Reuters World News - Special episode: America’s slavery legacy

Episode Date: July 1, 2023

On this special edition, host Kim Vinnell follows two Reuters journalists on their personal journeys to confront family connections with slavery and racial violence. Plus, the investigation into more than 100 lawmakers with slaveholding ancestors. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt-out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The lasting legacy of slavery and racial injustice that permeates U.S. institutions is also deeply personal. Today, we follow two Reuters journalists on their journeys to report their own history. I strongly suspected that I had slave owning in my family's past. Our first history lessons are family stories, and my family story includes some hard history. and in the process reveal the connections America's political elite still have with slaveholders, even as black Americans struggle to find family documents after emancipation. As we head toward July 4th, we dedicate a special episode of Reuters World News to an investigation into America's painful past.

I'm Kim Vinal in London. I'm Tom Lasseter in Washington, D.C. And I'm Donna Bryson in Denver, Colorado. In school curriculums or affirmative action, debates over slavery often seem distant and politically charged. But our reporter Tom Lasseter knew from a hazy memory that he needed to come to terms with his own ancestry. I thought back to a childhood memory from Georgia of walking across a farm. My family used to own with my grandfather. As we're walking across the field, he gestures in just so.

this offhand way at an old water well and said, the slaves built that. So the lineage starts with my mom, and her father was Joseph Bryce James. You know, when I sat down to build the first family tree, I really didn't like writing down my mother's name. I suspected strongly that what I would find would be ugly. George Julian, he wills enslaved people to his wife Adeline, and then to his son, Abijah. Abijah and George both had served in the state legislature and we know from the 1858 will that he had enslaved 13 people. There was a natural question of whether it would be possible to trace the descendants of those whom they'd enslaved. Two of the names on the 1858 will

was a lot who was a woman and dick who was a man. In 1870 there's a a Richard Julian and a Charlotte Julian, who we wondered might be the lot from the will. And they're living together in Forsyth County. But they would disappear from the census. And it didn't take very much research to figure out what was happening. In 1912, in Forsyth County, the white residents forcibly expelled almost every single black person who lived there. So when I tried to follow them to 1920, they just weren't there.

They disappeared. They had fled sometimes in the middle of the night. And so I went to the Elaine History Center to interview this young researchers and then sort of in walks another woman. And that woman was Elon Osby, the descendant of Richard and Charlotte, Julian. This was their direct descendant standing in front of me. My mother never mentioned their names. She didn't tell me what her grandfather's name was other than Julian. We looked through the documents as we talked about her life.

and just this remarkable and harrowing story. Imagining the fear, you know, that they must have felt. And it's unimaginable. You know, you are not only trying to save your life, but more important, you're trying to save the lives of your children. And just all of the things they had to leave that they had worked hard for. They then get on their feet in a part of Atlantic called Buckhead. And so Elon's grandfather, his name is William Bagley, and before long, the place is

known as Bagley Park. And he's known as the mayor of Bagley Park. What they did was tore down Bagley Park. So Elon's ancestors again sort of lost the opportunity to hold land and to build wealth. Months later, I came back to Atlanta and met with Elon again. She wanted to show me the cemetery where her grandparents are buried, and it was starting to rain. What I ended up saying is that I couldn't help but feel sorry when I saw the 1858 Will and the language that it uses about its property, including human beings. And she talked about how hard it is to see those documents, but it is important to know it. A little earlier in the conversation, she had asked me about, you know, whether I felt

guilty. I had said to her kind of laughing nervously that I wasn't asking her to absolve me. And I, you know, tell her, I'm sorry that this happened. And, you know, she points to the packet of material and said that she appreciated it. And then she laughed very loud and said, you're absolved. She's just, I guess she's such a great way of pulling the rug out just a little bit. So we laughed and it was starting to storm properly, you know, hugged and went on our separate ways. Tom's family story is not unique.

100 legislators, 11 governors, five living presidents, two Supreme Court justices. All have ancestors who owned and subjugated people to toil and die in bondage. Some of these lawmakers' slave-owning ancestors are just four generations. back, a great, great-grandfather. Tom, Donna, tell us about some of these lawmakers. So they include some of the most influential politicians in America, Republican senators Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Democrats, Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth. We looked also at U.S. presidents, President Joe Biden,

and every living former U.S. president, except for Donald Trump, is a direct descendant of slaveholders. That's Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, in Barack Obama. How did these lawmakers react to your findings? We reached out to every American politician and political leader named in the story. Most of them did not respond, and we had a handful of interviews among those former congressional member Mo Brooks, a Republican of Alabama. He said that, quote, hopefully everybody in America is smart enough to know that slavery is abhorrent. So the question then becomes, if everybody already knows that it's abhorrent, what more can you teach from that?

And I spoke to U.S. Representative Julia Brownlee, a Democrat of California, originally from Virginia. When I was told that my great-great-grandfather had two slaves and a child slave, that hit me really to the very core. Some may think this is ancient history, but it's really not, right? One, it's not so far in the past. And two, the legacy of slavery still haunts and shapes us in our families and in our public discourse. Tracing the lineage of lawmakers, while challenging, pales in comparison to what many black Americans face in searching for their families past.

When the paper trail came up empty for Donna, she visited her father to look for answers. My name is Andrew Landon Bryson. I was born in Comish, Jackson County, Georgia. My family roots are in the south. Everything is sort of centered around church and school, such as it is. I went back to see some of the places that my father had told me about, and promised myself that I would stop by what I knew to be a highway sign commemorating the Moors Board lynching that my father had witnessed in 1946.

who was helping out a soft drink delivery driver, and was on the road. And we pulled back to there, taking a shortcut on a dirt road, and there was shooting, and there were four people hanging. These guys were shooting at these bodies. This was now looked back on

as the last mass lynching in the United States. It involved a World War II veteran and his wife, and then another couple who were linched, perhaps, because this World War II veteran wanted to register to vote. He pushed me down into the wheel wheel. He said, stay down, stay down, stay down. And he gunned the engine and ran it through that. But I could see those people hanging up there.

The truck driver was scared too and skipped the last two stops on the route and got him back to his family. And his mother didn't want him to talk about it. She was thinking about what happened to her father-in-law. He owned the garage. and a store. This is General? General. Right.

In commerce, a lot of the family mileposts are no longer there. My great-grandfather's house is no longer standing, though I can look at old maps and see drawings of it and drawings of the store that my great-grandfather known as General Bryson owned. He had a garage back there on the Dunkin Circle where he fixed cars and things like in the 1890s and so forth. But of course, none of this is standing. Did you ever meet your grandfather? No, he died the year I was born. The death certificate we found puts his death in 1937.

He was taken from the store that he owned and tarred and feathered. These things were too uppity or something. These transmen or Yehous or whatever, they came over and they took him out. That's what killed him. It's a tarred and feathered. There is this background of violence that is just part of American's history. I can look at my own family history because our first history lessons are family stories.

And I think I grew up thinking that every African-American family had these kinds of violent stories to tell, and I'm sure many do. The truth is going to stay that way and trying to ignore it. It's kind of fool-hally. I think there is a conviction among a lot of African-Americans that the real history has not been taught. And as we debate now, what's going to be taught and what's going to be emphasized in our history lessons and when our children are going to confront these hard histories, we need to keep in mind that we owe them the truth. I mean, how can you make it go away by just something to say,

we're going to talk about this because it makes some people feel uncomfortable and other people, they're getting mad. That's it for this special episode of Reuters World News. Special thanks to Donna, Tom, and everyone. who worked on this investigation. To read their stories, see videos, pictures, and learn how to trace your own family history, visit Reuters.com.

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