Morning Joe - BONUS: Ep. 1 of Into America presents: Uncounted Millions

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

On Into America presents: Uncounted Millions: The Power of Reparations, award-winning MSNBC correspondent Trymaine Lee dives into one of today’s most pressing debates: reparations. Months ago, Trymaine discovered the little-known story of Gabriel Coakley and it blew his mind. In the midst of the Civil War, Coakley was among a handful of Black people who found a way to get compensated for slavery by the US government. On Uncounted Millions, Trymaine talks to Coakley’s descendants about how reparations forever changed their family’s trajectory. And as more cities and states consider the issue at a policy level, he imagines how reparations might shape the whole of Black America.  Listen to the first episode now. And follow the show: https://link.chtbl.com/iapum_fdlw

Hey everyone, it's Tremaine Lee, MSNBC correspondent and host of the podcast Into America. This Black History Month, Into America is presenting a special series, Uncounted Millions, The Power of Reparations. I'm exploring the untold story of one of the only Black Americans ever compensated for slavery. I talk to his descendants and discuss how reparations forever changed their family's trajectory. And we imagine a reality where reparations are paid to the rest of Black America. Stay right here and listen to the first episode and search for Into America

wherever you're listening and follow to get the whole series. 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 so without even knowing all this history your family was being guided in some way to put the puzzle pieces together. Yeah. I mean, it was just very, very emotional and really shocking. I'm going to tell you a story. It's about reparations, but I bet it's one that you've never heard before. America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.

For generations, Black Americans have pushed for reparations. All of that slave labor that was amassed in unpaid wages is due someone today. An overdue payment. It seems that America owes Black people a lot for what we have endured. An overdue payment. It's an argument that's been on the lips of some of our greatest leaders. It's been addressed at the local level, Any 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. and as a matter of national debate. The matter of reparations is one of making amends to say that a nation is both its credits and its debits. Now, in 2024, perhaps a watershed moment. Reparations? No! Reparations? No!

Voted by the Evanston City Council tonight, it has approved the first part of a plan to pay reparations to its Black residents. Cities and states are taking action. Racism and slavery in Boston getting historic reconsideration. California made history today. A state task force released its final list of proposed reparations for African-Americans.

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. If America did not want us to demand reparations, they shouldn't have brought us here. Slavery is the original sin. Slavery has never received an apology. 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 even with the heightened interest we're seeing around the country, it's not clear it ever will. 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. A Pew Research poll taken in late 2021 found that by a more than two to one margin, Americans oppose reparations for African-Americans. 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. 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.

This is John Flatow, a professor at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York. You had to apply. You had to fill out an application. Now, the reason John knows so much about this history isn't just because he's 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. I kept searching on that surname, Coakley, and it just came up in the middle of the National Archives. 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? What I discovered is that our great, great, great grandfather was one of the applicants to the Emancipation Commission. 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. A Black entrepreneur in the 1860s that had several thousand dollars. The sky's the limit. Like literally the sky's the limit. What would it reveal about the power of legacy, repair and generational wealth, about possibilities and what could have been for black America?

It would have been a game changer. And all of that sent us down a rabbit hole. See if we can find his name. Okay, which is Gabriel Coakley. We're looking for Coakley. Deep in the archives of the nation's capital. Are we going into the... Oh, you're definitely going into the depths.

You're definitely going into the depths. And around the country. Did Grandpa ever find out any stories about what happened to his father? 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. It's almost scary in a way, you know, to know that like things from like 100, 200 years ago could have such a direct influence. 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. If he hadn't done what he did 150 years ago, we might not be here right now. I'm Tremaine 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? He's ringing the bell here. I think so. He'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. How are you? Good. I'm by Tremaine. Okay. Pleased to meet you.

How you doing? All right. Thanks so much for having us. 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?

Hi, how are you? I'm right on my Tremaine. Hi, Tremaine. How y'all doing? Hello there. So is it Tremaine? It's Tremaine, yep. Okay.

Like Tremaine Hawkins. Recognized in the flesh. Yes, sir. Yeah. I've seen you on the tube a number of times. Yes, sir. The house belongs to John Flatow, but his siblings have made themselves at home. My name is Adele Marie Flatow, and I'm the three-times-great-granddaughter of Gabrielle and Mary Coakley.

My name is Richard Antoine Flatow. John Flatow. I'm the fourth of seven children. John Flatow 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. 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, you know, but... Who pushed John down the stairs? Who was that? I think that was me.

You pushed him out the window. No, no, I didn't push him out. 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. Another way, again, these stories abound in America.

Yeah. Every step we took, every accumulation of what we did. Unfortunately, we're just now unearthing the real history. 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. That's how we originally got connected with St. Augustine Church. Back in 2009, it was like their 150th anniversary.

And so Coakley was one of the main people. So they found us through that Coakley connection, St. Augustine's Church. They learned that the church was one of the most historic and the oldest black churches in the city and 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 DC. 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 is pretty thick here. Yeah. You're discovering all... We haven't even done the narrative yet. Yeah, yeah. This is even the... Wow. 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. In the photo, Coakley has a short black and gray beard, and he's wearing a double-breasted coat and some sort of metal 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. He was born in 18, probably 1825, 1826. We think he was probably born in District of Columbia, but we're not sure. What they are sure of is that from an early age, Gabriel Coakley was making moves.

Gabriel was a successful business owner. He's listed in those business directories a hundred something years ago. He either had an oyster bar, oyster business, restaurant business, et cetera, et cetera. But how we actually got to start is still a mystery. Where did he get his funds from? How did he get into a business? How did he have land? How did he get emancipated? Yeah, we don't know. That's still a big mystery for us about Gabriel. We do know Coakley was free before he reached his mid-20s. Now, if he'd been born free, he would have 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. He was an extraordinary, phenomenal man and accomplished in extraordinary times. These were extraordinary times, and few know more about that moment in D.C. better than Dr. Chris Myers Ash, co-author of Chocolate City, a history of race and democracy in the nation's capital. 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. He gave us a few likely scenarios to help explain Coakley's story. 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 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.

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 are still enslaved. 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. 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. 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. At just 20-something years old, Coakley did something extraordinary. He got his people free. 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. The family tells me that the first order of business was to free his wife, Mary. Mary had been enslaved multiple times. In 1850, he bought Mary's freedom for $350. What they went through, we can't even imagine. How do you pay somebody $350 for your wife? But somehow the family came through in some kind of way intact and able to progress, to keep going. 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 toley 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. Welcome to the D.C. Archives. Yeah, you know what? And this is kind of exactly where it should be, like this cobblestone, one historic alley, turn the corner.

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. It was built in the late 1800s and then converted to the archives in the early 90s. Wait, what was it back then? It was a horse stable. Oh, wow. So people would park their horses here? Yes, they would park their horses here and then go about their business throughout the District of Columbia.

So historic building for historic records. Amazing. But now I love places like this where you can, like, smell it and feel it. Well, you can definitely do that. There is a smell. Yes. Is it history or is it? Well, it's something. There we go. It's all right once you get inside. Yeah. Well, thank's something. There we go. It's all right once you get inside. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having us.

You see our statue of Abraham Lincoln? This is Abe Lincoln? That is Abe Lincoln, a young Abraham Lincoln. Now, I've never seen an Abe Lincoln like this. My man doesn't have a shirt on. He's shoeless. Hey, they're trying to create an image. Say, you know, we nicknamed him Sexy Lincoln.

Sexy Abe. look at him. That's right. 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 and looking for things and discovering things. Oh, yeah, because these go back to 1792. Wow. So 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're enslaved people documented in these books because they were property as well, because it does go back to the period of slavery.

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. 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. Okay. So we had to manually go through and see if we can find his name. Okay. Which is Gabriel Coakley. We're looking for Coakley. Ishmael had never heard of Gabriel Coakley, but he was intrigued. I told him everything we knew, that a black resident

right here in DC 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 old books page by page. We have a cloquet. That's a cloquet. Yeah, that doesn't look... That first L. It was... There we are right there. It was... Good luck. Look at this. That's it. There we, that doesn't look... That first L. It was... There we are right there. Wait, what's... Good luck. Look at this. That's it.

There we go. Is that it? Yes. Gabriel Coakley. Boom. Let's see. Look. Look at that.

Magic is happening. There we go. That's amazing. Let me find this book. This far back, everything is analog. One book corresponds to another book on a shelf somewhere a couple floors away. Let's go with nine.

Can we come with you? Are you on a couple? I want to come. Let's go. Are we going into the vault? So we have to take the freight elevator to wherever we're going. Oh, yes.

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. You said NCT 9? 9. All right, I'm going to have to get a ladder. I'm going to about right here. If I fall,

just reach your hand out. We are here. If you take an L, man, it's for good cause. Gabriel Coakley. It's always a good cause. You said nine? Nine. That's it.

We grabbed the book where we'd first seen his name. Then it's back down to the records room. So this might be the purchase of his... What is this, though? Is that a person? Yes. That's what we bought. And, you know, those were also logged in as...

Because they were property. So it might be... Right. So let's see. John... Ann M. Coakley was bought from Mr. John Larkham. That might be this. And here we go.

This might be this. This is 1857. Flipping through the pages, there was a frenzied energy. It was like sifting for gold. Nothing, nothing. Then something bright and shiny. Here we go. Larkham to Coakley.

Okay. This is Bill of Sale recorded 18th June, 1857. Yeah, he sold him by his sister. Right. Know all men by these presents

that I, John Lockham, of the city and county of Washington and District of Columbia, for it in consideration of the sum of one dollar to me in hand paid by Gabriel Coakley

of said city, the receipt of which I do hereby acknowledge have given granted bargains sold, alien released and confirmed. And by these presents do give grant bargains sell, alien release and confirm unto the said Gabriel Coakley, a Negro girl called Anne 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 in 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 record of Gabriel Coakley buying a loved one's freedom. But there's another interesting detail you might have heard. He purchased his sister's freedom for a dollar. Now, here's what makes that wild. In 1860, it would have 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. I'm sure and I'm sure he could speak well enough to say, you know, he's just not stepping in there saying I want my daddy's records back. He said, I want my family 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 people owner for years. 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. 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. There were still people enslaved in the city. Yes, that's what I mean. They're coming in on the water. Still people enslaved in the city. Yes, that's what I mean. They're coming in on the water. Right, right, right. They're still bringing in.

D.C. was kind of slow 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 his screen. But he did it to raise money to buy this family out and then get all the rest of his family out.

Dr. Matthews put all this in perspective. 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. What's so threatening about the existence of free Black people? So free Black people were threatening because they gave enslaved Black people the idea of freedom.

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. The push for freedom heats up when we come back. Act 3. 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 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 these 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. 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. Dr. Kelly Carter Jackson is an associate professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley. 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. 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 12th, 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 states' 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. The national government is tearing itself apart over the issue of slavery. Here's history professor Dr. Chris Myers-Ashigan. 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. And they- 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. And what comes out of this jockeying is the D.C. Emancipation Act, which passes in April 16, 1862. More than eight months before the Emancipation Proclamation, D.C. slaves are

emancipated. They are the first freed. But that emancipation bill called for compensated emancipation. It called for compensation for slaveholders. So not the enslaved people, but the actual enslavers got restitution. I had this conversation with my husband and I was like, yeah, I'm going to be talking about compensated emancipation. And he's like, oh, enslaved people got money? They got compensated? And I was like, no, slaveholders got compensated emancipation. And he's like, oh, enslaved people got money? They got compensated? And I was like, no, slaveholders got compensated. 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. 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 UK, when Great Britain frees or emancipates its enslaved population, they compensated slaveholders 20 million pounds. By 1862, America was ready to do the same thanks to the D.C. Compensated Emancipation Act. Congress 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. This sounds a lot like reparations to me.

Is this? It is reparations. Is this reparations? It is reparations. Absolutely. It's reparations for slave owners, for the people who owned enslaved people. Was this play as outlandish as it does now? Hearing that sounds crazy to me.

I'm sure that folks listening, but like, was that crazy then? 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, that it would help slave owners resign themselves to the fact that emancipation was going to happen. While Washington was part of the Union, slaveholders in the district still held a lot of power. 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. 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 from Congress would actually be valued at even more today. Let's put it this way. That million dollars was 0.2% of all government spending in 1862. If you look at the U.S. budget from last year, which was over $6 trillion, 0.2% 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? 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 live? Where are they going to work?

And so there are a lot of schemes, experiments created to sort of address this question. The enduring idea from the Civil War era that we tend to hold on to 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. So if you wanted to leave the country, Congress would support you and provide funding. The Compensation Act actually set aside $100,000 for Black people, not for reparations, but for removal. And slave 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 UK or Canada? We don't know what to do with Black people if they stay here. President Lincoln was one of colonization's loudest supporters. 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. And it's people like, you know, Black abolitionists, people like Frederick Douglass, who are like, no, we built this country.

This is our home. We're not going anywhere. So how about we work on equality? 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. 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. 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. When the D.C. Emancipation Act is passed and word comes out that that can get compensated for their quote-unquote property, well, Gabriel Coakley and others say, well, wait a minute, I can do this. 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.

If you follow our family's trajectory, our predecessors clearly appreciated that they were given a running start. In some ways, do you consider the compensation he got to be a form of reparations for what his family has been through? Absolutely. Unequivocally. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook using the handle at Into America Pod or check out at MSNBC on Twitter. You can also follow me on Instagram at Tremaine.Lee. 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 Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now.

Into America is produced by Max Jacobs. Our associate producer is Jamaris Perez. Katherine Anderson and Bob Mallory are the sound engineers. Thank you. producer of MSNBC Audio. And I'm Tremaine Lee. See you next Thursday for more of Uncounted Millions. Thanks so much for listening to this special preview. Search for Into America wherever you're listening now and follow.