigate. They examined, measured, and searched for clues. You can see the siding is... They showed us some of what they found. These are the kind of nails that we expect to see on buildings before 1800.

Handmade, wrought nails. Handmade? You can actually see the hammer strokes on the head. Is this the original siding? These are remnants of the original siding, absolutely. Okay! They worked from noon to dusk and finally gave Karen and Fred their conclusion.

It's got a complex history, but we think part of that history, a big part of that history, was a quarter for enslaved folks. They say it's one of the best preserved they've seen. They believe it was originally built in the late 1700s as a house for a white family. That's where the original door was. And was later divided into two separate, single-room slave dwellings. Two families.

Yeah, one household here, another enslaved household over there. It just showed there was two different worlds. This front big, beautiful world here and lavish, and you go right behind the house, and it was a whole different story. It's kind of crazy for me, just to even walk around out there. Do you own that? Do you own the slave house, too? I own the slave house. I do. It's mine. Wow. Fred Miller's purchase continues to surprise his family and intrigue historians when we come

back. When Fred Miller unwittingly purchased what he now knows to be the Sharswood Plantation House, with slave quarters just behind it, he knew virtually nothing about his own family history. He'd always assumed his ancestors had been enslaved, but it felt to him like an unknowable part of a distant past. Learning about his great-grandmother Sarah Miller, whom his mother had known as a child, piqued his interest. So when he found out her house was still standing, just a few miles away from Sharswood, he asked his mother Betty Dixon to go there with him.

All right, we're going to walk down through here. Betty's grandmother, Sarah, had been the first of their ancestors to be born into freedom shortly after the Civil War. That's my father's cabin. It had no light, no electricity. Betty remembers visiting and spending the night here with her grandmother and cousins.

Whoa. What is it, one room? Sarah's house didn't look much bigger than the slave dwelling. Just a single room with a smaller one above it and no indoor plumbing. Come a long ways, huh? Sure did. Glad I didn't have to live in here. Well, you had to make it work.

You want a piece of this wallpaper to take with you? Yeah. I hope the landlord don't say nothing. Oh, Lord, there you go. Sarah Miller is buried in the cemetery of the church the Miller family still attends. I'm glad now I can actually come in and see it. But unbeknownst to this Miller family, just five miles up the road in a different church cemetery was a tombstone that also read Miller, a far older one,

with names Fred and his family had never heard of, but were about to. In Karen's search for information about Sharswood, she found a document that mentioned them. It gave the names of the original owners, who was Nathaniel Crenshaw, Miller, and also Charles Edwin Miller. Miller? Yes, Miller. Any light bulbs? Any wires connect? No, not at that point. Not at that point, it did not.

Others had suspected a connection between the two sets of Millers. Because I was telling Dexter back in 88... Bill Thompson says he had mentioned the thought to Dexter 30 years ago. What we had been taught in high school was that when they freed the slaves, they just took the last name of the person that was there, which was Miller. I just had told Dexter, Dexter, it's a good chance that your ancestors came off of this farm. He did.

He said that. So you knew that this was a plantation? I did. Well, Fred, you said you didn't know. I had no idea. Dexter, you didn't tell Fred. I did not tell Fred. I did not tell anyone.

Dexter says he'd kept it to himself because he hadn't found any way to prove it. And that's where this becomes a detective story, with the Miller cousins now on a mission to figure out whether it could be possible that their own ancestors might have been enslaved on the very property Fred now owned. The first step was figuring out who their last enslaved ancestors were. And Sarah Miller's death certificate held the answer. The names of her parents, David and Violet Miller, who would have been adults at the time of emancipation. Did you know anything about them? Not at all. Not at all.

I didn't know anything about them. We didn't. Even Marion Keys, who knew Sarah Miller, had never heard their names. Nothing. Wow. Sure didn't. I just, I want everybody to know. Enter Carice Luck Brimmer, a local historian and genealogist. Karen reached out to her to see if she could help.

What are the special challenges looking for the ancestors of African Americans? African Americans were not listed by name until the 1870 census. So before that, they were just a number. And if they were enslaved, they weren't listed at all. So really, you're just looking for any type of tips and clues that you can. She started by looking at 1860 records for Sharswood's then-owner, N.C. for Nathaniel Crenshaw Miller. There he is.

N.C. Miller, right there. Yeah, he had 58 slaves here. But with only age and gender listed... You have enslaved people 69, 44, 34, and not a single name. There was no way of knowing whether Violet and David were among them. So Carice looked up David and Violet Miller in the 1870 census, the first one after the Civil War, where they finally appeared by name.

It showed they were farmhands, that they couldn't read or write, and it listed their children, including they couldn't read or write, and it listed their children, including, as Carice showed us, a very young Sarah Miller. There's Sarah. She's one year old. One years old. And this looks like Emily. Yes. She's three. And here's Samuel. Yeah.

He's Samuel. Yeah. He's five. To Carice, that meant Samuel, Sarah's older brother, was born before emancipation. So Carice searched for him in another historical record called the Virginia Slave Birth Index, where slave owners had to list births on their property. This document. And there, under N.C. Miller's name. N.C. Right. And there's Samuel.

Was Samuel. And look at that. Oh, my God. Lists Violet as his mother. It was the genealogy equivalent of a smoking gun. So this is proof that Violet, Sarah's mother, was enslaved by N.C. Miller. Yes. And this is absolute proof.

This is absolute, definite proof. And you were able to tell Karen? That her ancestors, David and Violet, were enslaved at Sharswood. That was tough. So did you call Fred? I did. I don't think he believed me in the beginning.

I didn't believe him. So the connection suddenly is made with your family, slavery, in this house. In this house. And you own it. Once I realized that it was actually my blood that was here, it took on a whole new meaning for me.

It really saddens me sometimes when I, you know, and I'm up, a lot of times I'm up a wee hours of the night now just thinking about what happened here. As news spread through the family, there was sadness. But that's not all there was. I almost felt like I was losing my breath for a moment. It was almost like a feeling of being found. Yes. This is where I started. And as black people, we don't always know where we started.

So here we are sitting in this house. I can't believe it. I can't believe it that I'm in the plantation house. The plantation that my family was enslaved. I can't believe it, that I'm in the plantation house. Of the plantation that my family was enslaved. You're laughing as if this cannot be true. That's right, but it is. I felt, I feel complete. Wow.

I'm not half of a human being anymore. They make me whole, even if I don't know them. I felt a connection to them at Sharswood. I touched a tree. I hugged a tree. And I said, oh, my God, you was here when my ancestor was here. I wonder which ancestor of mine has touched the tree. I didn't know what to say or do. I just hugged the tree and felt like I'm home.

He shared the news with Bill Thompson, who had had that hunch all those years ago. I look at it that I've been a servant to this farm and this house my whole life. And for the Miller family to come back home to my home, our home. Our home, absolutely. It's great. It's a celebration of coming home. You've never heard anything like this. No.

Yeah. So a number of plantation properties, like Mount Vernon and Monticello, have established relations with descendants of the enslaved there. But to actually see those descendants come to own that plantation property, wow. This is God. This is where we're supposed to be.

It's like a full circle. Like, it was meant to happen. To me, it was like it're supposed to be. It's like a full circle. Like it was meant to happen to me. Like it was meant to happen. The Millers also see the hand of their ancestors in all of this. I think there had to be because I did everything in my power to make this mail. Did not make it happen. I tried to mess it up at every angle. But those ancestors had one more surprise in store.

With all the revelations, there was one question that continued to gnaw at Dexter. Where were his enslaved ancestors buried? So just weeks ago, he asked Bill. I said, Bill, there's one question that's been bothering me. Where is the slave cemetery? He said, Dexter, it's right over there. I said, right over where? He said, you see those trees over there?

So did you just go right up there then? We went right up there. The trees Bill Thompson pointed to, just beyond Fred's property, sure didn't look like a cemetery. That is, until you start to look closely. Is that one of the... That's one of them right there. Oh, my God. As you can see, this is the indention right there.

The headstone there, maybe this is the footstone on the other end. Yeah. There's always seemed like to be there's one. Yeah, absolutely. Poking up through the leaves all around us were pointed rocks, some small, some medium-sized. No names, no engraving, just plain anonymous markers of many, many lives. Wow. This is astonishing. It's kind of overwhelming, isn't it? It is. It really is. I mean, we all live in the same area. We come past this place and we would not know that our ancestors were right there beside us the entire time. Fred, if you hadn't bought that house. Right. You're right. If I hadn't bought that house, we'd never know. Never. Never. So how has all of this affected you?

It's changed me. It's definitely changed me. You ever angry? I get a little bit upset sometimes when I find out things that I should have known already. Angry at yourself? At myself and at the system, because I think that we should have known more. What about the school system? Should have known more. Family? Should have known more, absolutely. You want the story of slavery told. I want the story of slavery told.

It's important. So this will convert it from a door to a window? Yeah, yeah. Fred wants to do whatever's necessary to preserve the slave house. You know, this has been exposed for 200 years. He's in the process of setting up a non-profit to make that possible. That's important to me, too, because I know a whole lot of emphasis on it, on that big white house there. Exactly. But this right here is really near and dear to me. This is the story. This is the story. Absolutely. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. There's eight right here.

And he's been thinking about the cemetery, too. I can imagine this being someone young. We have to do something about this. Yeah, have to. And I will. I'm going to fix it. Do you think you might allow historians to come? Absolutely. Absolutely.

This place will be open to anyone who wants to learn. Anyone? Anyone can come here. But for now, Sharswood is serving the purpose Fred bought it for in the first place, gathering the Miller family together in celebration. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday.

Happy birthday to you. What do you think Violet and David would think if they could see that you own this place? Yeah, I'm hoping they would be proud of us, and I think they would be. They endured a lot. I mean, I can't even imagine what they went through. Looking down on us now,

they must be smiling at us. In the mail this week, viewers commented on last Sunday's story about the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of young people. Sharon Alfonsi's interview with 11-year-old Austin Bringer drew particular attention. I was so moved by the young man's insight, vulnerability, and bravery this evening. What a beautiful boy. Despite his depression, Austin is an astute and mature boy who, through his courageous coming forward, will instill the resolve for other young people to seek help. And there was this from a New Jersey viewer, I simply want to say thank you to Austin and all of the young people in your

story. They are saving lives by talking about their experiences. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.