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EXPLORE / INTERESTING!!! Merci de vos visites et de vos commentaires !!!

Jardin aux papillons, Vannes, France
1. untitled, 2. Marée basse, 3. dégâts, 4. U3, 5. Sunshine, 6. Winter colors, 7. Branchie, 8. In my beautiful little world, 9. Petite maison de vigne au coucher du soleil, 10. Arrosage, 11. Maison de vigne à l'abandon, 12. culture, 13. Un petit coin de ciel bleu, 14. La route, 15. Le temps file ..., 16. Loire, 17. Filet de pomme..., 18. Countryside, 19. Buche glacée, 20. abandon, 21. prairie, 22. Reflets d'automne, 23. au bord d'un songe, 24. L'orée, 25. Stable, 26. bosquet, 27. Rivière de lait, 28. Helicoptère..., 29. Orange, 30. Untitled, 31. Papillon aux Jardins de Chaumont sur Loire, 32. Bords bleus, 33. 14 juillet, 34. dreambuilding, 35. Ailes peintes, 36. Saule pleureur sur l'Authion, 37. Oeil de lynx, 38. Morosphinx, 39. Ballon sur l'eau, 40. Ciel en haut et en bas, 41. Majesté, 42. Guerrière - pour de faux...., 43. Reflection of a sun, 44. Nature dans un miroir, 45. Buche flottante, 46. In the eye of the cyclone..., 47. Armageddon sky, 48. blockhaus, 49. De l'autre côté, 50. In a swell of crystal, 51. Three bubbles, 52. Clairvoyant's droplet, 53. Oh my god !!! :), 54. Premiers soleils, 55. Le retour de __^________ | __^________ returns, 56. Il va pleuvoir, 57. For Faddoush : 2 barques en couleur, 58. Collioure - le port, 59. Ange dessinateur, 60. Chateau de Chenonceau, 61. Horses, 62. Equin, 63. Dans la savane, 64. Love, 65. Temps de brouillard / fog day, 66. Sepia's girl, 67. Je t'emmène, 68. Bord d'étang par temps de brouillard, 69. Château de Chenonceau et son reflet, 70. Danse de nuages sur bord du Cher, 71. Le chat aviateur / The flying cat, 72. Pêcheur de bord de Loire - Le calme face à la ville73. goutte d'inox, 74. paysage d'Anjou, 75. Dernier soleil - last sun, 76. Un petit air d'Amélie Poulain, 77. La traversée surnaturelle, 78. Sourire, 79. Rose et vert, 80. Sauvageonne, 81. Fleur, 82. Lucie - Portrait - 10 08 2008
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90. All persons held

Sea Lion Landing, Columbia, South Carolina
MRD.vid1.90 “All persons held as slaves shall thenceforward be forever free and such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed services.” President Lincoln, January 1st, 1863 THESE BEGINNING-T0-END, SEQUENCED IMAGES ARE FROM THE LINKED TO VIDEO FOLLOWING THIS SCRIPT. THE SCRIPT'S TEXT IS COMPLETE AND IS BROKEN DOWN TO MATCH TO THE IMAGE SHOWN WITH IT DURING THE VIDEO. - JS "Act in the Living Present - The Life of Martin Robison Delany" - by Jim Surkamp MRD.vid1.1 MD: “I leave you here and journey on and if I never more return, farewell” NARRATOR: Martin Delany finally gave up on America. MRD.vid1.2 His expulsion with two others from Harvard Medical School just because of skin color convinced him that the power of reason and merit alone did not in fact determine the country’s esteemed leaders. So, scraping just a few hundred dollars, MRD.vid1.3 he rented a crew and ship back to Africa, where his grandfather Shango had returned several generations before. MRD.vid1.4 SHIP MRD.vid1.5 His critics including Frederick Douglass, were legion. "You must stay here and fight for freedom," they told him. MRD.vid1.6 He certainly reflected on his already long life: MRD.vid1.7 the long road as one of five children in a freed family in Charles Town Virginia; MRD.vid1.8 and after that fleeing because they illegally learned how to read, followed by the many years as a physician’s assistant in Pittsburgh, MRD.vid1.9 and then editing two influential newspapers. MRD.vid1.10 Most of all he remembered as he perhaps gazed at the sperm whales that wandered into those southern latitudes . . . Of the day he was walking MRD.vid1.11 the road to Pittsburgh in 1829 deciding - his head filled with books and images of pharoahs and Africa - of making this pilgrimage in reverse back to Africa. MRD.vid1.12 “Land Ho!" MRD.vid1.13 NARRATOR: “The arrival of Martin Robison Delany in Liberia is an era in the history of African emigration, an event doubtless that will long be remembered by hundreds of thousands of Africa’s exiled children. MRD.vid1.14 Persons from all parts of the country came to Monrovia to see this great man.” People cheering: MRD.vid1.15 MRD.vid1.16 MRD.vid1.17 MRD.vid1.18 MRD.vid1.19 Ridiculed and ignored in America for speaking - MRD.vid1.20 embraced by the thousands here for speaking - how strange. MRD.vid1.21 MD: “The regeneration of the African race can only be effected by its own efforts, the efforts of its own self and whatever aid may come from other sources; and it must, in this venture succeed, as God leads the movement and His hand guides the way.” MRD.vid1.22 “Face thine accusers, scorn the rack and rod and, if thou hast truth to utter, MRD.vid1.23 speak and leave the rest to God." MRD.vid1.24 But we pushed on to Abeokuta. MRD.vid1.25 Africa taught Martin Delany its mysteries. MD: “The principle markets to see all the wonders MRD.vid1.26 is in the evening. As the shades of evening deepen, MRD.vid1.27 every woman lights her little lamp and, to the distant MRD.vid1.28 observer, presents the beautiful appearance of innumerable stars.” MRD.vid1.29 “But in the entire Aku country one is struck by the beautiful country which continually spreads out in every direction.” MRD.vid1.30 Africa also taught him its nightmares. . . I read August 13th in the West African Herald: MRD.vid1.31 “King Dahomey is about to make the great Custom in honor of the late King Gezo. MRD.vid1.32 Determined to surpass all former monarchs, a great pit has been dug which is to MRD.vid1.33 contain human blood enough to float a canoe. Two thousand persons will be sacrificed on this occasion. MRD.vid1.34 The king has sent his army to make some excursions at the expense of some weaker tribes. The younger people will be sold into slavery. The older persons will be killed At the Grand Custom.” MRD.vid1.35 MD: “Whole villages are taken.” “Farewell, farewell my loving friends, farewell. . .” MRD.vid1.36 The jasmine smells of Africa are tonight less fragrant than my scented memory of soft honey-suckled summer’s night breezes in Virginia long ago, and awaking to the mockingbird. {MRD.5:37} END PART 1 TO BLACK MRD.vid1.37 MRD.vid1.38 NARRATOR: On April 10th, 1860 at Lagos, Martin Delany and Robert Campbell MRD.vid1.39 boarded ship for London and Birmingham MRD.vid1.40 to seek backers for a plan to build freedman’s cotton farms in the Niger Valley. MRD.vid1.41 They would undersell, at the gold price of fourteen cents a pound, all the slave wrought cotton from the plantations back home. MRD.vid1.42 To make bales of cotton rot on the docks of Charleston and New Orleans as it were. MRD.vid1.43 MD: When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, my children’s age – I worked hours and hours inscribing with a fine needle the Lord Prayer – MRD.vid1.44 all of it – on the face of an English six pence like this one. MRD.vid1.45 SHIP MRD.vid1.46 NARRATOR: Delany was not wanted in America because MRD.vid1.47 of his radical political views. So he set sail for London and began preparing his report to his backers MRD.vid1.48 on the promise of Africa. MRD.vid1.49 MD: I noticed that. . . when I read, my eyes scan the page. . . back and forth. . . and up and down like a loom. MRD.vid1.50 I was so crazy about words, I was like Cervantes. I’d pick up every grimy scrap in the gutters of Charles Town MRD.vid1.51 to see if it had magic code to worlds beyond MRD.vid1.52 I read and broke bread with the ideas and dreams of Thomas Jefferson and Socrates And ancient pharaohs. MRD.vid1.53 Then Grandma Graci at night would tell me about my grandfather Shango. GRANDMA GRACI: "No more stories Martin." MD: And off to sleep and dreams about the greatest people who ever lived. MRD.vid1.54 I wanted my child to accumulate great hopes. MRD.vid1.55 If I ever set shoe leather on New York’s dock, President Buchanan himself would drop the noose around my despised neck, MRD.vid1.56 since John Brown, who I knew, did rebel and killed, and was hanged, I didn’t reckon there would be much of a welcoming home party for me. MRD.vid1.57 NARRATOR: Dr. Delany’s most prestigious speaking invitation was before the International Statistical Society, MRD.vid1.58 chaired by Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, and the most esteemed scientific body in the world on July 16th at MRD.vid1.59 London’s Somerset House. As the meeting was beginning at four, MRD.vid1.60 Lord Brougham, who hated American slavery, addressed the body which included the delegation from the United States, MRD.vid1.61 headed by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet MRD.vid1.62 The United States Ambassador George Mifflin Dallas was also seated on the dais. Both fervently believed as did their MRD.vid1.63 President that those called slaves were technically, legally, and truly MRD.vid1.64 three fifths human - just a notch above a good horse. BROUGHAM: “I call to the attention of Mr. Dallas to the fact there is a Negro present, MRD.vid1.65 and I hope he will feel no scruples on that account." MRD.vid1.66 MD: I was eye to eye with men who wished me dead. MRD.vid1.67 So many memories engulfed me. “I rise, your Royal Highness, MRD.vid1.68 to thank his Lordship, the unflinching friend of the Negro and for the remarks he has made to myself and to assure your Royal Highness and his Lordship that I AM a man.” MRD.vid1.69 NARRATOR: Withering amid what the London Times called the wildest shouts ever from so grave an assemblage, Longstreet jumped up and led the United States delegation out of the hall. MRD.vid1.70 Ambassador Dallas stayed seated on the dais. The proceedings ended. And Dr. Delany became an international sensation. MRD.vid1.71 Delany read the reactions to his actions from America. Even Frederick Douglass spoke well of him. A new President had been elected. His plans for Africa delayed by war there, and too many days of watching birthdays of his children go by from his cramped little room in London, MRD.vid1.72 cold rain drizzling outside and streaking his window pane. He wrote that memories leapt to life and “pierced my heart like a golden spear and riddled my breast like precious stones." MRD.vid1.73 Memories, such as that of Lucinda Snow, the blind girl in the Ohio Asylum – who played for him Rose Bud on a piano MRD.vid1.74 shortly after his own dearest daughter had just died. Nothing, Delany decided, could keep him from being home MRD.vid1.75 in Chatham, Ontario by Christmas. There was hope there. It was 1860 MRD.vid1.76 Doctor Delany joined his family in Chatham, Dec. 29th, 1860 to help a flood of escaped ex-slaves. South Carolina voted to secede nine days before. Slavery was being challenged in earnest. MRD.vid1.77 On January 9th, 1861, Confederate shore batteries fire upon Federal supply ships approaching Fort Sumter. MRD.vid1.78 President Lincoln at his March 4th Inauguration said: “Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.” MRD.vid1.79 Peacetime ends. 6 images of fort sumter shelling not counted 80-86 MRD.vid1.85 Bull Run, July 21st, 1861 MRD.vid1.86 Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign, May-June, 1862 MRD.vid1.87 Antietam, the bloodiest day in American military history, September 17, 1862 MRD.vid1.88 Fredericksburg, Dec. 13, 1862 MRD.vid1.89 Vicksburg, Dec. 1862 through May, 1863 MRD.vid1.90 “All persons held as slaves shall thenceforward be forever free and such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed services.” President Lincoln, January 1st, 1863 MRD.vid1.91 179,000 men of color enlist. Three million remain enslaved. MRD.vid1.92 Confederate General Lee loses Gen. Jackson, his best, at Chancellorsville, May, 1863. MRD.vid1.93 Lee Gambles MRD.vid1.94 Over 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg foresees the ultimate defeat of the Southern Cause, July, 1863. MRD.vid1.95 Days later, angry antidraft mobs in soldierless New York City burn a Negro orphan asylum. MRD.vid1.96 And lynch twelve innocent freed blacks. MRD.vid1.97 The 7th New York militia helps restore order. MRD.vid1.98 On July 18th, public opinion is reversed by extreme bravery of men in the 54th Massachusetts' Colored Regiment at Fort Wagner, South Carolina. MRD.vid1.99 “With silent tongue, clenched teeth, and steady eye, they have helped us on to this great consummation, while others have strove to hinder it.” A. Lincoln, April 26, 1864 MRD.vid1.100 A ninety two per cent Republican vote by furloughed soldiers delivers big unexpected off-year wins in Ohio and Pennsylvania for Lincoln and his party. MRD.vid1.101 Abolitionist Lew Tappan writes: “We are coming out of the slanderous valley for we have lived to have old opponents say to us: “We were wrong.” MRD.vid1.102 “The year has brought many changes I thought impossible, May God bless this Cause.” Black recruit in Baltimore, MD. MRD.vid1.103 The U.S. Senate passes an amendment abolishing all slavery. The house still opposes. – April 9, 1864 MRD.vid1.104 Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest orders the murder of mostly black prisoners at Fort Pillow, April 12, 1864. MRD.vid1.105 "(it is hoped) these facts will demonstrate that Negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.” MRD.vid1.106 “Whatever happens there will be no turning back” – a letter to President Lincoln from his new commander, Gen. Grant, April, 1864. MRD.vid1.107 The Battle of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, May 5th through 12th, 1864. MRD.vid1.108 “These men are incomprehensible standing from daylight to dark killing and wounding each other, then making jokes and exchanging newspapers.” Col.Theodore Lyman. MRD.vid1.109 Gen. Grant of his Cold Harbor, Va. attack, June, 1864: “I regret this assault more than any other.” MRD.vid1.110 Equal pay for black troops is finally enacted, June, 1864. MRD.vid1.111 A teacher in the occupied South writes: “Their cry is for 'books' and 'When will school begin?'” MRD.vid1.112 Civilians become targets. MRD.vid1.113 Union Gen. Hunter torches “Leeland” and “Fountain Rock” in Shepherdstown, WV and VMI in July, 1864. MRD.vid1.114 General Jubal Early strikes back, levels Chambersburg, ransoms Hagerstown and Frederick, MD. MRD.vid1.115 “The valley is not fit for man or beast. I have destroyed 2,000 barns." – “Gen. Philip Sheridan MRD.vid1.116 Gen. William Sherman writes: “We cannot change the hearts of these people. But we can make it so terrible and make them so sick of war, they will not appeal to it again.” MRD.vid1.117 “I can make my men march and make Georgia howl.” Gen. Sherman while cutting a swath of destruction fifty miles wide to Savannah to the sea. MRD.vid1.118 Martin Delany sought roles and work for Gen. Sherman's thousands of "camp followers" MRD.vid1.119 wagon freed blacks MRD.vid1.120 stagecoach MRD.vid1.121 Delany went to President Lincoln himself with an idea to make the South Carolina coastline a new Israel MRD.vid1.122 for freedmen and women who had been joining Sherman’s army marching across Georgia in the tens of thousands. First, Delany thought, they would be an army of MRD.vid1.123 Africa of able black men, recruited, trained, and then themselves becoming liberating soldiers and, after the war, these same men would become able keepers of the land, MRD.vid1.124 homecoming MRD.vid1.125 the same land Sherman had promised in South Carolina in January of that same year. Gen. Sherman tentatively gave, MRD.vid1.126 subject to the approval of the President of course, tens of thousands of acres of land to the freedman. MRD.vid1.127 Each family, Sherman, would get forty acres – a place in the sun - and one army mule on loan MRD.vid1.128 If Abeokuta failed to be Martin Delany’s promised land, Carolina coastline would be his Israel. MRD.vid1.129 On a cold clammy damp morning at 8 AM on Feb. 8th, Delany was welcomed by President Lincoln into his study MRD.vid1.130 at the White House. MRD.vid1.131 Lincoln had followed Delany’s doings for years. He knew him. On entering MRD.vid1.132 the executive chamber and being introduced to his excellency, a generous grasp of the hand brought me to a seat in front of him. MRD.vid1.133 AL: “What can I do for you, sir?” MD: “Nothing, Mr. President, MRD.vid1.134 but I’ve come to propose something to you, which I think will be beneficial to this nation in this critical hour of her peril.” MRD.vid1.135 AL: “Go on sir.” Delany and Lincoln discussed the value of black leaders for freed black Americans, and how so many feared black leadership. MRD.vid1.136 AL: “This is the very thing I’ve been looking for and hoping for; but nobody offered it. I have talked about it; I hoped and prayed for it. But up until now, it has never been proposed. MRD.vid1.137 “When I issued the Emancipation Proclamation, I had this thing in contemplation. I then gave them a chance by prohibiting any interference on the part of the army; but they did not embrace it.” MRD.vid1.138 MD: “But Mr. President, these poor people could not READ your proclamation.” MRD.vid1.139 While he spoke Lincoln was writing MRD.vid1.140 on a piece of paper. “Hon. E. M. Stanton: “Don’t not fail to have a meeting with this most extraordinary and intelligent black man – MRD.vid1.141 A. Lincoln.” MRD.vid1.142 AL: “Stanton is firing! Listen. He is in his glory. Noble man!” MD: “What is it? Mr. President” AL: “Why don’t you know? Charleston’s ours.” MRD.vid1.143 NARRATOR: Martin Delany later in April, caught a stage for the cradle of Southern animosities, MRD.vid1.144 which turned by the magic stroke of a pen and the raising of a sword MRD.vid1.145 into a new land of opportunity. MRD.vid1.146 He was to report to Gen. Rufus Saxton, a strong protector of freedman who commanded the occupation forces in South Carolina. 3 fire images MRD.vid1.147 MRD.vid1.148 MRD.vid1.149 MRD.vid1.150 MD: “I entered the city which from earliest childhood and through life I had learned to contemplate with feelings of utmost abhorrence, where the sound of the lash at the whipping post, and the hammer of the auctioneer MRD.vid1.151 were coordinate sounds in thrilling harmony, such as might well have vied for the infamous King of Dahomey.” MRD.vid1.152 “For a moment, I found myself dashing in unmeasured strides through the city. Again I halted to look upon the shattered walls MRD.vid1.153 of the once stately, but now deserted edifices. And but for the vigilance and fidelity MRD.vid1.154 of the colored firemen, there would have been nothing left but a smoldering plain of runs in the place where Charleston once stood.” MRD.vid1.155 NARRATOR: Chief Justice Salmon Chase in Charleston said: “A great race numbering four million is suddenly brought in freedom. All the world is looking to see whether the prophecies of the enemies of that race will be fulfilled or falsified. It rests upon the men of that race to tell.” MRD.vid1.156 Delany made it in time MRD.vid1.157 to see the flags changed at Fort Sumter, with his son, a young private, also there. And his old friend MRD.vid1.158 and comrade-in-arms William Lloyd Garrison who as he bade goodbye to a large adoring audience in Charleston said: GARRISON: “I have always advocated non-resistance; but this much I say to you, Come what may, never will you submit again to slavery. Do anything. Die first! MRD.vid1.159 But don’t submit again to them, never again be slaves. Farewell.” MRD.vid1.160 NARRATOR: Major Delany, the first black field officer in the U.S. Army, MRD.vid1.161 quickly organized schools, farms, MRD.vid1.162 farmers, freedmen and tried to reason with disenfranchised plantation owners, MRD.vid1.163 who were always trying to tie new freedman into enslaving contracts, exploiting their illiteracy. MRD.vid1.164 But Delany they loved. He was one of them and he told it to them straight. MRD.vid1.165 MD: “I came to talk to you in plain words so as you can understand how to open the gates of oppression and let the captive free. MRD.vid1.166 In this state there are 200 thousand able, intelligent honorable Negroes, not an inferior race, mind you.” MRD.vid1.167 “I want to tell you one thing, do you know that if it was not for the black man, MRD.vid1.168 this war never would have been brought to a close with success. MRD.vid1.169 Do you know that? MRD.vid1.170 Do you know that?” MRD.vid1.171 NARRATOR: But they would be asked to submit again - and soon. From the moment a bullet penetrated the Great Liberator’s brain at Ford’s Theater, no such a grand promise of land and freedom would ever hold. In May, just a month later, MRD.vid1.172 the newly appointed President Johnson ordered all these lands – those not properly surveyed - returned MRD.vid1.173 to some 300 plantation owners – even if MRD.vid1.174 someone else’s crop was already growing in the field. One freedman wrote to Andrew Johnson himself: MRD.vid1.175 “We have been ready to strike for liberty and humanity, yea to fight if need be, to preserve the glorious union. And now, we are ready to pay for this land. MRD.vid1.176 ‘Sign contracts with your old master and work their land as partners’ This was the plea to most freed blacks. MRD.vid1.177 Throughout that long summer, Delany’s superiors Generals Howard and Saxton avoided Johnson’s order and eventually defied them outright until September MRD.vid1.178 when they broke the news to the freedmen they loved so much. An Edisto Island freedman wrote his friend, MRD.vid1.179 Gen. Howard: “You ask us to forgive the landowners of our island. You only lost your right to arm in war and might forgive them. MRD.vid1.180 The man who tied me to a tree and gave me thirty nine lashes, who stripped and flogged my mother and sister and who will not let me stay in his empty hut unless I do his planting – that man I cannot forgive. . . General we cannot remain here.” MRD.vid1.181 NARRATOR: Many left South Carolina. Some stayed and were beaten. MRD.vid1.182 Delany fought: MD: “Every species of infamy, however atrocious, private and public, bare-faced and in open daylight MRD.vid1.183 is defiantly perpetrated under the direction and guidance of the despicable political leaders in the sacred name of ‘Republicanism’ and ’Radicalism.’ MRD.vid1.184 “But these Yankees talk smooth to you. Oh yeh. Their tongues roll just like the drum. They don’t pay you enough.” MRD.vid1.185 I was told to stay out of politics. NARRATOR: The forty acres and a mule promised to freedmen were already secretly being returned to the planters courtesy of the tireless machinations of Trescott and Williams in Washington. MRD.vid1.186 They even got Gen. Sherman to write President Johnson. On the brink of being court-martialed for his opposition, MRD.vid1.187 Gen. Howard wrote his superiors: “The lands which have been taken possession by this bureau have been solemnly pledged to the freedman. Thousands of them are already located on tracts of forty acres each. MRD.vid1.188 The love of the soil and desire to own farms amounts to a passion. MRD.vid1.189 It appears to be the dearest hope of their lives.” MRD.vid1.190 NARRATOR: Within two years, the Freedman Bureau had its main function of redistributing the lands to original owners and apologizing for it . . . MRD.vid1.191 Saxton was reassigned, Gen. Howard court-martialed, MRD.vid1.192 but Col. Delany – a survivor – pressed on. He had made himself too valuable to too many people in a very short time. MRD.vid1.193 Republican politicians, like Christopher Columbus Bowen, who controlled the patronage at the Customs House, hated his dangerously incorruptible independence MRD.vid1.194 and integrity, but like everyone, MRD.vid1.195 bowed to his almost messianic hold on the freedmen – MRD.vid1.196 this the long-awaited black leader. MRD.vid1.197 And on the other side, the old Southern aristocracy MRD.vid1.198 saw Delany’s magic too. And planned to use him someday MRD.vid1.199 for their own ends. As one old Southern editor put, in grudging admiration: “Martin Delany is a genuine Negro.” MRD.vid1.200 MD: “No one who knows me will doubt my African proclivities. I have possessions in Africa which I hope to enjoy.” NARRATOR: The old Southern guard watched and waited. They noticed Delany’s perceptibly growing disgust with corruption, greased palms and greed MRD.vid1.201 that fueled his own Republican Party’s machine. MD: The Freedman’s Bureau was allowed to continue to return those 63,000 acres to the planters. MRD.vid1.202 I told freedman to get educated to see what was going on. “Through two crop failures in 66 and 67, I told freedmen to rely on their muscles, MRD.vid1.203 their faith, and the righteousness of their cause.” 1870 saw almost all of those 63,000 promised acres MRD.vid1.204 were back in planters hands and some 90,000 of South Carolina’s freedmen MRD.vid1.205 had left in disgust and desperation. MRD.vid1.206 2,000 brothers and sisters set sail for my beloved Africa. The best of our people. Their hopes were gone before mine. Delany’s disgust deepened on a trip to New York City where he represented the state in a bond issue. And he found out that Governor Chamberlain MRD.vid1.207 had given his old college chum and roommate $750,000 in commissions. MRD.vid1.208 The Old Southern guard, watched and waited knowing that Martin Delany might be the key to regaining power. MRD.vid1.209 WADE HAMPTON: “We can control the Negroes if we act discreetly.” I would come to know people like Wade Hampton an embodiment of the old South who invited me to speak at barbecue gatherings. HAMPTON: “If it means we can protect our state from destruction, I am willing to send Negroes to Congress. They will be better than anyone who can take the oath of loyalty and I should rather trust them than renegades or Yankees. “My experience has been that when a Yankee can do a bit of rascality, the temptation to do it is almost irresistible.” MRD.vid1.210 NARRATOR: No one, though, would be a more fateful associate in Martin Delany’s long and broad lifetime as Wade Hampton, the old cavalry general, aristocrat and front man for the South. Who - yes, truly speaking personally for himself - wished for a better life for the freedman because he and Delany both fervently lived and advocated personal honor and a regimen of book learning and practical skills as every freedman’s road to true permanent economic redemption. MRD.vid1.211 It was only a matter of time that these two stars would head on a one on one collision and one of those two stars would orbit around the other. MRD.vid1.212 If only there had been more than just one Wade Hampton and one Martin Delany. America’s working, educated electorate would have emerged sooner. But the personal prestige, humanitarian and pragmatic ways of each man could only briefly capture the public imagination, MRD.vid1.213 while, at all other times, whites, blacks, Democrats and Republicans slid disgracefully into the abyss where guns and bribes were constantly used as the preferred path to personal power and glory. MRD.vid1.214 Pressured out of the Freedman’s Bureau in 1869, Delany was retired from public life, selling real estate and editing his own newspaper, when Rev. Richard Cain came to him one day in 1872 and urged him to help elect Franklin Moses. MRD.vid1.215 He might even get – for his efforts – a decent job later to support his seamstress wife, Catherine, and their large family. MRD.vid1.216 Delany could deliver freedmen’s votes. Hoping to enhance his own political fortunes in this state with a majority of black voters, and hoping to get more homesteads for freedmen, Delany stumped vigorously for Moses. MRD.vid1.217 Moses had always given lip service to Delany’s plan to attract Northern money to be long-term, low-interest loans to help the freedmen to buy and develop their own homesteads. MRD.vid1.218 Delany’s unvarnished truth-telling inspired the common people and irked those grubbing after filthy lucre. MRD.vid1.219 Wrote onetime governor B.F. Perry: “After mature reflection, I believe Col. Delany has exhibited in his speeches more wisdom and prudence, more honor and patriotism than any other Republican, white or black in South Carolina.” MRD.vid1.220 Delany wrote that, should the homeless become landowners, they would at once become proportionately interested in the affairs of state. Before either school house or church can be erected, he said the people themselves must be settled in homes of their own. MRD.vid1.221 Freedmen were leaving the state, denied the once promised forty acres virtually all back in original hands, and their life savings deposited faithfully in the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, now gone form mismanagement. MRD.vid1.222 Delany knew his plan could work. In three years he organized white cotton wholesalers and freedmen farmers on Hilton Head Island into a peaceable alliance that grew and harvested the crop profitably. Moses was elected. MRD.vid1.223 So was “Honest John” who boasted he bought his seat in the U.S. Senate for $40,000. MRD.vid1.224 But Governor Moses continued to drive even higher the state debt. MRD.vid1.225 It had already soared from one to over seventeen million dollars in the previous five years. Moses then raised taxes on freed holders to pay for all this. MRD.vid1.226 And he lined his pockets with priced pardons sold to 503 imprisoned felons. And they were all released into this heavily armed, hate-filled powder keg land. And Governor Moses gave Delany no job. MRD.vid1.227 Rev. Cain wrote Moses: “I had assured Mr. Delany that you would not break faith. He has staked all on your word. For Heaven’s sake, do not cast him away.” MRD.vid1.228 Seeing Beaufort’s old St. Helena Church summed up a visitors’ feeling in 1873 about every South Carolina town he saw: MRD.vid1.229 it was one of complete prostration, dejection, MRD.vid1.230 stagnation. MRD.vid1.231 VISITOR: “Utter stagnation marks its streets and everything is flavored with decay. The mockingbird sings as if winter has no meaning for them, MRD.vid1.232 the old mansions are permeated with the air of desertion. The merry tinkling that proceeds from the closed shutters of one of them seems altogether dissonant with the surroundings.” MRD.vid1.233 Bad crops, bad weather, a lost position in world cotton markets, a national depression – this all contributed. MRD.vid1.234 So by 1874, all of South Carolina, including Delany’s beloved St. Helena Island, looked like an armed camp. MRD.vid1.235 The Ku Klux Klan was forming almost three hundred rifle clubs that once beat two hundred freedmen and killed four more in nine months, in just one county. MRD.vid1.236 Freedmen either armed themselves, MRD.vid1.237 Or prayed the Federal troops would never leave. MRD.vid1.238 Some freedmen and their families slept in the swamps in the mild winter where the men in hoods and facemasks could not find them MRD.vid1.239 Wrote the editor of the Edgefield Advertiser in one of the states’ most strife torn counties: “Good people now look upon the entire electoral contest as a struggle between thieves and plunderers.” MRD.vid1.240 And they worried: “Among the whites is a class of men who hold human life of little value, MRD.vid1.241 and among the colored people there is a class who do not wish to labor and are known as habitual thieves or disturbers of the peace. MRD.vid1.242 Gen. Rufus Saxton wrote back his old friend Robert Smalls about these darkest of times in South Carolina: “I rejoiced when the right of suffrage came and I sorrowed when it was told that some had sold this precious birthright for a miserable mess of potage.” MRD.vid1.243 A few years earlier, Delany heard the church bells ring when the Fourteenth Amendment had been passed; but it was a hollow sound. MRD.vid1.244 He saw freedmen unable to read show up at the Freedmen’s Bureau with great baskets. The word, “Registration” sounded not much different from that other word: “provisions.” MRD.vid1.245 The Republicans’ vampire like bite into the state’s ebbing lifeblood blinded them to that emerging menace and giant, the old Southern Democrats MRD.vid1.246 and their gun-toting right wing rabble. Delany saw this disaster collision coming: MD: Again and again I warned the majority Republicans to go easy on the white planters MRD.vid1.247 because one day the shoe would go over to their foot. And sure enough it did. MRD.vid1.248 NARRATOR: Delany ran for lieutenant governor in 1874 on an independent reformed Republican ticket, getting 64,000 votes as corrupt Chamberlain won. MD: I lost my race but the planters got the shoe on their foot capturing the majority of seats in the statehouse. MRD.vid1.249 NARRATOR: Delany was made justice of the peace in Charleston when, as the gubernatorial election drew near in 1876 was indicted, courtesy of Governor Chamberlain, for misusing the funds of a dirt poor black church. MRD.vid1.250 Hardly. The implicit threat was: do not support Wade Hampton who was now the official candidate against Chamberlain with all the wealth and smart men the Old South could muster squarely behind him. MRD.vid1.251 Hampton and Delany always appealed to people’s desire for peaceful solutions based on reason and fair play. HAMPTON: “I pledge myself solemnly in the presence of the people of South Carolina MRD.vid1.252 and in the presence of my God that, if the Democratic ticket is elected – not one single right enjoyed by the colored people today shall be taken from them.” MRD.vid1.253 NARRATOR: As violence increased the extreme Democratic clubs secretly assigned one man to personally bribe or scare one freedman from voting, MRD.vid1.254 as Chamberlain’s campaign promises became more grotesque and desperate, Delany announced for Wade Hampton in September, 1876 MRD.vid1.255 – immediately putting his life at risk. Delany fought hard and spoke forcefully for Hampton. MD: Freedmen I told one and all were serving a new master now the radical Republican Carpetbaggers. I said the blackest truth out loud – a black man would not be allowed to lead, not just to live, but to lead. I myself always dared to do what the white men ever dared and done – to pull on every lion’s tail a white man has pulled. MRD.vid1.256 NARRATOR: On October 16th, C.C. Bowen promised me that our party of white and black Democrats could speak to freedmen on Edisto Island. MRD.vid1.257 Before the steamer left the Charleston wharf a number of Republican negroes gathered and they noisily demanded that they be permitted to take passage and threateningly declared that they wanted a chance to clean out those Democrats. MRD.vid1.258 MD: The audience at the meeting of some 500 or 600 “African citizens” was by far the most uncouth, savage and uncivilized that I have ever seen. The Republican Negroes started to beat their drums and left in a body. They would listen to “De Damn Democrats. MRD.vid1.259 They marched off and the women crowded around the wagon with their bludgeons with threats, and curses. MRD.vid1.260 MD: ”I rose to speak on the wagon. They interrupted me as I said: “I had come to South Carolina with my sword drawn to fight for the freedom of the black man.” MRD.vid1.261 I said “I had warned you against trusting your money to the Freedman’s Bank; and that you had, to your sorrow, paid no heed to my warning.” MRD.vid1.262 In violation of the agreement that neither party should carry guns or rifles to the place of meeting, MRD.vid1.263 the Negroes had brought their muskets and secreted them in a nearby swamp and in an old house near a church not far from the speaking ground. MRD.vid1.264 They marched out of the swamp with their arms and opened fire upon the whites who were unarmed. In the meantime I, Mr. William E. Simmons, and several aides to white men had taken refuge in a brick house adjoining the church. The Negro militia charged out of the swamp surrounded the brick house and tried to batter down the door. MRD.vid1.265 Failing in this, they broke open the windows and pointed muskets at us. We all escaped except for Mr. Simmons, who upon emerging from the door was knocked down and beaten to death. MRD.vid1.266 Six white men were killed and sixteen whites wounded that day. One black man was killed. The siege of Cainhoy continued for several days afterwards. MRD.vid1.267 White racists conducted similar assaults against blacks especially in Edgefield County. NARRATOR: Wade Hampton did win by a fiercely contested 1100 vote margin, provided in part by an estimated 3,000 Republican blacks who followed Delany’s example. MRD.vid1.268 MD: I had hurt the cause of my people beyond all imaginings. MRD.vid1.269 NARRATOR: Then Wade Hampton made history. With his election for governor still is dispute and the state in anarchy MRD.vid1.270 he met at the Willard Hotel with president-elect Rutherford B. Hayes, MRD.vid1.271 who held onto his election by one electoral vote. To keep his single electoral vote lead, Hayes and Hampton agreed that Hayes would support and confirm Hampton’s election and as Hampton wrote Hayes: MRD.vid1.272 HAMPTON: “If the Federal troops are withdrawn from the State House, there shall be on my part or that of my friends no resort to violence MRD.vid1.273 but we shall look for their maintenance solely to such peaceful remedies as the Constitution and laws of the State provide.” MRD.vid1.274 MD: U.S. soldiers were removed from the South on Hampton’s pact with Hayes - and I helped that. One person called it the abandonment of the colored race. MRD.vid1.275 Wade Hampton appointed me judge and I remained until he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1879. MRD.vid1.276 But the secret all white Charleston County Democratic committee methodically organized the state, county-by-county and parish-by-parish MRD.vid1.277 to crush the Republican party and all spokesmen for Reconstruction. MRD.vid1.278 My son drowned in the Savannah River. His body was found in December, late 1879. My wife Catherine, who had carried our family during my long absences, needed me. MRD.vid1.279 I was old. My children needed their college educations at Wilberforce. The books that set my dreams afire long ago belonged to them now. MRD.vid1.280 So I was there on the dock when a ship - the Azor - set sail for Liberia from Charleston harbor MRD.vid1.281 full of hopeful friends, with my fondest dreams on that distant shore. MRD.vid1.282 My torch had passed from me. MRD.vid1.283 His loving admirers gave him the Liberian flag on that dock for his many years of inspiration MRD.vid1.284 to act on their dreams. "Almost all his many children became teachers. His name is misspelled on his tombstone. His life’s work was lost when a library burned. And the ancestors of those who left for Africa in his lifetime and with his blessing still turn the native soil. MRD.vid1.285 MD: ”Act, act in the living present – but act. Speak the truth and leave the rest to God.” GRANDMA GRACI: No more stories, Martin. End THE VIDEO: The video broken out into segments on Flickr below: Martin Delany was a Harvard-educated physician, explorer who led his own scientific expedition to Africa; co-editor of The North Star newspaper; novelist; political theorist, judge in South Carolina, the first black field officer in the U.S. Army and described by Abraham Lincoln in February, 1865 after meeting him as " an extraordinary and intelligent black man." Martin Delany - Visionary - 1 www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBbR4_XVL9A TRT: 5:38 Martin Delany - Visionary - 2 www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IKkeh-oAJw TRT: 4:55 Martin Delany - Defiance - 3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=akOy0YTgveI TRT: 4:32 Martin Delany - Wartime - 4 www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoov745rJIQ TRT: 7:22 Martin Delany - Meets Lincoln - 5 www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FLy2e5k-lA TRT: 6:34 Martin Delany - Major Delany - 6 www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmsREGq81F4 TRT: 5:32 Martin Delany - Post-War - 7 www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfr5btQPF8M TRT: 2:20 Martin Delany - Disillusioned - 8 www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rdRT-_9mZE TRT: 4:17 Martin Delany - Charleston - 9 www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRmGweOo5A0 TRT: 5:37 Martin Delany - Betrayed - 10 www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdeCu7a4pww TRT: 6:01 Martin Delany - Going Home - 11 www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hj9nWbIfIo TRT: 4:29 OTHER SOURCES: Surkamp, James T. (1853). "To Be More Than Equal: The Many Lives of Martin R. Delany 1812-1885. West Virginia University Libraries. 9 Nov. 1999. Web. 26 Dec. 2010.
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136. never been proposed

Sea Lion Landing, Columbia, South Carolina
MRD.vid1.136 AL: “This is the very thing I’ve been looking for and hoping for; but nobody offered it. I have talked about it; I hoped and prayed for it. But up until now, it has never been proposed. THESE BEGINNING-T0-END, SEQUENCED IMAGES ARE FROM THE LINKED TO VIDEO FOLLOWING THIS SCRIPT. THE SCRIPT'S TEXT IS COMPLETE AND IS BROKEN DOWN TO MATCH TO THE IMAGE SHOWN WITH IT DURING THE VIDEO. - JS "Act in the Living Present - The Life of Martin Robison Delany" - by Jim Surkamp MRD.vid1.1 MD: “I leave you here and journey on and if I never more return, farewell” NARRATOR: Martin Delany finally gave up on America. MRD.vid1.2 His expulsion with two others from Harvard Medical School just because of skin color convinced him that the power of reason and merit alone did not in fact determine the country’s esteemed leaders. So, scraping just a few hundred dollars, MRD.vid1.3 he rented a crew and ship back to Africa, where his grandfather Shango had returned several generations before. MRD.vid1.4 SHIP MRD.vid1.5 His critics including Frederick Douglass, were legion. "You must stay here and fight for freedom," they told him. MRD.vid1.6 He certainly reflected on his already long life: MRD.vid1.7 the long road as one of five children in a freed family in Charles Town Virginia; MRD.vid1.8 and after that fleeing because they illegally learned how to read, followed by the many years as a physician’s assistant in Pittsburgh, MRD.vid1.9 and then editing two influential newspapers. MRD.vid1.10 Most of all he remembered as he perhaps gazed at the sperm whales that wandered into those southern latitudes . . . Of the day he was walking MRD.vid1.11 the road to Pittsburgh in 1829 deciding - his head filled with books and images of pharoahs and Africa - of making this pilgrimage in reverse back to Africa. MRD.vid1.12 “Land Ho!" MRD.vid1.13 NARRATOR: “The arrival of Martin Robison Delany in Liberia is an era in the history of African emigration, an event doubtless that will long be remembered by hundreds of thousands of Africa’s exiled children. MRD.vid1.14 Persons from all parts of the country came to Monrovia to see this great man.” People cheering: MRD.vid1.15 MRD.vid1.16 MRD.vid1.17 MRD.vid1.18 MRD.vid1.19 Ridiculed and ignored in America for speaking - MRD.vid1.20 embraced by the thousands here for speaking - how strange. MRD.vid1.21 MD: “The regeneration of the African race can only be effected by its own efforts, the efforts of its own self and whatever aid may come from other sources; and it must, in this venture succeed, as God leads the movement and His hand guides the way.” MRD.vid1.22 “Face thine accusers, scorn the rack and rod and, if thou hast truth to utter, MRD.vid1.23 speak and leave the rest to God." MRD.vid1.24 But we pushed on to Abeokuta. MRD.vid1.25 Africa taught Martin Delany its mysteries. MD: “The principle markets to see all the wonders MRD.vid1.26 is in the evening. As the shades of evening deepen, MRD.vid1.27 every woman lights her little lamp and, to the distant MRD.vid1.28 observer, presents the beautiful appearance of innumerable stars.” MRD.vid1.29 “But in the entire Aku country one is struck by the beautiful country which continually spreads out in every direction.” MRD.vid1.30 Africa also taught him its nightmares. . . I read August 13th in the West African Herald: MRD.vid1.31 “King Dahomey is about to make the great Custom in honor of the late King Gezo. MRD.vid1.32 Determined to surpass all former monarchs, a great pit has been dug which is to MRD.vid1.33 contain human blood enough to float a canoe. Two thousand persons will be sacrificed on this occasion. MRD.vid1.34 The king has sent his army to make some excursions at the expense of some weaker tribes. The younger people will be sold into slavery. The older persons will be killed At the Grand Custom.” MRD.vid1.35 MD: “Whole villages are taken.” “Farewell, farewell my loving friends, farewell. . .” MRD.vid1.36 The jasmine smells of Africa are tonight less fragrant than my scented memory of soft honey-suckled summer’s night breezes in Virginia long ago, and awaking to the mockingbird. {MRD.5:37} END PART 1 TO BLACK MRD.vid1.37 MRD.vid1.38 NARRATOR: On April 10th, 1860 at Lagos, Martin Delany and Robert Campbell MRD.vid1.39 boarded ship for London and Birmingham MRD.vid1.40 to seek backers for a plan to build freedman’s cotton farms in the Niger Valley. MRD.vid1.41 They would undersell, at the gold price of fourteen cents a pound, all the slave wrought cotton from the plantations back home. MRD.vid1.42 To make bales of cotton rot on the docks of Charleston and New Orleans as it were. MRD.vid1.43 MD: When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, my children’s age – I worked hours and hours inscribing with a fine needle the Lord Prayer – MRD.vid1.44 all of it – on the face of an English six pence like this one. MRD.vid1.45 SHIP MRD.vid1.46 NARRATOR: Delany was not wanted in America because MRD.vid1.47 of his radical political views. So he set sail for London and began preparing his report to his backers MRD.vid1.48 on the promise of Africa. MRD.vid1.49 MD: I noticed that. . . when I read, my eyes scan the page. . . back and forth. . . and up and down like a loom. MRD.vid1.50 I was so crazy about words, I was like Cervantes. I’d pick up every grimy scrap in the gutters of Charles Town MRD.vid1.51 to see if it had magic code to worlds beyond MRD.vid1.52 I read and broke bread with the ideas and dreams of Thomas Jefferson and Socrates And ancient pharaohs. MRD.vid1.53 Then Grandma Graci at night would tell me about my grandfather Shango. GRANDMA GRACI: "No more stories Martin." MD: And off to sleep and dreams about the greatest people who ever lived. MRD.vid1.54 I wanted my child to accumulate great hopes. MRD.vid1.55 If I ever set shoe leather on New York’s dock, President Buchanan himself would drop the noose around my despised neck, MRD.vid1.56 since John Brown, who I knew, did rebel and killed, and was hanged, I didn’t reckon there would be much of a welcoming home party for me. MRD.vid1.57 NARRATOR: Dr. Delany’s most prestigious speaking invitation was before the International Statistical Society, MRD.vid1.58 chaired by Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, and the most esteemed scientific body in the world on July 16th at MRD.vid1.59 London’s Somerset House. As the meeting was beginning at four, MRD.vid1.60 Lord Brougham, who hated American slavery, addressed the body which included the delegation from the United States, MRD.vid1.61 headed by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet MRD.vid1.62 The United States Ambassador George Mifflin Dallas was also seated on the dais. Both fervently believed as did their MRD.vid1.63 President that those called slaves were technically, legally, and truly MRD.vid1.64 three fifths human - just a notch above a good horse. BROUGHAM: “I call to the attention of Mr. Dallas to the fact there is a Negro present, MRD.vid1.65 and I hope he will feel no scruples on that account." MRD.vid1.66 MD: I was eye to eye with men who wished me dead. MRD.vid1.67 So many memories engulfed me. “I rise, your Royal Highness, MRD.vid1.68 to thank his Lordship, the unflinching friend of the Negro and for the remarks he has made to myself and to assure your Royal Highness and his Lordship that I AM a man.” MRD.vid1.69 NARRATOR: Withering amid what the London Times called the wildest shouts ever from so grave an assemblage, Longstreet jumped up and led the United States delegation out of the hall. MRD.vid1.70 Ambassador Dallas stayed seated on the dais. The proceedings ended. And Dr. Delany became an international sensation. MRD.vid1.71 Delany read the reactions to his actions from America. Even Frederick Douglass spoke well of him. A new President had been elected. His plans for Africa delayed by war there, and too many days of watching birthdays of his children go by from his cramped little room in London, MRD.vid1.72 cold rain drizzling outside and streaking his window pane. He wrote that memories leapt to life and “pierced my heart like a golden spear and riddled my breast like precious stones." MRD.vid1.73 Memories, such as that of Lucinda Snow, the blind girl in the Ohio Asylum – who played for him Rose Bud on a piano MRD.vid1.74 shortly after his own dearest daughter had just died. Nothing, Delany decided, could keep him from being home MRD.vid1.75 in Chatham, Ontario by Christmas. There was hope there. It was 1860 MRD.vid1.76 Doctor Delany joined his family in Chatham, Dec. 29th, 1860 to help a flood of escaped ex-slaves. South Carolina voted to secede nine days before. Slavery was being challenged in earnest. MRD.vid1.77 On January 9th, 1861, Confederate shore batteries fire upon Federal supply ships approaching Fort Sumter. MRD.vid1.78 President Lincoln at his March 4th Inauguration said: “Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.” MRD.vid1.79 Peacetime ends. 6 images of fort sumter shelling not counted 80-86 MRD.vid1.85 Bull Run, July 21st, 1861 MRD.vid1.86 Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign, May-June, 1862 MRD.vid1.87 Antietam, the bloodiest day in American military history, September 17, 1862 MRD.vid1.88 Fredericksburg, Dec. 13, 1862 MRD.vid1.89 Vicksburg, Dec. 1862 through May, 1863 MRD.vid1.90 “All persons held as slaves shall thenceforward be forever free and such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed services.” President Lincoln, January 1st, 1863 MRD.vid1.91 179,000 men of color enlist. Three million remain enslaved. MRD.vid1.92 Confederate General Lee loses Gen. Jackson, his best, at Chancellorsville, May, 1863. MRD.vid1.93 Lee Gambles MRD.vid1.94 Over 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg foresees the ultimate defeat of the Southern Cause, July, 1863. MRD.vid1.95 Days later, angry antidraft mobs in soldierless New York City burn a Negro orphan asylum. MRD.vid1.96 And lynch twelve innocent freed blacks. MRD.vid1.97 The 7th New York militia helps restore order. MRD.vid1.98 On July 18th, public opinion is reversed by extreme bravery of men in the 54th Massachusetts' Colored Regiment at Fort Wagner, South Carolina. MRD.vid1.99 “With silent tongue, clenched teeth, and steady eye, they have helped us on to this great consummation, while others have strove to hinder it.” A. Lincoln, April 26, 1864 MRD.vid1.100 A ninety two per cent Republican vote by furloughed soldiers delivers big unexpected off-year wins in Ohio and Pennsylvania for Lincoln and his party. MRD.vid1.101 Abolitionist Lew Tappan writes: “We are coming out of the slanderous valley for we have lived to have old opponents say to us: “We were wrong.” MRD.vid1.102 “The year has brought many changes I thought impossible, May God bless this Cause.” Black recruit in Baltimore, MD. MRD.vid1.103 The U.S. Senate passes an amendment abolishing all slavery. The house still opposes. – April 9, 1864 MRD.vid1.104 Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest orders the murder of mostly black prisoners at Fort Pillow, April 12, 1864. MRD.vid1.105 "(it is hoped) these facts will demonstrate that Negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.” MRD.vid1.106 “Whatever happens there will be no turning back” – a letter to President Lincoln from his new commander, Gen. Grant, April, 1864. MRD.vid1.107 The Battle of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, May 5th through 12th, 1864. MRD.vid1.108 “These men are incomprehensible standing from daylight to dark killing and wounding each other, then making jokes and exchanging newspapers.” Col.Theodore Lyman. MRD.vid1.109 Gen. Grant of his Cold Harbor, Va. attack, June, 1864: “I regret this assault more than any other.” MRD.vid1.110 Equal pay for black troops is finally enacted, June, 1864. MRD.vid1.111 A teacher in the occupied South writes: “Their cry is for 'books' and 'When will school begin?'” MRD.vid1.112 Civilians become targets. MRD.vid1.113 Union Gen. Hunter torches “Leeland” and “Fountain Rock” in Shepherdstown, WV and VMI in July, 1864. MRD.vid1.114 General Jubal Early strikes back, levels Chambersburg, ransoms Hagerstown and Frederick, MD. MRD.vid1.115 “The valley is not fit for man or beast. I have destroyed 2,000 barns." – “Gen. Philip Sheridan MRD.vid1.116 Gen. William Sherman writes: “We cannot change the hearts of these people. But we can make it so terrible and make them so sick of war, they will not appeal to it again.” MRD.vid1.117 “I can make my men march and make Georgia howl.” Gen. Sherman while cutting a swath of destruction fifty miles wide to Savannah to the sea. MRD.vid1.118 Martin Delany sought roles and work for Gen. Sherman's thousands of "camp followers" MRD.vid1.119 wagon freed blacks MRD.vid1.120 stagecoach MRD.vid1.121 Delany went to President Lincoln himself with an idea to make the South Carolina coastline a new Israel MRD.vid1.122 for freedmen and women who had been joining Sherman’s army marching across Georgia in the tens of thousands. First, Delany thought, they would be an army of MRD.vid1.123 Africa of able black men, recruited, trained, and then themselves becoming liberating soldiers and, after the war, these same men would become able keepers of the land, MRD.vid1.124 homecoming MRD.vid1.125 the same land Sherman had promised in South Carolina in January of that same year. Gen. Sherman tentatively gave, MRD.vid1.126 subject to the approval of the President of course, tens of thousands of acres of land to the freedman. MRD.vid1.127 Each family, Sherman, would get forty acres – a place in the sun - and one army mule on loan MRD.vid1.128 If Abeokuta failed to be Martin Delany’s promised land, Carolina coastline would be his Israel. MRD.vid1.129 On a cold clammy damp morning at 8 AM on Feb. 8th, Delany was welcomed by President Lincoln into his study MRD.vid1.130 at the White House. MRD.vid1.131 Lincoln had followed Delany’s doings for years. He knew him. On entering MRD.vid1.132 the executive chamber and being introduced to his excellency, a generous grasp of the hand brought me to a seat in front of him. MRD.vid1.133 AL: “What can I do for you, sir?” MD: “Nothing, Mr. President, MRD.vid1.134 but I’ve come to propose something to you, which I think will be beneficial to this nation in this critical hour of her peril.” MRD.vid1.135 AL: “Go on sir.” Delany and Lincoln discussed the value of black leaders for freed black Americans, and how so many feared black leadership. MRD.vid1.136 AL: “This is the very thing I’ve been looking for and hoping for; but nobody offered it. I have talked about it; I hoped and prayed for it. But up until now, it has never been proposed. MRD.vid1.137 “When I issued the Emancipation Proclamation, I had this thing in contemplation. I then gave them a chance by prohibiting any interference on the part of the army; but they did not embrace it.” MRD.vid1.138 MD: “But Mr. President, these poor people could not READ your proclamation.” MRD.vid1.139 While he spoke Lincoln was writing MRD.vid1.140 on a piece of paper. “Hon. E. M. Stanton: “Don’t not fail to have a meeting with this most extraordinary and intelligent black man – MRD.vid1.141 A. Lincoln.” MRD.vid1.142 AL: “Stanton is firing! Listen. He is in his glory. Noble man!” MD: “What is it? Mr. President” AL: “Why don’t you know? Charleston’s ours.” MRD.vid1.143 NARRATOR: Martin Delany later in April, caught a stage for the cradle of Southern animosities, MRD.vid1.144 which turned by the magic stroke of a pen and the raising of a sword MRD.vid1.145 into a new land of opportunity. MRD.vid1.146 He was to report to Gen. Rufus Saxton, a strong protector of freedman who commanded the occupation forces in South Carolina. 3 fire images MRD.vid1.147 MRD.vid1.148 MRD.vid1.149 MRD.vid1.150 MD: “I entered the city which from earliest childhood and through life I had learned to contemplate with feelings of utmost abhorrence, where the sound of the lash at the whipping post, and the hammer of the auctioneer MRD.vid1.151 were coordinate sounds in thrilling harmony, such as might well have vied for the infamous King of Dahomey.” MRD.vid1.152 “For a moment, I found myself dashing in unmeasured strides through the city. Again I halted to look upon the shattered walls MRD.vid1.153 of the once stately, but now deserted edifices. And but for the vigilance and fidelity MRD.vid1.154 of the colored firemen, there would have been nothing left but a smoldering plain of runs in the place where Charleston once stood.” MRD.vid1.155 NARRATOR: Chief Justice Salmon Chase in Charleston said: “A great race numbering four million is suddenly brought in freedom. All the world is looking to see whether the prophecies of the enemies of that race will be fulfilled or falsified. It rests upon the men of that race to tell.” MRD.vid1.156 Delany made it in time MRD.vid1.157 to see the flags changed at Fort Sumter, with his son, a young private, also there. And his old friend MRD.vid1.158 and comrade-in-arms William Lloyd Garrison who as he bade goodbye to a large adoring audience in Charleston said: GARRISON: “I have always advocated non-resistance; but this much I say to you, Come what may, never will you submit again to slavery. Do anything. Die first! MRD.vid1.159 But don’t submit again to them, never again be slaves. Farewell.” MRD.vid1.160 NARRATOR: Major Delany, the first black field officer in the U.S. Army, MRD.vid1.161 quickly organized schools, farms, MRD.vid1.162 farmers, freedmen and tried to reason with disenfranchised plantation owners, MRD.vid1.163 who were always trying to tie new freedman into enslaving contracts, exploiting their illiteracy. MRD.vid1.164 But Delany they loved. He was one of them and he told it to them straight. MRD.vid1.165 MD: “I came to talk to you in plain words so as you can understand how to open the gates of oppression and let the captive free. MRD.vid1.166 In this state there are 200 thousand able, intelligent honorable Negroes, not an inferior race, mind you.” MRD.vid1.167 “I want to tell you one thing, do you know that if it was not for the black man, MRD.vid1.168 this war never would have been brought to a close with success. MRD.vid1.169 Do you know that? MRD.vid1.170 Do you know that?” MRD.vid1.171 NARRATOR: But they would be asked to submit again - and soon. From the moment a bullet penetrated the Great Liberator’s brain at Ford’s Theater, no such a grand promise of land and freedom would ever hold. In May, just a month later, MRD.vid1.172 the newly appointed President Johnson ordered all these lands – those not properly surveyed - returned MRD.vid1.173 to some 300 plantation owners – even if MRD.vid1.174 someone else’s crop was already growing in the field. One freedman wrote to Andrew Johnson himself: MRD.vid1.175 “We have been ready to strike for liberty and humanity, yea to fight if need be, to preserve the glorious union. And now, we are ready to pay for this land. MRD.vid1.176 ‘Sign contracts with your old master and work their land as partners’ This was the plea to most freed blacks. MRD.vid1.177 Throughout that long summer, Delany’s superiors Generals Howard and Saxton avoided Johnson’s order and eventually defied them outright until September MRD.vid1.178 when they broke the news to the freedmen they loved so much. An Edisto Island freedman wrote his friend, MRD.vid1.179 Gen. Howard: “You ask us to forgive the landowners of our island. You only lost your right to arm in war and might forgive them. MRD.vid1.180 The man who tied me to a tree and gave me thirty nine lashes, who stripped and flogged my mother and sister and who will not let me stay in his empty hut unless I do his planting – that man I cannot forgive. . . General we cannot remain here.” MRD.vid1.181 NARRATOR: Many left South Carolina. Some stayed and were beaten. MRD.vid1.182 Delany fought: MD: “Every species of infamy, however atrocious, private and public, bare-faced and in open daylight MRD.vid1.183 is defiantly perpetrated under the direction and guidance of the despicable political leaders in the sacred name of ‘Republicanism’ and ’Radicalism.’ MRD.vid1.184 “But these Yankees talk smooth to you. Oh yeh. Their tongues roll just like the drum. They don’t pay you enough.” MRD.vid1.185 I was told to stay out of politics. NARRATOR: The forty acres and a mule promised to freedmen were already secretly being returned to the planters courtesy of the tireless machinations of Trescott and Williams in Washington. MRD.vid1.186 They even got Gen. Sherman to write President Johnson. On the brink of being court-martialed for his opposition, MRD.vid1.187 Gen. Howard wrote his superiors: “The lands which have been taken possession by this bureau have been solemnly pledged to the freedman. Thousands of them are already located on tracts of forty acres each. MRD.vid1.188 The love of the soil and desire to own farms amounts to a passion. MRD.vid1.189 It appears to be the dearest hope of their lives.” MRD.vid1.190 NARRATOR: Within two years, the Freedman Bureau had its main function of redistributing the lands to original owners and apologizing for it . . . MRD.vid1.191 Saxton was reassigned, Gen. Howard court-martialed, MRD.vid1.192 but Col. Delany – a survivor – pressed on. He had made himself too valuable to too many people in a very short time. MRD.vid1.193 Republican politicians, like Christopher Columbus Bowen, who controlled the patronage at the Customs House, hated his dangerously incorruptible independence MRD.vid1.194 and integrity, but like everyone, MRD.vid1.195 bowed to his almost messianic hold on the freedmen – MRD.vid1.196 this the long-awaited black leader. MRD.vid1.197 And on the other side, the old Southern aristocracy MRD.vid1.198 saw Delany’s magic too. And planned to use him someday MRD.vid1.199 for their own ends. As one old Southern editor put, in grudging admiration: “Martin Delany is a genuine Negro.” MRD.vid1.200 MD: “No one who knows me will doubt my African proclivities. I have possessions in Africa which I hope to enjoy.” NARRATOR: The old Southern guard watched and waited. They noticed Delany’s perceptibly growing disgust with corruption, greased palms and greed MRD.vid1.201 that fueled his own Republican Party’s machine. MD: The Freedman’s Bureau was allowed to continue to return those 63,000 acres to the planters. MRD.vid1.202 I told freedman to get educated to see what was going on. “Through two crop failures in 66 and 67, I told freedmen to rely on their muscles, MRD.vid1.203 their faith, and the righteousness of their cause.” 1870 saw almost all of those 63,000 promised acres MRD.vid1.204 were back in planters hands and some 90,000 of South Carolina’s freedmen MRD.vid1.205 had left in disgust and desperation. MRD.vid1.206 2,000 brothers and sisters set sail for my beloved Africa. The best of our people. Their hopes were gone before mine. Delany’s disgust deepened on a trip to New York City where he represented the state in a bond issue. And he found out that Governor Chamberlain MRD.vid1.207 had given his old college chum and roommate $750,000 in commissions. MRD.vid1.208 The Old Southern guard, watched and waited knowing that Martin Delany might be the key to regaining power. MRD.vid1.209 WADE HAMPTON: “We can control the Negroes if we act discreetly.” I would come to know people like Wade Hampton an embodiment of the old South who invited me to speak at barbecue gatherings. HAMPTON: “If it means we can protect our state from destruction, I am willing to send Negroes to Congress. They will be better than anyone who can take the oath of loyalty and I should rather trust them than renegades or Yankees. “My experience has been that when a Yankee can do a bit of rascality, the temptation to do it is almost irresistible.” MRD.vid1.210 NARRATOR: No one, though, would be a more fateful associate in Martin Delany’s long and broad lifetime as Wade Hampton, the old cavalry general, aristocrat and front man for the South. Who - yes, truly speaking personally for himself - wished for a better life for the freedman because he and Delany both fervently lived and advocated personal honor and a regimen of book learning and practical skills as every freedman’s road to true permanent economic redemption. MRD.vid1.211 It was only a matter of time that these two stars would head on a one on one collision and one of those two stars would orbit around the other. MRD.vid1.212 If only there had been more than just one Wade Hampton and one Martin Delany. America’s working, educated electorate would have emerged sooner. But the personal prestige, humanitarian and pragmatic ways of each man could only briefly capture the public imagination, MRD.vid1.213 while, at all other times, whites, blacks, Democrats and Republicans slid disgracefully into the abyss where guns and bribes were constantly used as the preferred path to personal power and glory. MRD.vid1.214 Pressured out of the Freedman’s Bureau in 1869, Delany was retired from public life, selling real estate and editing his own newspaper, when Rev. Richard Cain came to him one day in 1872 and urged him to help elect Franklin Moses. MRD.vid1.215 He might even get – for his efforts – a decent job later to support his seamstress wife, Catherine, and their large family. MRD.vid1.216 Delany could deliver freedmen’s votes. Hoping to enhance his own political fortunes in this state with a majority of black voters, and hoping to get more homesteads for freedmen, Delany stumped vigorously for Moses. MRD.vid1.217 Moses had always given lip service to Delany’s plan to attract Northern money to be long-term, low-interest loans to help the freedmen to buy and develop their own homesteads. MRD.vid1.218 Delany’s unvarnished truth-telling inspired the common people and irked those grubbing after filthy lucre. MRD.vid1.219 Wrote onetime governor B.F. Perry: “After mature reflection, I believe Col. Delany has exhibited in his speeches more wisdom and prudence, more honor and patriotism than any other Republican, white or black in South Carolina.” MRD.vid1.220 Delany wrote that, should the homeless become landowners, they would at once become proportionately interested in the affairs of state. Before either school house or church can be erected, he said the people themselves must be settled in homes of their own. MRD.vid1.221 Freedmen were leaving the state, denied the once promised forty acres virtually all back in original hands, and their life savings deposited faithfully in the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, now gone form mismanagement. MRD.vid1.222 Delany knew his plan could work. In three years he organized white cotton wholesalers and freedmen farmers on Hilton Head Island into a peaceable alliance that grew and harvested the crop profitably. Moses was elected. MRD.vid1.223 So was “Honest John” who boasted he bought his seat in the U.S. Senate for $40,000. MRD.vid1.224 But Governor Moses continued to drive even higher the state debt. MRD.vid1.225 It had already soared from one to over seventeen million dollars in the previous five years. Moses then raised taxes on freed holders to pay for all this. MRD.vid1.226 And he lined his pockets with priced pardons sold to 503 imprisoned felons. And they were all released into this heavily armed, hate-filled powder keg land. And Governor Moses gave Delany no job. MRD.vid1.227 Rev. Cain wrote Moses: “I had assured Mr. Delany that you would not break faith. He has staked all on your word. For Heaven’s sake, do not cast him away.” MRD.vid1.228 Seeing Beaufort’s old St. Helena Church summed up a visitors’ feeling in 1873 about every South Carolina town he saw: MRD.vid1.229 it was one of complete prostration, dejection, MRD.vid1.230 stagnation. MRD.vid1.231 VISITOR: “Utter stagnation marks its streets and everything is flavored with decay. The mockingbird sings as if winter has no meaning for them, MRD.vid1.232 the old mansions are permeated with the air of desertion. The merry tinkling that proceeds from the closed shutters of one of them seems altogether dissonant with the surroundings.” MRD.vid1.233 Bad crops, bad weather, a lost position in world cotton markets, a national depression – this all contributed. MRD.vid1.234 So by 1874, all of South Carolina, including Delany’s beloved St. Helena Island, looked like an armed camp. MRD.vid1.235 The Ku Klux Klan was forming almost three hundred rifle clubs that once beat two hundred freedmen and killed four more in nine months, in just one county. MRD.vid1.236 Freedmen either armed themselves, MRD.vid1.237 Or prayed the Federal troops would never leave. MRD.vid1.238 Some freedmen and their families slept in the swamps in the mild winter where the men in hoods and facemasks could not find them MRD.vid1.239 Wrote the editor of the Edgefield Advertiser in one of the states’ most strife torn counties: “Good people now look upon the entire electoral contest as a struggle between thieves and plunderers.” MRD.vid1.240 And they worried: “Among the whites is a class of men who hold human life of little value, MRD.vid1.241 and among the colored people there is a class who do not wish to labor and are known as habitual thieves or disturbers of the peace. MRD.vid1.242 Gen. Rufus Saxton wrote back his old friend Robert Smalls about these darkest of times in South Carolina: “I rejoiced when the right of suffrage came and I sorrowed when it was told that some had sold this precious birthright for a miserable mess of potage.” MRD.vid1.243 A few years earlier, Delany heard the church bells ring when the Fourteenth Amendment had been passed; but it was a hollow sound. MRD.vid1.244 He saw freedmen unable to read show up at the Freedmen’s Bureau with great baskets. The word, “Registration” sounded not much different from that other word: “provisions.” MRD.vid1.245 The Republicans’ vampire like bite into the state’s ebbing lifeblood blinded them to that emerging menace and giant, the old Southern Democrats MRD.vid1.246 and their gun-toting right wing rabble. Delany saw this disaster collision coming: MD: Again and again I warned the majority Republicans to go easy on the white planters MRD.vid1.247 because one day the shoe would go over to their foot. And sure enough it did. MRD.vid1.248 NARRATOR: Delany ran for lieutenant governor in 1874 on an independent reformed Republican ticket, getting 64,000 votes as corrupt Chamberlain won. MD: I lost my race but the planters got the shoe on their foot capturing the majority of seats in the statehouse. MRD.vid1.249 NARRATOR: Delany was made justice of the peace in Charleston when, as the gubernatorial election drew near in 1876 was indicted, courtesy of Governor Chamberlain, for misusing the funds of a dirt poor black church. MRD.vid1.250 Hardly. The implicit threat was: do not support Wade Hampton who was now the official candidate against Chamberlain with all the wealth and smart men the Old South could muster squarely behind him. MRD.vid1.251 Hampton and Delany always appealed to people’s desire for peaceful solutions based on reason and fair play. HAMPTON: “I pledge myself solemnly in the presence of the people of South Carolina MRD.vid1.252 and in the presence of my God that, if the Democratic ticket is elected – not one single right enjoyed by the colored people today shall be taken from them.” MRD.vid1.253 NARRATOR: As violence increased the extreme Democratic clubs secretly assigned one man to personally bribe or scare one freedman from voting, MRD.vid1.254 as Chamberlain’s campaign promises became more grotesque and desperate, Delany announced for Wade Hampton in September, 1876 MRD.vid1.255 – immediately putting his life at risk. Delany fought hard and spoke forcefully for Hampton. MD: Freedmen I told one and all were serving a new master now the radical Republican Carpetbaggers. I said the blackest truth out loud – a black man would not be allowed to lead, not just to live, but to lead. I myself always dared to do what the white men ever dared and done – to pull on every lion’s tail a white man has pulled. MRD.vid1.256 NARRATOR: On October 16th, C.C. Bowen promised me that our party of white and black Democrats could speak to freedmen on Edisto Island. MRD.vid1.257 Before the steamer left the Charleston wharf a number of Republican negroes gathered and they noisily demanded that they be permitted to take passage and threateningly declared that they wanted a chance to clean out those Democrats. MRD.vid1.258 MD: The audience at the meeting of some 500 or 600 “African citizens” was by far the most uncouth, savage and uncivilized that I have ever seen. The Republican Negroes started to beat their drums and left in a body. They would listen to “De Damn Democrats. MRD.vid1.259 They marched off and the women crowded around the wagon with their bludgeons with threats, and curses. MRD.vid1.260 MD: ”I rose to speak on the wagon. They interrupted me as I said: “I had come to South Carolina with my sword drawn to fight for the freedom of the black man.” MRD.vid1.261 I said “I had warned you against trusting your money to the Freedman’s Bank; and that you had, to your sorrow, paid no heed to my warning.” MRD.vid1.262 In violation of the agreement that neither party should carry guns or rifles to the place of meeting, MRD.vid1.263 the Negroes had brought their muskets and secreted them in a nearby swamp and in an old house near a church not far from the speaking ground. MRD.vid1.264 They marched out of the swamp with their arms and opened fire upon the whites who were unarmed. In the meantime I, Mr. William E. Simmons, and several aides to white men had taken refuge in a brick house adjoining the church. The Negro militia charged out of the swamp surrounded the brick house and tried to batter down the door. MRD.vid1.265 Failing in this, they broke open the windows and pointed muskets at us. We all escaped except for Mr. Simmons, who upon emerging from the door was knocked down and beaten to death. MRD.vid1.266 Six white men were killed and sixteen whites wounded that day. One black man was killed. The siege of Cainhoy continued for several days afterwards. MRD.vid1.267 White racists conducted similar assaults against blacks especially in Edgefield County. NARRATOR: Wade Hampton did win by a fiercely contested 1100 vote margin, provided in part by an estimated 3,000 Republican blacks who followed Delany’s example. MRD.vid1.268 MD: I had hurt the cause of my people beyond all imaginings. MRD.vid1.269 NARRATOR: Then Wade Hampton made history. With his election for governor still is dispute and the state in anarchy MRD.vid1.270 he met at the Willard Hotel with president-elect Rutherford B. Hayes, MRD.vid1.271 who held onto his election by one electoral vote. To keep his single electoral vote lead, Hayes and Hampton agreed that Hayes would support and confirm Hampton’s election and as Hampton wrote Hayes: MRD.vid1.272 HAMPTON: “If the Federal troops are withdrawn from the State House, there shall be on my part or that of my friends no resort to violence MRD.vid1.273 but we shall look for their maintenance solely to such peaceful remedies as the Constitution and laws of the State provide.” MRD.vid1.274 MD: U.S. soldiers were removed from the South on Hampton’s pact with Hayes - and I helped that. One person called it the abandonment of the colored race. MRD.vid1.275 Wade Hampton appointed me judge and I remained until he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1879. MRD.vid1.276 But the secret all white Charleston County Democratic committee methodically organized the state, county-by-county and parish-by-parish MRD.vid1.277 to crush the Republican party and all spokesmen for Reconstruction. MRD.vid1.278 My son drowned in the Savannah River. His body was found in December, late 1879. My wife Catherine, who had carried our family during my long absences, needed me. MRD.vid1.279 I was old. My children needed their college educations at Wilberforce. The books that set my dreams afire long ago belonged to them now. MRD.vid1.280 So I was there on the dock when a ship - the Azor - set sail for Liberia from Charleston harbor MRD.vid1.281 full of hopeful friends, with my fondest dreams on that distant shore. MRD.vid1.282 My torch had passed from me. MRD.vid1.283 His loving admirers gave him the Liberian flag on that dock for his many years of inspiration MRD.vid1.284 to act on their dreams. "Almost all his many children became teachers. His name is misspelled on his tombstone. His life’s work was lost when a library burned. And the ancestors of those who left for Africa in his lifetime and with his blessing still turn the native soil. MRD.vid1.285 MD: ”Act, act in the living present – but act. Speak the truth and leave the rest to God.” GRANDMA GRACI: No more stories, Martin. End THE VIDEO: The video broken out into segments on Flickr below: Martin Delany was a Harvard-educated physician, explorer who led his own scientific expedition to Africa; co-editor of The North Star newspaper; novelist; political theorist, judge in South Carolina, the first black field officer in the U.S. Army and described by Abraham Lincoln in February, 1865 after meeting him as " an extraordinary and intelligent black man." Martin Delany - Visionary - 1 www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBbR4_XVL9A TRT: 5:38 Martin Delany - Visionary - 2 www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IKkeh-oAJw TRT: 4:55 Martin Delany - Defiance - 3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=akOy0YTgveI TRT: 4:32 Martin Delany - Wartime - 4 www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoov745rJIQ TRT: 7:22 Martin Delany - Meets Lincoln - 5 www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FLy2e5k-lA TRT: 6:34 Martin Delany - Major Delany - 6 www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmsREGq81F4 TRT: 5:32 Martin Delany - Post-War - 7 www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfr5btQPF8M TRT: 2:20 Martin Delany - Disillusioned - 8 www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rdRT-_9mZE TRT: 4:17 Martin Delany - Charleston - 9 www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRmGweOo5A0 TRT: 5:37 Martin Delany - Betrayed - 10 www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdeCu7a4pww TRT: 6:01 Martin Delany - Going Home - 11 www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hj9nWbIfIo TRT: 4:29 OTHER SOURCES: Surkamp, James T. (1853). "To Be More Than Equal: The Many Lives of Martin R. Delany 1812-1885. West Virginia University Libraries. 9 Nov. 1999. Web. 26 Dec. 2010.
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203. 63,000 promised acres

Sea Lion Landing, Columbia, South Carolina
MRD.vid1.203 their faith, and the righteousness of their cause. 1870 saw almost all of those 63,000 promised acres THESE BEGINNING-T0-END, SEQUENCED IMAGES ARE FROM THE LINKED TO VIDEO FOLLOWING THIS SCRIPT. THE SCRIPT'S TEXT IS COMPLETE AND IS BROKEN DOWN TO MATCH TO THE IMAGE SHOWN WITH IT DURING THE VIDEO. - JS "Act in the Living Present - The Life of Martin Robison Delany" - by Jim Surkamp MRD.vid1.1 MD: “I leave you here and journey on and if I never more return, farewell” NARRATOR: Martin Delany finally gave up on America. MRD.vid1.2 His expulsion with two others from Harvard Medical School just because of skin color convinced him that the power of reason and merit alone did not in fact determine the country’s esteemed leaders. So, scraping just a few hundred dollars, MRD.vid1.3 he rented a crew and ship back to Africa, where his grandfather Shango had returned several generations before. MRD.vid1.4 SHIP MRD.vid1.5 His critics including Frederick Douglass, were legion. "You must stay here and fight for freedom," they told him. MRD.vid1.6 He certainly reflected on his already long life: MRD.vid1.7 the long road as one of five children in a freed family in Charles Town Virginia; MRD.vid1.8 and after that fleeing because they illegally learned how to read, followed by the many years as a physician’s assistant in Pittsburgh, MRD.vid1.9 and then editing two influential newspapers. MRD.vid1.10 Most of all he remembered as he perhaps gazed at the sperm whales that wandered into those southern latitudes . . . Of the day he was walking MRD.vid1.11 the road to Pittsburgh in 1829 deciding - his head filled with books and images of pharoahs and Africa - of making this pilgrimage in reverse back to Africa. MRD.vid1.12 “Land Ho!" MRD.vid1.13 NARRATOR: “The arrival of Martin Robison Delany in Liberia is an era in the history of African emigration, an event doubtless that will long be remembered by hundreds of thousands of Africa’s exiled children. MRD.vid1.14 Persons from all parts of the country came to Monrovia to see this great man.” People cheering: MRD.vid1.15 MRD.vid1.16 MRD.vid1.17 MRD.vid1.18 MRD.vid1.19 Ridiculed and ignored in America for speaking - MRD.vid1.20 embraced by the thousands here for speaking - how strange. MRD.vid1.21 MD: “The regeneration of the African race can only be effected by its own efforts, the efforts of its own self and whatever aid may come from other sources; and it must, in this venture succeed, as God leads the movement and His hand guides the way.” MRD.vid1.22 “Face thine accusers, scorn the rack and rod and, if thou hast truth to utter, MRD.vid1.23 speak and leave the rest to God." MRD.vid1.24 But we pushed on to Abeokuta. MRD.vid1.25 Africa taught Martin Delany its mysteries. MD: “The principle markets to see all the wonders MRD.vid1.26 is in the evening. As the shades of evening deepen, MRD.vid1.27 every woman lights her little lamp and, to the distant MRD.vid1.28 observer, presents the beautiful appearance of innumerable stars.” MRD.vid1.29 “But in the entire Aku country one is struck by the beautiful country which continually spreads out in every direction.” MRD.vid1.30 Africa also taught him its nightmares. . . I read August 13th in the West African Herald: MRD.vid1.31 “King Dahomey is about to make the great Custom in honor of the late King Gezo. MRD.vid1.32 Determined to surpass all former monarchs, a great pit has been dug which is to MRD.vid1.33 contain human blood enough to float a canoe. Two thousand persons will be sacrificed on this occasion. MRD.vid1.34 The king has sent his army to make some excursions at the expense of some weaker tribes. The younger people will be sold into slavery. The older persons will be killed At the Grand Custom.” MRD.vid1.35 MD: “Whole villages are taken.” “Farewell, farewell my loving friends, farewell. . .” MRD.vid1.36 The jasmine smells of Africa are tonight less fragrant than my scented memory of soft honey-suckled summer’s night breezes in Virginia long ago, and awaking to the mockingbird. {MRD.5:37} END PART 1 TO BLACK MRD.vid1.37 MRD.vid1.38 NARRATOR: On April 10th, 1860 at Lagos, Martin Delany and Robert Campbell MRD.vid1.39 boarded ship for London and Birmingham MRD.vid1.40 to seek backers for a plan to build freedman’s cotton farms in the Niger Valley. MRD.vid1.41 They would undersell, at the gold price of fourteen cents a pound, all the slave wrought cotton from the plantations back home. MRD.vid1.42 To make bales of cotton rot on the docks of Charleston and New Orleans as it were. MRD.vid1.43 MD: When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, my children’s age – I worked hours and hours inscribing with a fine needle the Lord Prayer – MRD.vid1.44 all of it – on the face of an English six pence like this one. MRD.vid1.45 SHIP MRD.vid1.46 NARRATOR: Delany was not wanted in America because MRD.vid1.47 of his radical political views. So he set sail for London and began preparing his report to his backers MRD.vid1.48 on the promise of Africa. MRD.vid1.49 MD: I noticed that. . . when I read, my eyes scan the page. . . back and forth. . . and up and down like a loom. MRD.vid1.50 I was so crazy about words, I was like Cervantes. I’d pick up every grimy scrap in the gutters of Charles Town MRD.vid1.51 to see if it had magic code to worlds beyond MRD.vid1.52 I read and broke bread with the ideas and dreams of Thomas Jefferson and Socrates And ancient pharaohs. MRD.vid1.53 Then Grandma Graci at night would tell me about my grandfather Shango. GRANDMA GRACI: "No more stories Martin." MD: And off to sleep and dreams about the greatest people who ever lived. MRD.vid1.54 I wanted my child to accumulate great hopes. MRD.vid1.55 If I ever set shoe leather on New York’s dock, President Buchanan himself would drop the noose around my despised neck, MRD.vid1.56 since John Brown, who I knew, did rebel and killed, and was hanged, I didn’t reckon there would be much of a welcoming home party for me. MRD.vid1.57 NARRATOR: Dr. Delany’s most prestigious speaking invitation was before the International Statistical Society, MRD.vid1.58 chaired by Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, and the most esteemed scientific body in the world on July 16th at MRD.vid1.59 London’s Somerset House. As the meeting was beginning at four, MRD.vid1.60 Lord Brougham, who hated American slavery, addressed the body which included the delegation from the United States, MRD.vid1.61 headed by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet MRD.vid1.62 The United States Ambassador George Mifflin Dallas was also seated on the dais. Both fervently believed as did their MRD.vid1.63 President that those called slaves were technically, legally, and truly MRD.vid1.64 three fifths human - just a notch above a good horse. BROUGHAM: “I call to the attention of Mr. Dallas to the fact there is a Negro present, MRD.vid1.65 and I hope he will feel no scruples on that account." MRD.vid1.66 MD: I was eye to eye with men who wished me dead. MRD.vid1.67 So many memories engulfed me. “I rise, your Royal Highness, MRD.vid1.68 to thank his Lordship, the unflinching friend of the Negro and for the remarks he has made to myself and to assure your Royal Highness and his Lordship that I AM a man.” MRD.vid1.69 NARRATOR: Withering amid what the London Times called the wildest shouts ever from so grave an assemblage, Longstreet jumped up and led the United States delegation out of the hall. MRD.vid1.70 Ambassador Dallas stayed seated on the dais. The proceedings ended. And Dr. Delany became an international sensation. MRD.vid1.71 Delany read the reactions to his actions from America. Even Frederick Douglass spoke well of him. A new President had been elected. His plans for Africa delayed by war there, and too many days of watching birthdays of his children go by from his cramped little room in London, MRD.vid1.72 cold rain drizzling outside and streaking his window pane. He wrote that memories leapt to life and “pierced my heart like a golden spear and riddled my breast like precious stones." MRD.vid1.73 Memories, such as that of Lucinda Snow, the blind girl in the Ohio Asylum – who played for him Rose Bud on a piano MRD.vid1.74 shortly after his own dearest daughter had just died. Nothing, Delany decided, could keep him from being home MRD.vid1.75 in Chatham, Ontario by Christmas. There was hope there. It was 1860 MRD.vid1.76 Doctor Delany joined his family in Chatham, Dec. 29th, 1860 to help a flood of escaped ex-slaves. South Carolina voted to secede nine days before. Slavery was being challenged in earnest. MRD.vid1.77 On January 9th, 1861, Confederate shore batteries fire upon Federal supply ships approaching Fort Sumter. MRD.vid1.78 President Lincoln at his March 4th Inauguration said: “Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.” MRD.vid1.79 Peacetime ends. 6 images of fort sumter shelling not counted 80-86 MRD.vid1.85 Bull Run, July 21st, 1861 MRD.vid1.86 Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign, May-June, 1862 MRD.vid1.87 Antietam, the bloodiest day in American military history, September 17, 1862 MRD.vid1.88 Fredericksburg, Dec. 13, 1862 MRD.vid1.89 Vicksburg, Dec. 1862 through May, 1863 MRD.vid1.90 “All persons held as slaves shall thenceforward be forever free and such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed services.” President Lincoln, January 1st, 1863 MRD.vid1.91 179,000 men of color enlist. Three million remain enslaved. MRD.vid1.92 Confederate General Lee loses Gen. Jackson, his best, at Chancellorsville, May, 1863. MRD.vid1.93 Lee Gambles MRD.vid1.94 Over 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg foresees the ultimate defeat of the Southern Cause, July, 1863. MRD.vid1.95 Days later, angry antidraft mobs in soldierless New York City burn a Negro orphan asylum. MRD.vid1.96 And lynch twelve innocent freed blacks. MRD.vid1.97 The 7th New York militia helps restore order. MRD.vid1.98 On July 18th, public opinion is reversed by extreme bravery of men in the 54th Massachusetts' Colored Regiment at Fort Wagner, South Carolina. MRD.vid1.99 “With silent tongue, clenched teeth, and steady eye, they have helped us on to this great consummation, while others have strove to hinder it.” A. Lincoln, April 26, 1864 MRD.vid1.100 A ninety two per cent Republican vote by furloughed soldiers delivers big unexpected off-year wins in Ohio and Pennsylvania for Lincoln and his party. MRD.vid1.101 Abolitionist Lew Tappan writes: “We are coming out of the slanderous valley for we have lived to have old opponents say to us: “We were wrong.” MRD.vid1.102 “The year has brought many changes I thought impossible, May God bless this Cause.” Black recruit in Baltimore, MD. MRD.vid1.103 The U.S. Senate passes an amendment abolishing all slavery. The house still opposes. – April 9, 1864 MRD.vid1.104 Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest orders the murder of mostly black prisoners at Fort Pillow, April 12, 1864. MRD.vid1.105 "(it is hoped) these facts will demonstrate that Negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.” MRD.vid1.106 “Whatever happens there will be no turning back” – a letter to President Lincoln from his new commander, Gen. Grant, April, 1864. MRD.vid1.107 The Battle of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, May 5th through 12th, 1864. MRD.vid1.108 “These men are incomprehensible standing from daylight to dark killing and wounding each other, then making jokes and exchanging newspapers.” Col.Theodore Lyman. MRD.vid1.109 Gen. Grant of his Cold Harbor, Va. attack, June, 1864: “I regret this assault more than any other.” MRD.vid1.110 Equal pay for black troops is finally enacted, June, 1864. MRD.vid1.111 A teacher in the occupied South writes: “Their cry is for 'books' and 'When will school begin?'” MRD.vid1.112 Civilians become targets. MRD.vid1.113 Union Gen. Hunter torches “Leeland” and “Fountain Rock” in Shepherdstown, WV and VMI in July, 1864. MRD.vid1.114 General Jubal Early strikes back, levels Chambersburg, ransoms Hagerstown and Frederick, MD. MRD.vid1.115 “The valley is not fit for man or beast. I have destroyed 2,000 barns." – “Gen. Philip Sheridan MRD.vid1.116 Gen. William Sherman writes: “We cannot change the hearts of these people. But we can make it so terrible and make them so sick of war, they will not appeal to it again.” MRD.vid1.117 “I can make my men march and make Georgia howl.” Gen. Sherman while cutting a swath of destruction fifty miles wide to Savannah to the sea. MRD.vid1.118 Martin Delany sought roles and work for Gen. Sherman's thousands of "camp followers" MRD.vid1.119 wagon freed blacks MRD.vid1.120 stagecoach MRD.vid1.121 Delany went to President Lincoln himself with an idea to make the South Carolina coastline a new Israel MRD.vid1.122 for freedmen and women who had been joining Sherman’s army marching across Georgia in the tens of thousands. First, Delany thought, they would be an army of MRD.vid1.123 Africa of able black men, recruited, trained, and then themselves becoming liberating soldiers and, after the war, these same men would become able keepers of the land, MRD.vid1.124 homecoming MRD.vid1.125 the same land Sherman had promised in South Carolina in January of that same year. Gen. Sherman tentatively gave, MRD.vid1.126 subject to the approval of the President of course, tens of thousands of acres of land to the freedman. MRD.vid1.127 Each family, Sherman, would get forty acres – a place in the sun - and one army mule on loan MRD.vid1.128 If Abeokuta failed to be Martin Delany’s promised land, Carolina coastline would be his Israel. MRD.vid1.129 On a cold clammy damp morning at 8 AM on Feb. 8th, Delany was welcomed by President Lincoln into his study MRD.vid1.130 at the White House. MRD.vid1.131 Lincoln had followed Delany’s doings for years. He knew him. On entering MRD.vid1.132 the executive chamber and being introduced to his excellency, a generous grasp of the hand brought me to a seat in front of him. MRD.vid1.133 AL: “What can I do for you, sir?” MD: “Nothing, Mr. President, MRD.vid1.134 but I’ve come to propose something to you, which I think will be beneficial to this nation in this critical hour of her peril.” MRD.vid1.135 AL: “Go on sir.” Delany and Lincoln discussed the value of black leaders for freed black Americans, and how so many feared black leadership. MRD.vid1.136 AL: “This is the very thing I’ve been looking for and hoping for; but nobody offered it. I have talked about it; I hoped and prayed for it. But up until now, it has never been proposed. MRD.vid1.137 “When I issued the Emancipation Proclamation, I had this thing in contemplation. I then gave them a chance by prohibiting any interference on the part of the army; but they did not embrace it.” MRD.vid1.138 MD: “But Mr. President, these poor people could not READ your proclamation.” MRD.vid1.139 While he spoke Lincoln was writing MRD.vid1.140 on a piece of paper. “Hon. E. M. Stanton: “Don’t not fail to have a meeting with this most extraordinary and intelligent black man – MRD.vid1.141 A. Lincoln.” MRD.vid1.142 AL: “Stanton is firing! Listen. He is in his glory. Noble man!” MD: “What is it? Mr. President” AL: “Why don’t you know? Charleston’s ours.” MRD.vid1.143 NARRATOR: Martin Delany later in April, caught a stage for the cradle of Southern animosities, MRD.vid1.144 which turned by the magic stroke of a pen and the raising of a sword MRD.vid1.145 into a new land of opportunity. MRD.vid1.146 He was to report to Gen. Rufus Saxton, a strong protector of freedman who commanded the occupation forces in South Carolina. 3 fire images MRD.vid1.147 MRD.vid1.148 MRD.vid1.149 MRD.vid1.150 MD: “I entered the city which from earliest childhood and through life I had learned to contemplate with feelings of utmost abhorrence, where the sound of the lash at the whipping post, and the hammer of the auctioneer MRD.vid1.151 were coordinate sounds in thrilling harmony, such as might well have vied for the infamous King of Dahomey.” MRD.vid1.152 “For a moment, I found myself dashing in unmeasured strides through the city. Again I halted to look upon the shattered walls MRD.vid1.153 of the once stately, but now deserted edifices. And but for the vigilance and fidelity MRD.vid1.154 of the colored firemen, there would have been nothing left but a smoldering plain of runs in the place where Charleston once stood.” MRD.vid1.155 NARRATOR: Chief Justice Salmon Chase in Charleston said: “A great race numbering four million is suddenly brought in freedom. All the world is looking to see whether the prophecies of the enemies of that race will be fulfilled or falsified. It rests upon the men of that race to tell.” MRD.vid1.156 Delany made it in time MRD.vid1.157 to see the flags changed at Fort Sumter, with his son, a young private, also there. And his old friend MRD.vid1.158 and comrade-in-arms William Lloyd Garrison who as he bade goodbye to a large adoring audience in Charleston said: GARRISON: “I have always advocated non-resistance; but this much I say to you, Come what may, never will you submit again to slavery. Do anything. Die first! MRD.vid1.159 But don’t submit again to them, never again be slaves. Farewell.” MRD.vid1.160 NARRATOR: Major Delany, the first black field officer in the U.S. Army, MRD.vid1.161 quickly organized schools, farms, MRD.vid1.162 farmers, freedmen and tried to reason with disenfranchised plantation owners, MRD.vid1.163 who were always trying to tie new freedman into enslaving contracts, exploiting their illiteracy. MRD.vid1.164 But Delany they loved. He was one of them and he told it to them straight. MRD.vid1.165 MD: “I came to talk to you in plain words so as you can understand how to open the gates of oppression and let the captive free. MRD.vid1.166 In this state there are 200 thousand able, intelligent honorable Negroes, not an inferior race, mind you.” MRD.vid1.167 “I want to tell you one thing, do you know that if it was not for the black man, MRD.vid1.168 this war never would have been brought to a close with success. MRD.vid1.169 Do you know that? MRD.vid1.170 Do you know that?” MRD.vid1.171 NARRATOR: But they would be asked to submit again - and soon. From the moment a bullet penetrated the Great Liberator’s brain at Ford’s Theater, no such a grand promise of land and freedom would ever hold. In May, just a month later, MRD.vid1.172 the newly appointed President Johnson ordered all these lands – those not properly surveyed - returned MRD.vid1.173 to some 300 plantation owners – even if MRD.vid1.174 someone else’s crop was already growing in the field. One freedman wrote to Andrew Johnson himself: MRD.vid1.175 “We have been ready to strike for liberty and humanity, yea to fight if need be, to preserve the glorious union. And now, we are ready to pay for this land. MRD.vid1.176 ‘Sign contracts with your old master and work their land as partners’ This was the plea to most freed blacks. MRD.vid1.177 Throughout that long summer, Delany’s superiors Generals Howard and Saxton avoided Johnson’s order and eventually defied them outright until September MRD.vid1.178 when they broke the news to the freedmen they loved so much. An Edisto Island freedman wrote his friend, MRD.vid1.179 Gen. Howard: “You ask us to forgive the landowners of our island. You only lost your right to arm in war and might forgive them. MRD.vid1.180 The man who tied me to a tree and gave me thirty nine lashes, who stripped and flogged my mother and sister and who will not let me stay in his empty hut unless I do his planting – that man I cannot forgive. . . General we cannot remain here.” MRD.vid1.181 NARRATOR: Many left South Carolina. Some stayed and were beaten. MRD.vid1.182 Delany fought: MD: “Every species of infamy, however atrocious, private and public, bare-faced and in open daylight MRD.vid1.183 is defiantly perpetrated under the direction and guidance of the despicable political leaders in the sacred name of ‘Republicanism’ and ’Radicalism.’ MRD.vid1.184 “But these Yankees talk smooth to you. Oh yeh. Their tongues roll just like the drum. They don’t pay you enough.” MRD.vid1.185 I was told to stay out of politics. NARRATOR: The forty acres and a mule promised to freedmen were already secretly being returned to the planters courtesy of the tireless machinations of Trescott and Williams in Washington. MRD.vid1.186 They even got Gen. Sherman to write President Johnson. On the brink of being court-martialed for his opposition, MRD.vid1.187 Gen. Howard wrote his superiors: “The lands which have been taken possession by this bureau have been solemnly pledged to the freedman. Thousands of them are already located on tracts of forty acres each. MRD.vid1.188 The love of the soil and desire to own farms amounts to a passion. MRD.vid1.189 It appears to be the dearest hope of their lives.” MRD.vid1.190 NARRATOR: Within two years, the Freedman Bureau had its main function of redistributing the lands to original owners and apologizing for it . . . MRD.vid1.191 Saxton was reassigned, Gen. Howard court-martialed, MRD.vid1.192 but Col. Delany – a survivor – pressed on. He had made himself too valuable to too many people in a very short time. MRD.vid1.193 Republican politicians, like Christopher Columbus Bowen, who controlled the patronage at the Customs House, hated his dangerously incorruptible independence MRD.vid1.194 and integrity, but like everyone, MRD.vid1.195 bowed to his almost messianic hold on the freedmen – MRD.vid1.196 this the long-awaited black leader. MRD.vid1.197 And on the other side, the old Southern aristocracy MRD.vid1.198 saw Delany’s magic too. And planned to use him someday MRD.vid1.199 for their own ends. As one old Southern editor put, in grudging admiration: “Martin Delany is a genuine Negro.” MRD.vid1.200 MD: “No one who knows me will doubt my African proclivities. I have possessions in Africa which I hope to enjoy.” NARRATOR: The old Southern guard watched and waited. They noticed Delany’s perceptibly growing disgust with corruption, greased palms and greed MRD.vid1.201 that fueled his own Republican Party’s machine. MD: The Freedman’s Bureau was allowed to continue to return those 63,000 acres to the planters. MRD.vid1.202 I told freedman to get educated to see what was going on. “Through two crop failures in 66 and 67, I told freedmen to rely on their muscles, MRD.vid1.203 their faith, and the righteousness of their cause.” 1870 saw almost all of those 63,000 promised acres MRD.vid1.204 were back in planters hands and some 90,000 of South Carolina’s freedmen MRD.vid1.205 had left in disgust and desperation. MRD.vid1.206 2,000 brothers and sisters set sail for my beloved Africa. The best of our people. Their hopes were gone before mine. Delany’s disgust deepened on a trip to New York City where he represented the state in a bond issue. And he found out that Governor Chamberlain MRD.vid1.207 had given his old college chum and roommate $750,000 in commissions. MRD.vid1.208 The Old Southern guard, watched and waited knowing that Martin Delany might be the key to regaining power. MRD.vid1.209 WADE HAMPTON: “We can control the Negroes if we act discreetly.” I would come to know people like Wade Hampton an embodiment of the old South who invited me to speak at barbecue gatherings. HAMPTON: “If it means we can protect our state from destruction, I am willing to send Negroes to Congress. They will be better than anyone who can take the oath of loyalty and I should rather trust them than renegades or Yankees. “My experience has been that when a Yankee can do a bit of rascality, the temptation to do it is almost irresistible.” MRD.vid1.210 NARRATOR: No one, though, would be a more fateful associate in Martin Delany’s long and broad lifetime as Wade Hampton, the old cavalry general, aristocrat and front man for the South. Who - yes, truly speaking personally for himself - wished for a better life for the freedman because he and Delany both fervently lived and advocated personal honor and a regimen of book learning and practical skills as every freedman’s road to true permanent economic redemption. MRD.vid1.211 It was only a matter of time that these two stars would head on a one on one collision and one of those two stars would orbit around the other. MRD.vid1.212 If only there had been more than just one Wade Hampton and one Martin Delany. America’s working, educated electorate would have emerged sooner. But the personal prestige, humanitarian and pragmatic ways of each man could only briefly capture the public imagination, MRD.vid1.213 while, at all other times, whites, blacks, Democrats and Republicans slid disgracefully into the abyss where guns and bribes were constantly used as the preferred path to personal power and glory. MRD.vid1.214 Pressured out of the Freedman’s Bureau in 1869, Delany was retired from public life, selling real estate and editing his own newspaper, when Rev. Richard Cain came to him one day in 1872 and urged him to help elect Franklin Moses. MRD.vid1.215 He might even get – for his efforts – a decent job later to support his seamstress wife, Catherine, and their large family. MRD.vid1.216 Delany could deliver freedmen’s votes. Hoping to enhance his own political fortunes in this state with a majority of black voters, and hoping to get more homesteads for freedmen, Delany stumped vigorously for Moses. MRD.vid1.217 Moses had always given lip service to Delany’s plan to attract Northern money to be long-term, low-interest loans to help the freedmen to buy and develop their own homesteads. MRD.vid1.218 Delany’s unvarnished truth-telling inspired the common people and irked those grubbing after filthy lucre. MRD.vid1.219 Wrote onetime governor B.F. Perry: “After mature reflection, I believe Col. Delany has exhibited in his speeches more wisdom and prudence, more honor and patriotism than any other Republican, white or black in South Carolina.” MRD.vid1.220 Delany wrote that, should the homeless become landowners, they would at once become proportionately interested in the affairs of state. Before either school house or church can be erected, he said the people themselves must be settled in homes of their own. MRD.vid1.221 Freedmen were leaving the state, denied the once promised forty acres virtually all back in original hands, and their life savings deposited faithfully in the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, now gone form mismanagement. MRD.vid1.222 Delany knew his plan could work. In three years he organized white cotton wholesalers and freedmen farmers on Hilton Head Island into a peaceable alliance that grew and harvested the crop profitably. Moses was elected. MRD.vid1.223 So was “Honest John” who boasted he bought his seat in the U.S. Senate for $40,000. MRD.vid1.224 But Governor Moses continued to drive even higher the state debt. MRD.vid1.225 It had already soared from one to over seventeen million dollars in the previous five years. Moses then raised taxes on freed holders to pay for all this. MRD.vid1.226 And he lined his pockets with priced pardons sold to 503 imprisoned felons. And they were all released into this heavily armed, hate-filled powder keg land. And Governor Moses gave Delany no job. MRD.vid1.227 Rev. Cain wrote Moses: “I had assured Mr. Delany that you would not break faith. He has staked all on your word. For Heaven’s sake, do not cast him away.” MRD.vid1.228 Seeing Beaufort’s old St. Helena Church summed up a visitors’ feeling in 1873 about every South Carolina town he saw: MRD.vid1.229 it was one of complete prostration, dejection, MRD.vid1.230 stagnation. MRD.vid1.231 VISITOR: “Utter stagnation marks its streets and everything is flavored with decay. The mockingbird sings as if winter has no meaning for them, MRD.vid1.232 the old mansions are permeated with the air of desertion. The merry tinkling that proceeds from the closed shutters of one of them seems altogether dissonant with the surroundings.” MRD.vid1.233 Bad crops, bad weather, a lost position in world cotton markets, a national depression – this all contributed. MRD.vid1.234 So by 1874, all of South Carolina, including Delany’s beloved St. Helena Island, looked like an armed camp. MRD.vid1.235 The Ku Klux Klan was forming almost three hundred rifle clubs that once beat two hundred freedmen and killed four more in nine months, in just one county. MRD.vid1.236 Freedmen either armed themselves, MRD.vid1.237 Or prayed the Federal troops would never leave. MRD.vid1.238 Some freedmen and their families slept in the swamps in the mild winter where the men in hoods and facemasks could not find them MRD.vid1.239 Wrote the editor of the Edgefield Advertiser in one of the states’ most strife torn counties: “Good people now look upon the entire electoral contest as a struggle between thieves and plunderers.” MRD.vid1.240 And they worried: “Among the whites is a class of men who hold human life of little value, MRD.vid1.241 and among the colored people there is a class who do not wish to labor and are known as habitual thieves or disturbers of the peace. MRD.vid1.242 Gen. Rufus Saxton wrote back his old friend Robert Smalls about these darkest of times in South Carolina: “I rejoiced when the right of suffrage came and I sorrowed when it was told that some had sold this precious birthright for a miserable mess of potage.” MRD.vid1.243 A few years earlier, Delany heard the church bells ring when the Fourteenth Amendment had been passed; but it was a hollow sound. MRD.vid1.244 He saw freedmen unable to read show up at the Freedmen’s Bureau with great baskets. The word, “Registration” sounded not much different from that other word: “provisions.” MRD.vid1.245 The Republicans’ vampire like bite into the state’s ebbing lifeblood blinded them to that emerging menace and giant, the old Southern Democrats MRD.vid1.246 and their gun-toting right wing rabble. Delany saw this disaster collision coming: MD: Again and again I warned the majority Republicans to go easy on the white planters MRD.vid1.247 because one day the shoe would go over to their foot. And sure enough it did. MRD.vid1.248 NARRATOR: Delany ran for lieutenant governor in 1874 on an independent reformed Republican ticket, getting 64,000 votes as corrupt Chamberlain won. MD: I lost my race but the planters got the shoe on their foot capturing the majority of seats in the statehouse. MRD.vid1.249 NARRATOR: Delany was made justice of the peace in Charleston when, as the gubernatorial election drew near in 1876 was indicted, courtesy of Governor Chamberlain, for misusing the funds of a dirt poor black church. MRD.vid1.250 Hardly. The implicit threat was: do not support Wade Hampton who was now the official candidate against Chamberlain with all the wealth and smart men the Old South could muster squarely behind him. MRD.vid1.251 Hampton and Delany always appealed to people’s desire for peaceful solutions based on reason and fair play. HAMPTON: “I pledge myself solemnly in the presence of the people of South Carolina MRD.vid1.252 and in the presence of my God that, if the Democratic ticket is elected – not one single right enjoyed by the colored people today shall be taken from them.” MRD.vid1.253 NARRATOR: As violence increased the extreme Democratic clubs secretly assigned one man to personally bribe or scare one freedman from voting, MRD.vid1.254 as Chamberlain’s campaign promises became more grotesque and desperate, Delany announced for Wade Hampton in September, 1876 MRD.vid1.255 – immediately putting his life at risk. Delany fought hard and spoke forcefully for Hampton. MD: Freedmen I told one and all were serving a new master now the radical Republican Carpetbaggers. I said the blackest truth out loud – a black man would not be allowed to lead, not just to live, but to lead. I myself always dared to do what the white men ever dared and done – to pull on every lion’s tail a white man has pulled. MRD.vid1.256 NARRATOR: On October 16th, C.C. Bowen promised me that our party of white and black Democrats could speak to freedmen on Edisto Island. MRD.vid1.257 Before the steamer left the Charleston wharf a number of Republican negroes gathered and they noisily demanded that they be permitted to take passage and threateningly declared that they wanted a chance to clean out those Democrats. MRD.vid1.258 MD: The audience at the meeting of some 500 or 600 “African citizens” was by far the most uncouth, savage and uncivilized that I have ever seen. The Republican Negroes started to beat their drums and left in a body. They would listen to “De Damn Democrats. MRD.vid1.259 They marched off and the women crowded around the wagon with their bludgeons with threats, and curses. MRD.vid1.260 MD: ”I rose to speak on the wagon. They interrupted me as I said: “I had come to South Carolina with my sword drawn to fight for the freedom of the black man.” MRD.vid1.261 I said “I had warned you against trusting your money to the Freedman’s Bank; and that you had, to your sorrow, paid no heed to my warning.” MRD.vid1.262 In violation of the agreement that neither party should carry guns or rifles to the place of meeting, MRD.vid1.263 the Negroes had brought their muskets and secreted them in a nearby swamp and in an old house near a church not far from the speaking ground. MRD.vid1.264 They marched out of the swamp with their arms and opened fire upon the whites who were unarmed. In the meantime I, Mr. William E. Simmons, and several aides to white men had taken refuge in a brick house adjoining the church. The Negro militia charged out of the swamp surrounded the brick house and tried to batter down the door. MRD.vid1.265 Failing in this, they broke open the windows and pointed muskets at us. We all escaped except for Mr. Simmons, who upon emerging from the door was knocked down and beaten to death. MRD.vid1.266 Six white men were killed and sixteen whites wounded that day. One black man was killed. The siege of Cainhoy continued for several days afterwards. MRD.vid1.267 White racists conducted similar assaults against blacks especially in Edgefield County. NARRATOR: Wade Hampton did win by a fiercely contested 1100 vote margin, provided in part by an estimated 3,000 Republican blacks who followed Delany’s example. MRD.vid1.268 MD: I had hurt the cause of my people beyond all imaginings. MRD.vid1.269 NARRATOR: Then Wade Hampton made history. With his election for governor still is dispute and the state in anarchy MRD.vid1.270 he met at the Willard Hotel with president-elect Rutherford B. Hayes, MRD.vid1.271 who held onto his election by one electoral vote. To keep his single electoral vote lead, Hayes and Hampton agreed that Hayes would support and confirm Hampton’s election and as Hampton wrote Hayes: MRD.vid1.272 HAMPTON: “If the Federal troops are withdrawn from the State House, there shall be on my part or that of my friends no resort to violence MRD.vid1.273 but we shall look for their maintenance solely to such peaceful remedies as the Constitution and laws of the State provide.” MRD.vid1.274 MD: U.S. soldiers were removed from the South on Hampton’s pact with Hayes - and I helped that. One person called it the abandonment of the colored race. MRD.vid1.275 Wade Hampton appointed me judge and I remained until he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1879. MRD.vid1.276 But the secret all white Charleston County Democratic committee methodically organized the state, county-by-county and parish-by-parish MRD.vid1.277 to crush the Republican party and all spokesmen for Reconstruction. MRD.vid1.278 My son drowned in the Savannah River. His body was found in December, late 1879. My wife Catherine, who had carried our family during my long absences, needed me. MRD.vid1.279 I was old. My children needed their college educations at Wilberforce. The books that set my dreams afire long ago belonged to them now. MRD.vid1.280 So I was there on the dock when a ship - the Azor - set sail for Liberia from Charleston harbor MRD.vid1.281 full of hopeful friends, with my fondest dreams on that distant shore. MRD.vid1.282 My torch had passed from me. MRD.vid1.283 His loving admirers gave him the Liberian flag on that dock for his many years of inspiration MRD.vid1.284 to act on their dreams. "Almost all his many children became teachers. His name is misspelled on his tombstone. His life’s work was lost when a library burned. And the ancestors of those who left for Africa in his lifetime and with his blessing still turn the native soil. MRD.vid1.285 MD: ”Act, act in the living present – but act. Speak the truth and leave the rest to God.” GRANDMA GRACI: No more stories, Martin. End THE VIDEO: The video broken out into segments on Flickr below: Martin Delany was a Harvard-educated physician, explorer who led his own scientific expedition to Africa; co-editor of The North Star newspaper; novelist; political theorist, judge in South Carolina, the first black field officer in the U.S. Army and described by Abraham Lincoln in February, 1865 after meeting him as " an extraordinary and intelligent black man." Martin Delany - Visionary - 1 www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBbR4_XVL9A TRT: 5:38 Martin Delany - Visionary - 2 www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IKkeh-oAJw TRT: 4:55 Martin Delany - Defiance - 3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=akOy0YTgveI TRT: 4:32 Martin Delany - Wartime - 4 www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoov745rJIQ TRT: 7:22 Martin Delany - Meets Lincoln - 5 www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FLy2e5k-lA TRT: 6:34 Martin Delany - Major Delany - 6 www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmsREGq81F4 TRT: 5:32 Martin Delany - Post-War - 7 www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfr5btQPF8M TRT: 2:20 Martin Delany - Disillusioned - 8 www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rdRT-_9mZE TRT: 4:17 Martin Delany - Charleston - 9 www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRmGweOo5A0 TRT: 5:37 Martin Delany - Betrayed - 10 www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdeCu7a4pww TRT: 6:01 Martin Delany - Going Home - 11 www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hj9nWbIfIo TRT: 4:29 OTHER SOURCES: Surkamp, James T. (1853). "To Be More Than Equal: The Many Lives of Martin R. Delany 1812-1885. West Virginia University Libraries. 9 Nov. 1999. Web. 26 Dec. 2010.
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285. "no more stories, Martin"

Sea Lion Landing, Columbia, South Carolina
MRD.vid1.285 MD: ”Act, act in the living present – but act. Speak the truth and leave the rest to God.” GRANDMA GRACI: No more stories, Martin. End THESE BEGINNING-T0-END, SEQUENCED IMAGES ARE FROM THE LINKED TO VIDEO FOLLOWING THIS SCRIPT. THE SCRIPT'S TEXT IS COMPLETE AND IS BROKEN DOWN TO MATCH TO THE IMAGE SHOWN WITH IT DURING THE VIDEO. - JS "Act in the Living Present - The Life of Martin Robison Delany" - by Jim Surkamp MRD.vid1.1 MD: “I leave you here and journey on and if I never more return, farewell” NARRATOR: Martin Delany finally gave up on America. MRD.vid1.2 His expulsion with two others from Harvard Medical School just because of skin color convinced him that the power of reason and merit alone did not in fact determine the country’s esteemed leaders. So, scraping just a few hundred dollars, MRD.vid1.3 he rented a crew and ship back to Africa, where his grandfather Shango had returned several generations before. MRD.vid1.4 SHIP MRD.vid1.5 His critics including Frederick Douglass, were legion. "You must stay here and fight for freedom," they told him. MRD.vid1.6 He certainly reflected on his already long life: MRD.vid1.7 the long road as one of five children in a freed family in Charles Town Virginia; MRD.vid1.8 and after that fleeing because they illegally learned how to read, followed by the many years as a physician’s assistant in Pittsburgh, MRD.vid1.9 and then editing two influential newspapers. MRD.vid1.10 Most of all he remembered as he perhaps gazed at the sperm whales that wandered into those southern latitudes . . . Of the day he was walking MRD.vid1.11 the road to Pittsburgh in 1829 deciding - his head filled with books and images of pharoahs and Africa - of making this pilgrimage in reverse back to Africa. MRD.vid1.12 “Land Ho!" MRD.vid1.13 NARRATOR: “The arrival of Martin Robison Delany in Liberia is an era in the history of African emigration, an event doubtless that will long be remembered by hundreds of thousands of Africa’s exiled children. MRD.vid1.14 Persons from all parts of the country came to Monrovia to see this great man.” People cheering: MRD.vid1.15 MRD.vid1.16 MRD.vid1.17 MRD.vid1.18 MRD.vid1.19 Ridiculed and ignored in America for speaking - MRD.vid1.20 embraced by the thousands here for speaking - how strange. MRD.vid1.21 MD: “The regeneration of the African race can only be effected by its own efforts, the efforts of its own self and whatever aid may come from other sources; and it must, in this venture succeed, as God leads the movement and His hand guides the way.” MRD.vid1.22 “Face thine accusers, scorn the rack and rod and, if thou hast truth to utter, MRD.vid1.23 speak and leave the rest to God." MRD.vid1.24 But we pushed on to Abeokuta. MRD.vid1.25 Africa taught Martin Delany its mysteries. MD: “The principle markets to see all the wonders MRD.vid1.26 is in the evening. As the shades of evening deepen, MRD.vid1.27 every woman lights her little lamp and, to the distant MRD.vid1.28 observer, presents the beautiful appearance of innumerable stars.” MRD.vid1.29 “But in the entire Aku country one is struck by the beautiful country which continually spreads out in every direction.” MRD.vid1.30 Africa also taught him its nightmares. . . I read August 13th in the West African Herald: MRD.vid1.31 “King Dahomey is about to make the great Custom in honor of the late King Gezo. MRD.vid1.32 Determined to surpass all former monarchs, a great pit has been dug which is to MRD.vid1.33 contain human blood enough to float a canoe. Two thousand persons will be sacrificed on this occasion. MRD.vid1.34 The king has sent his army to make some excursions at the expense of some weaker tribes. The younger people will be sold into slavery. The older persons will be killed At the Grand Custom.” MRD.vid1.35 MD: “Whole villages are taken.” “Farewell, farewell my loving friends, farewell. . .” MRD.vid1.36 The jasmine smells of Africa are tonight less fragrant than my scented memory of soft honey-suckled summer’s night breezes in Virginia long ago, and awaking to the mockingbird. {MRD.5:37} END PART 1 TO BLACK MRD.vid1.37 MRD.vid1.38 NARRATOR: On April 10th, 1860 at Lagos, Martin Delany and Robert Campbell MRD.vid1.39 boarded ship for London and Birmingham MRD.vid1.40 to seek backers for a plan to build freedman’s cotton farms in the Niger Valley. MRD.vid1.41 They would undersell, at the gold price of fourteen cents a pound, all the slave wrought cotton from the plantations back home. MRD.vid1.42 To make bales of cotton rot on the docks of Charleston and New Orleans as it were. MRD.vid1.43 MD: When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, my children’s age – I worked hours and hours inscribing with a fine needle the Lord Prayer – MRD.vid1.44 all of it – on the face of an English six pence like this one. MRD.vid1.45 SHIP MRD.vid1.46 NARRATOR: Delany was not wanted in America because MRD.vid1.47 of his radical political views. So he set sail for London and began preparing his report to his backers MRD.vid1.48 on the promise of Africa. MRD.vid1.49 MD: I noticed that. . . when I read, my eyes scan the page. . . back and forth. . . and up and down like a loom. MRD.vid1.50 I was so crazy about words, I was like Cervantes. I’d pick up every grimy scrap in the gutters of Charles Town MRD.vid1.51 to see if it had magic code to worlds beyond MRD.vid1.52 I read and broke bread with the ideas and dreams of Thomas Jefferson and Socrates And ancient pharaohs. MRD.vid1.53 Then Grandma Graci at night would tell me about my grandfather Shango. GRANDMA GRACI: "No more stories Martin." MD: And off to sleep and dreams about the greatest people who ever lived. MRD.vid1.54 I wanted my child to accumulate great hopes. MRD.vid1.55 If I ever set shoe leather on New York’s dock, President Buchanan himself would drop the noose around my despised neck, MRD.vid1.56 since John Brown, who I knew, did rebel and killed, and was hanged, I didn’t reckon there would be much of a welcoming home party for me. MRD.vid1.57 NARRATOR: Dr. Delany’s most prestigious speaking invitation was before the International Statistical Society, MRD.vid1.58 chaired by Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, and the most esteemed scientific body in the world on July 16th at MRD.vid1.59 London’s Somerset House. As the meeting was beginning at four, MRD.vid1.60 Lord Brougham, who hated American slavery, addressed the body which included the delegation from the United States, MRD.vid1.61 headed by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet MRD.vid1.62 The United States Ambassador George Mifflin Dallas was also seated on the dais. Both fervently believed as did their MRD.vid1.63 President that those called slaves were technically, legally, and truly MRD.vid1.64 three fifths human - just a notch above a good horse. BROUGHAM: “I call to the attention of Mr. Dallas to the fact there is a Negro present, MRD.vid1.65 and I hope he will feel no scruples on that account." MRD.vid1.66 MD: I was eye to eye with men who wished me dead. MRD.vid1.67 So many memories engulfed me. “I rise, your Royal Highness, MRD.vid1.68 to thank his Lordship, the unflinching friend of the Negro and for the remarks he has made to myself and to assure your Royal Highness and his Lordship that I AM a man.” MRD.vid1.69 NARRATOR: Withering amid what the London Times called the wildest shouts ever from so grave an assemblage, Longstreet jumped up and led the United States delegation out of the hall. MRD.vid1.70 Ambassador Dallas stayed seated on the dais. The proceedings ended. And Dr. Delany became an international sensation. MRD.vid1.71 Delany read the reactions to his actions from America. Even Frederick Douglass spoke well of him. A new President had been elected. His plans for Africa delayed by war there, and too many days of watching birthdays of his children go by from his cramped little room in London, MRD.vid1.72 cold rain drizzling outside and streaking his window pane. He wrote that memories leapt to life and “pierced my heart like a golden spear and riddled my breast like precious stones." MRD.vid1.73 Memories, such as that of Lucinda Snow, the blind girl in the Ohio Asylum – who played for him Rose Bud on a piano MRD.vid1.74 shortly after his own dearest daughter had just died. Nothing, Delany decided, could keep him from being home MRD.vid1.75 in Chatham, Ontario by Christmas. There was hope there. It was 1860 MRD.vid1.76 Doctor Delany joined his family in Chatham, Dec. 29th, 1860 to help a flood of escaped ex-slaves. South Carolina voted to secede nine days before. Slavery was being challenged in earnest. MRD.vid1.77 On January 9th, 1861, Confederate shore batteries fire upon Federal supply ships approaching Fort Sumter. MRD.vid1.78 President Lincoln at his March 4th Inauguration said: “Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.” MRD.vid1.79 Peacetime ends. 6 images of fort sumter shelling not counted 80-86 MRD.vid1.85 Bull Run, July 21st, 1861 MRD.vid1.86 Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign, May-June, 1862 MRD.vid1.87 Antietam, the bloodiest day in American military history, September 17, 1862 MRD.vid1.88 Fredericksburg, Dec. 13, 1862 MRD.vid1.89 Vicksburg, Dec. 1862 through May, 1863 MRD.vid1.90 “All persons held as slaves shall thenceforward be forever free and such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed services.” President Lincoln, January 1st, 1863 MRD.vid1.91 179,000 men of color enlist. Three million remain enslaved. MRD.vid1.92 Confederate General Lee loses Gen. Jackson, his best, at Chancellorsville, May, 1863. MRD.vid1.93 Lee Gambles MRD.vid1.94 Over 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg foresees the ultimate defeat of the Southern Cause, July, 1863. MRD.vid1.95 Days later, angry antidraft mobs in soldierless New York City burn a Negro orphan asylum. MRD.vid1.96 And lynch twelve innocent freed blacks. MRD.vid1.97 The 7th New York militia helps restore order. MRD.vid1.98 On July 18th, public opinion is reversed by extreme bravery of men in the 54th Massachusetts' Colored Regiment at Fort Wagner, South Carolina. MRD.vid1.99 “With silent tongue, clenched teeth, and steady eye, they have helped us on to this great consummation, while others have strove to hinder it.” A. Lincoln, April 26, 1864 MRD.vid1.100 A ninety two per cent Republican vote by furloughed soldiers delivers big unexpected off-year wins in Ohio and Pennsylvania for Lincoln and his party. MRD.vid1.101 Abolitionist Lew Tappan writes: “We are coming out of the slanderous valley for we have lived to have old opponents say to us: “We were wrong.” MRD.vid1.102 “The year has brought many changes I thought impossible, May God bless this Cause.” Black recruit in Baltimore, MD. MRD.vid1.103 The U.S. Senate passes an amendment abolishing all slavery. The house still opposes. – April 9, 1864 MRD.vid1.104 Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest orders the murder of mostly black prisoners at Fort Pillow, April 12, 1864. MRD.vid1.105 "(it is hoped) these facts will demonstrate that Negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.” MRD.vid1.106 “Whatever happens there will be no turning back” – a letter to President Lincoln from his new commander, Gen. Grant, April, 1864. MRD.vid1.107 The Battle of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, May 5th through 12th, 1864. MRD.vid1.108 “These men are incomprehensible standing from daylight to dark killing and wounding each other, then making jokes and exchanging newspapers.” Col.Theodore Lyman. MRD.vid1.109 Gen. Grant of his Cold Harbor, Va. attack, June, 1864: “I regret this assault more than any other.” MRD.vid1.110 Equal pay for black troops is finally enacted, June, 1864. MRD.vid1.111 A teacher in the occupied South writes: “Their cry is for 'books' and 'When will school begin?'” MRD.vid1.112 Civilians become targets. MRD.vid1.113 Union Gen. Hunter torches “Leeland” and “Fountain Rock” in Shepherdstown, WV and VMI in July, 1864. MRD.vid1.114 General Jubal Early strikes back, levels Chambersburg, ransoms Hagerstown and Frederick, MD. MRD.vid1.115 “The valley is not fit for man or beast. I have destroyed 2,000 barns." – “Gen. Philip Sheridan MRD.vid1.116 Gen. William Sherman writes: “We cannot change the hearts of these people. But we can make it so terrible and make them so sick of war, they will not appeal to it again.” MRD.vid1.117 “I can make my men march and make Georgia howl.” Gen. Sherman while cutting a swath of destruction fifty miles wide to Savannah to the sea. MRD.vid1.118 Martin Delany sought roles and work for Gen. Sherman's thousands of "camp followers" MRD.vid1.119 wagon freed blacks MRD.vid1.120 stagecoach MRD.vid1.121 Delany went to President Lincoln himself with an idea to make the South Carolina coastline a new Israel MRD.vid1.122 for freedmen and women who had been joining Sherman’s army marching across Georgia in the tens of thousands. First, Delany thought, they would be an army of MRD.vid1.123 Africa of able black men, recruited, trained, and then themselves becoming liberating soldiers and, after the war, these same men would become able keepers of the land, MRD.vid1.124 homecoming MRD.vid1.125 the same land Sherman had promised in South Carolina in January of that same year. Gen. Sherman tentatively gave, MRD.vid1.126 subject to the approval of the President of course, tens of thousands of acres of land to the freedman. MRD.vid1.127 Each family, Sherman, would get forty acres – a place in the sun - and one army mule on loan MRD.vid1.128 If Abeokuta failed to be Martin Delany’s promised land, Carolina coastline would be his Israel. MRD.vid1.129 On a cold clammy damp morning at 8 AM on Feb. 8th, Delany was welcomed by President Lincoln into his study MRD.vid1.130 at the White House. MRD.vid1.131 Lincoln had followed Delany’s doings for years. He knew him. On entering MRD.vid1.132 the executive chamber and being introduced to his excellency, a generous grasp of the hand brought me to a seat in front of him. MRD.vid1.133 AL: “What can I do for you, sir?” MD: “Nothing, Mr. President, MRD.vid1.134 but I’ve come to propose something to you, which I think will be beneficial to this nation in this critical hour of her peril.” MRD.vid1.135 AL: “Go on sir.” Delany and Lincoln discussed the value of black leaders for freed black Americans, and how so many feared black leadership. MRD.vid1.136 AL: “This is the very thing I’ve been looking for and hoping for; but nobody offered it. I have talked about it; I hoped and prayed for it. But up until now, it has never been proposed. MRD.vid1.137 “When I issued the Emancipation Proclamation, I had this thing in contemplation. I then gave them a chance by prohibiting any interference on the part of the army; but they did not embrace it.” MRD.vid1.138 MD: “But Mr. President, these poor people could not READ your proclamation.” MRD.vid1.139 While he spoke Lincoln was writing MRD.vid1.140 on a piece of paper. “Hon. E. M. Stanton: “Don’t not fail to have a meeting with this most extraordinary and intelligent black man – MRD.vid1.141 A. Lincoln.” MRD.vid1.142 AL: “Stanton is firing! Listen. He is in his glory. Noble man!” MD: “What is it? Mr. President” AL: “Why don’t you know? Charleston’s ours.” MRD.vid1.143 NARRATOR: Martin Delany later in April, caught a stage for the cradle of Southern animosities, MRD.vid1.144 which turned by the magic stroke of a pen and the raising of a sword MRD.vid1.145 into a new land of opportunity. MRD.vid1.146 He was to report to Gen. Rufus Saxton, a strong protector of freedman who commanded the occupation forces in South Carolina. 3 fire images MRD.vid1.147 MRD.vid1.148 MRD.vid1.149 MRD.vid1.150 MD: “I entered the city which from earliest childhood and through life I had learned to contemplate with feelings of utmost abhorrence, where the sound of the lash at the whipping post, and the hammer of the auctioneer MRD.vid1.151 were coordinate sounds in thrilling harmony, such as might well have vied for the infamous King of Dahomey.” MRD.vid1.152 “For a moment, I found myself dashing in unmeasured strides through the city. Again I halted to look upon the shattered walls MRD.vid1.153 of the once stately, but now deserted edifices. And but for the vigilance and fidelity MRD.vid1.154 of the colored firemen, there would have been nothing left but a smoldering plain of runs in the place where Charleston once stood.” MRD.vid1.155 NARRATOR: Chief Justice Salmon Chase in Charleston said: “A great race numbering four million is suddenly brought in freedom. All the world is looking to see whether the prophecies of the enemies of that race will be fulfilled or falsified. It rests upon the men of that race to tell.” MRD.vid1.156 Delany made it in time MRD.vid1.157 to see the flags changed at Fort Sumter, with his son, a young private, also there. And his old friend MRD.vid1.158 and comrade-in-arms William Lloyd Garrison who as he bade goodbye to a large adoring audience in Charleston said: GARRISON: “I have always advocated non-resistance; but this much I say to you, Come what may, never will you submit again to slavery. Do anything. Die first! MRD.vid1.159 But don’t submit again to them, never again be slaves. Farewell.” MRD.vid1.160 NARRATOR: Major Delany, the first black field officer in the U.S. Army, MRD.vid1.161 quickly organized schools, farms, MRD.vid1.162 farmers, freedmen and tried to reason with disenfranchised plantation owners, MRD.vid1.163 who were always trying to tie new freedman into enslaving contracts, exploiting their illiteracy. MRD.vid1.164 But Delany they loved. He was one of them and he told it to them straight. MRD.vid1.165 MD: “I came to talk to you in plain words so as you can understand how to open the gates of oppression and let the captive free. MRD.vid1.166 In this state there are 200 thousand able, intelligent honorable Negroes, not an inferior race, mind you.” MRD.vid1.167 “I want to tell you one thing, do you know that if it was not for the black man, MRD.vid1.168 this war never would have been brought to a close with success. MRD.vid1.169 Do you know that? MRD.vid1.170 Do you know that?” MRD.vid1.171 NARRATOR: But they would be asked to submit again - and soon. From the moment a bullet penetrated the Great Liberator’s brain at Ford’s Theater, no such a grand promise of land and freedom would ever hold. In May, just a month later, MRD.vid1.172 the newly appointed President Johnson ordered all these lands – those not properly surveyed - returned MRD.vid1.173 to some 300 plantation owners – even if MRD.vid1.174 someone else’s crop was already growing in the field. One freedman wrote to Andrew Johnson himself: MRD.vid1.175 “We have been ready to strike for liberty and humanity, yea to fight if need be, to preserve the glorious union. And now, we are ready to pay for this land. MRD.vid1.176 ‘Sign contracts with your old master and work their land as partners’ This was the plea to most freed blacks. MRD.vid1.177 Throughout that long summer, Delany’s superiors Generals Howard and Saxton avoided Johnson’s order and eventually defied them outright until September MRD.vid1.178 when they broke the news to the freedmen they loved so much. An Edisto Island freedman wrote his friend, MRD.vid1.179 Gen. Howard: “You ask us to forgive the landowners of our island. You only lost your right to arm in war and might forgive them. MRD.vid1.180 The man who tied me to a tree and gave me thirty nine lashes, who stripped and flogged my mother and sister and who will not let me stay in his empty hut unless I do his planting – that man I cannot forgive. . . General we cannot remain here.” MRD.vid1.181 NARRATOR: Many left South Carolina. Some stayed and were beaten. MRD.vid1.182 Delany fought: MD: “Every species of infamy, however atrocious, private and public, bare-faced and in open daylight MRD.vid1.183 is defiantly perpetrated under the direction and guidance of the despicable political leaders in the sacred name of ‘Republicanism’ and ’Radicalism.’ MRD.vid1.184 “But these Yankees talk smooth to you. Oh yeh. Their tongues roll just like the drum. They don’t pay you enough.” MRD.vid1.185 I was told to stay out of politics. NARRATOR: The forty acres and a mule promised to freedmen were already secretly being returned to the planters courtesy of the tireless machinations of Trescott and Williams in Washington. MRD.vid1.186 They even got Gen. Sherman to write President Johnson. On the brink of being court-martialed for his opposition, MRD.vid1.187 Gen. Howard wrote his superiors: “The lands which have been taken possession by this bureau have been solemnly pledged to the freedman. Thousands of them are already located on tracts of forty acres each. MRD.vid1.188 The love of the soil and desire to own farms amounts to a passion. MRD.vid1.189 It appears to be the dearest hope of their lives.” MRD.vid1.190 NARRATOR: Within two years, the Freedman Bureau had its main function of redistributing the lands to original owners and apologizing for it . . . MRD.vid1.191 Saxton was reassigned, Gen. Howard court-martialed, MRD.vid1.192 but Col. Delany – a survivor – pressed on. He had made himself too valuable to too many people in a very short time. MRD.vid1.193 Republican politicians, like Christopher Columbus Bowen, who controlled the patronage at the Customs House, hated his dangerously incorruptible independence MRD.vid1.194 and integrity, but like everyone, MRD.vid1.195 bowed to his almost messianic hold on the freedmen – MRD.vid1.196 this the long-awaited black leader. MRD.vid1.197 And on the other side, the old Southern aristocracy MRD.vid1.198 saw Delany’s magic too. And planned to use him someday MRD.vid1.199 for their own ends. As one old Southern editor put, in grudging admiration: “Martin Delany is a genuine Negro.” MRD.vid1.200 MD: “No one who knows me will doubt my African proclivities. I have possessions in Africa which I hope to enjoy.” NARRATOR: The old Southern guard watched and waited. They noticed Delany’s perceptibly growing disgust with corruption, greased palms and greed MRD.vid1.201 that fueled his own Republican Party’s machine. MD: The Freedman’s Bureau was allowed to continue to return those 63,000 acres to the planters. MRD.vid1.202 I told freedman to get educated to see what was going on. “Through two crop failures in 66 and 67, I told freedmen to rely on their muscles, MRD.vid1.203 their faith, and the righteousness of their cause.” 1870 saw almost all of those 63,000 promised acres MRD.vid1.204 were back in planters hands and some 90,000 of South Carolina’s freedmen MRD.vid1.205 had left in disgust and desperation. MRD.vid1.206 2,000 brothers and sisters set sail for my beloved Africa. The best of our people. Their hopes were gone before mine. Delany’s disgust deepened on a trip to New York City where he represented the state in a bond issue. And he found out that Governor Chamberlain MRD.vid1.207 had given his old college chum and roommate $750,000 in commissions. MRD.vid1.208 The Old Southern guard, watched and waited knowing that Martin Delany might be the key to regaining power. MRD.vid1.209 WADE HAMPTON: “We can control the Negroes if we act discreetly.” I would come to know people like Wade Hampton an embodiment of the old South who invited me to speak at barbecue gatherings. HAMPTON: “If it means we can protect our state from destruction, I am willing to send Negroes to Congress. They will be better than anyone who can take the oath of loyalty and I should rather trust them than renegades or Yankees. “My experience has been that when a Yankee can do a bit of rascality, the temptation to do it is almost irresistible.” MRD.vid1.210 NARRATOR: No one, though, would be a more fateful associate in Martin Delany’s long and broad lifetime as Wade Hampton, the old cavalry general, aristocrat and front man for the South. Who - yes, truly speaking personally for himself - wished for a better life for the freedman because he and Delany both fervently lived and advocated personal honor and a regimen of book learning and practical skills as every freedman’s road to true permanent economic redemption. MRD.vid1.211 It was only a matter of time that these two stars would head on a one on one collision and one of those two stars would orbit around the other. MRD.vid1.212 If only there had been more than just one Wade Hampton and one Martin Delany. America’s working, educated electorate would have emerged sooner. But the personal prestige, humanitarian and pragmatic ways of each man could only briefly capture the public imagination, MRD.vid1.213 while, at all other times, whites, blacks, Democrats and Republicans slid disgracefully into the abyss where guns and bribes were constantly used as the preferred path to personal power and glory. MRD.vid1.214 Pressured out of the Freedman’s Bureau in 1869, Delany was retired from public life, selling real estate and editing his own newspaper, when Rev. Richard Cain came to him one day in 1872 and urged him to help elect Franklin Moses. MRD.vid1.215 He might even get – for his efforts – a decent job later to support his seamstress wife, Catherine, and their large family. MRD.vid1.216 Delany could deliver freedmen’s votes. Hoping to enhance his own political fortunes in this state with a majority of black voters, and hoping to get more homesteads for freedmen, Delany stumped vigorously for Moses. MRD.vid1.217 Moses had always given lip service to Delany’s plan to attract Northern money to be long-term, low-interest loans to help the freedmen to buy and develop their own homesteads. MRD.vid1.218 Delany’s unvarnished truth-telling inspired the common people and irked those grubbing after filthy lucre. MRD.vid1.219 Wrote onetime governor B.F. Perry: “After mature reflection, I believe Col. Delany has exhibited in his speeches more wisdom and prudence, more honor and patriotism than any other Republican, white or black in South Carolina.” MRD.vid1.220 Delany wrote that, should the homeless become landowners, they would at once become proportionately interested in the affairs of state. Before either school house or church can be erected, he said the people themselves must be settled in homes of their own. MRD.vid1.221 Freedmen were leaving the state, denied the once promised forty acres virtually all back in original hands, and their life savings deposited faithfully in the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, now gone form mismanagement. MRD.vid1.222 Delany knew his plan could work. In three years he organized white cotton wholesalers and freedmen farmers on Hilton Head Island into a peaceable alliance that grew and harvested the crop profitably. Moses was elected. MRD.vid1.223 So was “Honest John” who boasted he bought his seat in the U.S. Senate for $40,000. MRD.vid1.224 But Governor Moses continued to drive even higher the state debt. MRD.vid1.225 It had already soared from one to over seventeen million dollars in the previous five years. Moses then raised taxes on freed holders to pay for all this. MRD.vid1.226 And he lined his pockets with priced pardons sold to 503 imprisoned felons. And they were all released into this heavily armed, hate-filled powder keg land. And Governor Moses gave Delany no job. MRD.vid1.227 Rev. Cain wrote Moses: “I had assured Mr. Delany that you would not break faith. He has staked all on your word. For Heaven’s sake, do not cast him away.” MRD.vid1.228 Seeing Beaufort’s old St. Helena Church summed up a visitors’ feeling in 1873 about every South Carolina town he saw: MRD.vid1.229 it was one of complete prostration, dejection, MRD.vid1.230 stagnation. MRD.vid1.231 VISITOR: “Utter stagnation marks its streets and everything is flavored with decay. The mockingbird sings as if winter has no meaning for them, MRD.vid1.232 the old mansions are permeated with the air of desertion. The merry tinkling that proceeds from the closed shutters of one of them seems altogether dissonant with the surroundings.” MRD.vid1.233 Bad crops, bad weather, a lost position in world cotton markets, a national depression – this all contributed. MRD.vid1.234 So by 1874, all of South Carolina, including Delany’s beloved St. Helena Island, looked like an armed camp. MRD.vid1.235 The Ku Klux Klan was forming almost three hundred rifle clubs that once beat two hundred freedmen and killed four more in nine months, in just one county. MRD.vid1.236 Freedmen either armed themselves, MRD.vid1.237 Or prayed the Federal troops would never leave. MRD.vid1.238 Some freedmen and their families slept in the swamps in the mild winter where the men in hoods and facemasks could not find them MRD.vid1.239 Wrote the editor of the Edgefield Advertiser in one of the states’ most strife torn counties: “Good people now look upon the entire electoral contest as a struggle between thieves and plunderers.” MRD.vid1.240 And they worried: “Among the whites is a class of men who hold human life of little value, MRD.vid1.241 and among the colored people there is a class who do not wish to labor and are known as habitual thieves or disturbers of the peace. MRD.vid1.242 Gen. Rufus Saxton wrote back his old friend Robert Smalls about these darkest of times in South Carolina: “I rejoiced when the right of suffrage came and I sorrowed when it was told that some had sold this precious birthright for a miserable mess of potage.” MRD.vid1.243 A few years earlier, Delany heard the church bells ring when the Fourteenth Amendment had been passed; but it was a hollow sound. MRD.vid1.244 He saw freedmen unable to read show up at the Freedmen’s Bureau with great baskets. The word, “Registration” sounded not much different from that other word: “provisions.” MRD.vid1.245 The Republicans’ vampire like bite into the state’s ebbing lifeblood blinded them to that emerging menace and giant, the old Southern Democrats MRD.vid1.246 and their gun-toting right wing rabble. Delany saw this disaster collision coming: MD: Again and again I warned the majority Republicans to go easy on the white planters MRD.vid1.247 because one day the shoe would go over to their foot. And sure enough it did. MRD.vid1.248 NARRATOR: Delany ran for lieutenant governor in 1874 on an independent reformed Republican ticket, getting 64,000 votes as corrupt Chamberlain won. MD: I lost my race but the planters got the shoe on their foot capturing the majority of seats in the statehouse. MRD.vid1.249 NARRATOR: Delany was made justice of the peace in Charleston when, as the gubernatorial election drew near in 1876 was indicted, courtesy of Governor Chamberlain, for misusing the funds of a dirt poor black church. MRD.vid1.250 Hardly. The implicit threat was: do not support Wade Hampton who was now the official candidate against Chamberlain with all the wealth and smart men the Old South could muster squarely behind him. MRD.vid1.251 Hampton and Delany always appealed to people’s desire for peaceful solutions based on reason and fair play. HAMPTON: “I pledge myself solemnly in the presence of the people of South Carolina MRD.vid1.252 and in the presence of my God that, if the Democratic ticket is elected – not one single right enjoyed by the colored people today shall be taken from them.” MRD.vid1.253 NARRATOR: As violence increased the extreme Democratic clubs secretly assigned one man to personally bribe or scare one freedman from voting, MRD.vid1.254 as Chamberlain’s campaign promises became more grotesque and desperate, Delany announced for Wade Hampton in September, 1876 MRD.vid1.255 – immediately putting his life at risk. Delany fought hard and spoke forcefully for Hampton. MD: Freedmen I told one and all were serving a new master now the radical Republican Carpetbaggers. I said the blackest truth out loud – a black man would not be allowed to lead, not just to live, but to lead. I myself always dared to do what the white men ever dared and done – to pull on every lion’s tail a white man has pulled. MRD.vid1.256 NARRATOR: On October 16th, C.C. Bowen promised me that our party of white and black Democrats could speak to freedmen on Edisto Island. MRD.vid1.257 Before the steamer left the Charleston wharf a number of Republican negroes gathered and they noisily demanded that they be permitted to take passage and threateningly declared that they wanted a chance to clean out those Democrats. MRD.vid1.258 MD: The audience at the meeting of some 500 or 600 “African citizens” was by far the most uncouth, savage and uncivilized that I have ever seen. The Republican Negroes started to beat their drums and left in a body. They would listen to “De Damn Democrats. MRD.vid1.259 They marched off and the women crowded around the wagon with their bludgeons with threats, and curses. MRD.vid1.260 MD: ”I rose to speak on the wagon. They interrupted me as I said: “I had come to South Carolina with my sword drawn to fight for the freedom of the black man.” MRD.vid1.261 I said “I had warned you against trusting your money to the Freedman’s Bank; and that you had, to your sorrow, paid no heed to my warning.” MRD.vid1.262 In violation of the agreement that neither party should carry guns or rifles to the place of meeting, MRD.vid1.263 the Negroes had brought their muskets and secreted them in a nearby swamp and in an old house near a church not far from the speaking ground. MRD.vid1.264 They marched out of the swamp with their arms and opened fire upon the whites who were unarmed. In the meantime I, Mr. William E. Simmons, and several aides to white men had taken refuge in a brick house adjoining the church. The Negro militia charged out of the swamp surrounded the brick house and tried to batter down the door. MRD.vid1.265 Failing in this, they broke open the windows and pointed muskets at us. We all escaped except for Mr. Simmons, who upon emerging from the door was knocked down and beaten to death. MRD.vid1.266 Six white men were killed and sixteen whites wounded that day. One black man was killed. The siege of Cainhoy continued for several days afterwards. MRD.vid1.267 White racists conducted similar assaults against blacks especially in Edgefield County. NARRATOR: Wade Hampton did win by a fiercely contested 1100 vote margin, provided in part by an estimated 3,000 Republican blacks who followed Delany’s example. MRD.vid1.268 MD: I had hurt the cause of my people beyond all imaginings. MRD.vid1.269 NARRATOR: Then Wade Hampton made history. With his election for governor still is dispute and the state in anarchy MRD.vid1.270 he met at the Willard Hotel with president-elect Rutherford B. Hayes, MRD.vid1.271 who held onto his election by one electoral vote. To keep his single electoral vote lead, Hayes and Hampton agreed that Hayes would support and confirm Hampton’s election and as Hampton wrote Hayes: MRD.vid1.272 HAMPTON: “If the Federal troops are withdrawn from the State House, there shall be on my part or that of my friends no resort to violence MRD.vid1.273 but we shall look for their maintenance solely to such peaceful remedies as the Constitution and laws of the State provide.” MRD.vid1.274 MD: U.S. soldiers were removed from the South on Hampton’s pact with Hayes - and I helped that. One person called it the abandonment of the colored race. MRD.vid1.275 Wade Hampton appointed me judge and I remained until he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1879. MRD.vid1.276 But the secret all white Charleston County Democratic committee methodically organized the state, county-by-county and parish-by-parish MRD.vid1.277 to crush the Republican party and all spokesmen for Reconstruction. MRD.vid1.278 My son drowned in the Savannah River. His body was found in December, late 1879. My wife Catherine, who had carried our family during my long absences, needed me. MRD.vid1.279 I was old. My children needed their college educations at Wilberforce. The books that set my dreams afire long ago belonged to them now. MRD.vid1.280 So I was there on the dock when a ship - the Azor - set sail for Liberia from Charleston harbor MRD.vid1.281 full of hopeful friends, with my fondest dreams on that distant shore. MRD.vid1.282 My torch had passed from me. MRD.vid1.283 His loving admirers gave him the Liberian flag on that dock for his many years of inspiration MRD.vid1.284 to act on their dreams. "Almost all his many children became teachers. His name is misspelled on his tombstone. His life’s work was lost when a library burned. And the ancestors of those who left for Africa in his lifetime and with his blessing still turn the native soil. MRD.vid1.285 MD: ”Act, act in the living present – but act. Speak the truth and leave the rest to God.” GRANDMA GRACI: No more stories, Martin. End THE VIDEO: The video broken out into segments on Flickr below: Martin Delany was a Harvard-educated physician, explorer who led his own scientific expedition to Africa; co-editor of The North Star newspaper; novelist; political theorist, judge in South Carolina, the first black field officer in the U.S. Army and described by Abraham Lincoln in February, 1865 after meeting him as " an extraordinary and intelligent black man." Martin Delany - Visionary - 1 www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBbR4_XVL9A TRT: 5:38 Martin Delany - Visionary - 2 www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IKkeh-oAJw TRT: 4:55 Martin Delany - Defiance - 3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=akOy0YTgveI TRT: 4:32 Martin Delany - Wartime - 4 www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoov745rJIQ TRT: 7:22 Martin Delany - Meets Lincoln - 5 www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FLy2e5k-lA TRT: 6:34 Martin Delany - Major Delany - 6 www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmsREGq81F4 TRT: 5:32 Martin Delany - Post-War - 7 www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfr5btQPF8M TRT: 2:20 Martin Delany - Disillusioned - 8 www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rdRT-_9mZE TRT: 4:17 Martin Delany - Charleston - 9 www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRmGweOo5A0 TRT: 5:37 Martin Delany - Betrayed - 10 www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdeCu7a4pww TRT: 6:01 Martin Delany - Going Home - 11 www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hj9nWbIfIo TRT: 4:29 OTHER SOURCES: Surkamp, James T. (1853). "To Be More Than Equal: The Many Lives of Martin R. Delany 1812-1885. West Virginia University Libraries. 9 Nov. 1999. Web. 26 Dec. 2010.
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276. county and parish-by-parish

Sea Lion Landing, Columbia, South Carolina
MRD.vid1.276 But the secret all white Charleston County Democratic committee methodically organized the state, county-by-county and parish-by-parish THESE BEGINNING-T0-END, SEQUENCED IMAGES ARE FROM THE LINKED TO VIDEO FOLLOWING THIS SCRIPT. THE SCRIPT'S TEXT IS COMPLETE AND IS BROKEN DOWN TO MATCH TO THE IMAGE SHOWN WITH IT DURING THE VIDEO. - JS "Act in the Living Present - The Life of Martin Robison Delany" - by Jim Surkamp MRD.vid1.1 MD: “I leave you here and journey on and if I never more return, farewell” NARRATOR: Martin Delany finally gave up on America. MRD.vid1.2 His expulsion with two others from Harvard Medical School just because of skin color convinced him that the power of reason and merit alone did not in fact determine the country’s esteemed leaders. So, scraping just a few hundred dollars, MRD.vid1.3 he rented a crew and ship back to Africa, where his grandfather Shango had returned several generations before. MRD.vid1.4 SHIP MRD.vid1.5 His critics including Frederick Douglass, were legion. "You must stay here and fight for freedom," they told him. MRD.vid1.6 He certainly reflected on his already long life: MRD.vid1.7 the long road as one of five children in a freed family in Charles Town Virginia; MRD.vid1.8 and after that fleeing because they illegally learned how to read, followed by the many years as a physician’s assistant in Pittsburgh, MRD.vid1.9 and then editing two influential newspapers. MRD.vid1.10 Most of all he remembered as he perhaps gazed at the sperm whales that wandered into those southern latitudes . . . Of the day he was walking MRD.vid1.11 the road to Pittsburgh in 1829 deciding - his head filled with books and images of pharoahs and Africa - of making this pilgrimage in reverse back to Africa. MRD.vid1.12 “Land Ho!" MRD.vid1.13 NARRATOR: “The arrival of Martin Robison Delany in Liberia is an era in the history of African emigration, an event doubtless that will long be remembered by hundreds of thousands of Africa’s exiled children. MRD.vid1.14 Persons from all parts of the country came to Monrovia to see this great man.” People cheering: MRD.vid1.15 MRD.vid1.16 MRD.vid1.17 MRD.vid1.18 MRD.vid1.19 Ridiculed and ignored in America for speaking - MRD.vid1.20 embraced by the thousands here for speaking - how strange. MRD.vid1.21 MD: “The regeneration of the African race can only be effected by its own efforts, the efforts of its own self and whatever aid may come from other sources; and it must, in this venture succeed, as God leads the movement and His hand guides the way.” MRD.vid1.22 “Face thine accusers, scorn the rack and rod and, if thou hast truth to utter, MRD.vid1.23 speak and leave the rest to God." MRD.vid1.24 But we pushed on to Abeokuta. MRD.vid1.25 Africa taught Martin Delany its mysteries. MD: “The principle markets to see all the wonders MRD.vid1.26 is in the evening. As the shades of evening deepen, MRD.vid1.27 every woman lights her little lamp and, to the distant MRD.vid1.28 observer, presents the beautiful appearance of innumerable stars.” MRD.vid1.29 “But in the entire Aku country one is struck by the beautiful country which continually spreads out in every direction.” MRD.vid1.30 Africa also taught him its nightmares. . . I read August 13th in the West African Herald: MRD.vid1.31 “King Dahomey is about to make the great Custom in honor of the late King Gezo. MRD.vid1.32 Determined to surpass all former monarchs, a great pit has been dug which is to MRD.vid1.33 contain human blood enough to float a canoe. Two thousand persons will be sacrificed on this occasion. MRD.vid1.34 The king has sent his army to make some excursions at the expense of some weaker tribes. The younger people will be sold into slavery. The older persons will be killed At the Grand Custom.” MRD.vid1.35 MD: “Whole villages are taken.” “Farewell, farewell my loving friends, farewell. . .” MRD.vid1.36 The jasmine smells of Africa are tonight less fragrant than my scented memory of soft honey-suckled summer’s night breezes in Virginia long ago, and awaking to the mockingbird. {MRD.5:37} END PART 1 TO BLACK MRD.vid1.37 MRD.vid1.38 NARRATOR: On April 10th, 1860 at Lagos, Martin Delany and Robert Campbell MRD.vid1.39 boarded ship for London and Birmingham MRD.vid1.40 to seek backers for a plan to build freedman’s cotton farms in the Niger Valley. MRD.vid1.41 They would undersell, at the gold price of fourteen cents a pound, all the slave wrought cotton from the plantations back home. MRD.vid1.42 To make bales of cotton rot on the docks of Charleston and New Orleans as it were. MRD.vid1.43 MD: When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, my children’s age – I worked hours and hours inscribing with a fine needle the Lord Prayer – MRD.vid1.44 all of it – on the face of an English six pence like this one. MRD.vid1.45 SHIP MRD.vid1.46 NARRATOR: Delany was not wanted in America because MRD.vid1.47 of his radical political views. So he set sail for London and began preparing his report to his backers MRD.vid1.48 on the promise of Africa. MRD.vid1.49 MD: I noticed that. . . when I read, my eyes scan the page. . . back and forth. . . and up and down like a loom. MRD.vid1.50 I was so crazy about words, I was like Cervantes. I’d pick up every grimy scrap in the gutters of Charles Town MRD.vid1.51 to see if it had magic code to worlds beyond MRD.vid1.52 I read and broke bread with the ideas and dreams of Thomas Jefferson and Socrates And ancient pharaohs. MRD.vid1.53 Then Grandma Graci at night would tell me about my grandfather Shango. GRANDMA GRACI: "No more stories Martin." MD: And off to sleep and dreams about the greatest people who ever lived. MRD.vid1.54 I wanted my child to accumulate great hopes. MRD.vid1.55 If I ever set shoe leather on New York’s dock, President Buchanan himself would drop the noose around my despised neck, MRD.vid1.56 since John Brown, who I knew, did rebel and killed, and was hanged, I didn’t reckon there would be much of a welcoming home party for me. MRD.vid1.57 NARRATOR: Dr. Delany’s most prestigious speaking invitation was before the International Statistical Society, MRD.vid1.58 chaired by Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, and the most esteemed scientific body in the world on July 16th at MRD.vid1.59 London’s Somerset House. As the meeting was beginning at four, MRD.vid1.60 Lord Brougham, who hated American slavery, addressed the body which included the delegation from the United States, MRD.vid1.61 headed by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet MRD.vid1.62 The United States Ambassador George Mifflin Dallas was also seated on the dais. Both fervently believed as did their MRD.vid1.63 President that those called slaves were technically, legally, and truly MRD.vid1.64 three fifths human - just a notch above a good horse. BROUGHAM: “I call to the attention of Mr. Dallas to the fact there is a Negro present, MRD.vid1.65 and I hope he will feel no scruples on that account." MRD.vid1.66 MD: I was eye to eye with men who wished me dead. MRD.vid1.67 So many memories engulfed me. “I rise, your Royal Highness, MRD.vid1.68 to thank his Lordship, the unflinching friend of the Negro and for the remarks he has made to myself and to assure your Royal Highness and his Lordship that I AM a man.” MRD.vid1.69 NARRATOR: Withering amid what the London Times called the wildest shouts ever from so grave an assemblage, Longstreet jumped up and led the United States delegation out of the hall. MRD.vid1.70 Ambassador Dallas stayed seated on the dais. The proceedings ended. And Dr. Delany became an international sensation. MRD.vid1.71 Delany read the reactions to his actions from America. Even Frederick Douglass spoke well of him. A new President had been elected. His plans for Africa delayed by war there, and too many days of watching birthdays of his children go by from his cramped little room in London, MRD.vid1.72 cold rain drizzling outside and streaking his window pane. He wrote that memories leapt to life and “pierced my heart like a golden spear and riddled my breast like precious stones." MRD.vid1.73 Memories, such as that of Lucinda Snow, the blind girl in the Ohio Asylum – who played for him Rose Bud on a piano MRD.vid1.74 shortly after his own dearest daughter had just died. Nothing, Delany decided, could keep him from being home MRD.vid1.75 in Chatham, Ontario by Christmas. There was hope there. It was 1860 MRD.vid1.76 Doctor Delany joined his family in Chatham, Dec. 29th, 1860 to help a flood of escaped ex-slaves. South Carolina voted to secede nine days before. Slavery was being challenged in earnest. MRD.vid1.77 On January 9th, 1861, Confederate shore batteries fire upon Federal supply ships approaching Fort Sumter. MRD.vid1.78 President Lincoln at his March 4th Inauguration said: “Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.” MRD.vid1.79 Peacetime ends. 6 images of fort sumter shelling not counted 80-86 MRD.vid1.85 Bull Run, July 21st, 1861 MRD.vid1.86 Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign, May-June, 1862 MRD.vid1.87 Antietam, the bloodiest day in American military history, September 17, 1862 MRD.vid1.88 Fredericksburg, Dec. 13, 1862 MRD.vid1.89 Vicksburg, Dec. 1862 through May, 1863 MRD.vid1.90 “All persons held as slaves shall thenceforward be forever free and such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed services.” President Lincoln, January 1st, 1863 MRD.vid1.91 179,000 men of color enlist. Three million remain enslaved. MRD.vid1.92 Confederate General Lee loses Gen. Jackson, his best, at Chancellorsville, May, 1863. MRD.vid1.93 Lee Gambles MRD.vid1.94 Over 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg foresees the ultimate defeat of the Southern Cause, July, 1863. MRD.vid1.95 Days later, angry antidraft mobs in soldierless New York City burn a Negro orphan asylum. MRD.vid1.96 And lynch twelve innocent freed blacks. MRD.vid1.97 The 7th New York militia helps restore order. MRD.vid1.98 On July 18th, public opinion is reversed by extreme bravery of men in the 54th Massachusetts' Colored Regiment at Fort Wagner, South Carolina. MRD.vid1.99 “With silent tongue, clenched teeth, and steady eye, they have helped us on to this great consummation, while others have strove to hinder it.” A. Lincoln, April 26, 1864 MRD.vid1.100 A ninety two per cent Republican vote by furloughed soldiers delivers big unexpected off-year wins in Ohio and Pennsylvania for Lincoln and his party. MRD.vid1.101 Abolitionist Lew Tappan writes: “We are coming out of the slanderous valley for we have lived to have old opponents say to us: “We were wrong.” MRD.vid1.102 “The year has brought many changes I thought impossible, May God bless this Cause.” Black recruit in Baltimore, MD. MRD.vid1.103 The U.S. Senate passes an amendment abolishing all slavery. The house still opposes. – April 9, 1864 MRD.vid1.104 Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest orders the murder of mostly black prisoners at Fort Pillow, April 12, 1864. MRD.vid1.105 "(it is hoped) these facts will demonstrate that Negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.” MRD.vid1.106 “Whatever happens there will be no turning back” – a letter to President Lincoln from his new commander, Gen. Grant, April, 1864. MRD.vid1.107 The Battle of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, May 5th through 12th, 1864. MRD.vid1.108 “These men are incomprehensible standing from daylight to dark killing and wounding each other, then making jokes and exchanging newspapers.” Col.Theodore Lyman. MRD.vid1.109 Gen. Grant of his Cold Harbor, Va. attack, June, 1864: “I regret this assault more than any other.” MRD.vid1.110 Equal pay for black troops is finally enacted, June, 1864. MRD.vid1.111 A teacher in the occupied South writes: “Their cry is for 'books' and 'When will school begin?'” MRD.vid1.112 Civilians become targets. MRD.vid1.113 Union Gen. Hunter torches “Leeland” and “Fountain Rock” in Shepherdstown, WV and VMI in July, 1864. MRD.vid1.114 General Jubal Early strikes back, levels Chambersburg, ransoms Hagerstown and Frederick, MD. MRD.vid1.115 “The valley is not fit for man or beast. I have destroyed 2,000 barns." – “Gen. Philip Sheridan MRD.vid1.116 Gen. William Sherman writes: “We cannot change the hearts of these people. But we can make it so terrible and make them so sick of war, they will not appeal to it again.” MRD.vid1.117 “I can make my men march and make Georgia howl.” Gen. Sherman while cutting a swath of destruction fifty miles wide to Savannah to the sea. MRD.vid1.118 Martin Delany sought roles and work for Gen. Sherman's thousands of "camp followers" MRD.vid1.119 wagon freed blacks MRD.vid1.120 stagecoach MRD.vid1.121 Delany went to President Lincoln himself with an idea to make the South Carolina coastline a new Israel MRD.vid1.122 for freedmen and women who had been joining Sherman’s army marching across Georgia in the tens of thousands. First, Delany thought, they would be an army of MRD.vid1.123 Africa of able black men, recruited, trained, and then themselves becoming liberating soldiers and, after the war, these same men would become able keepers of the land, MRD.vid1.124 homecoming MRD.vid1.125 the same land Sherman had promised in South Carolina in January of that same year. Gen. Sherman tentatively gave, MRD.vid1.126 subject to the approval of the President of course, tens of thousands of acres of land to the freedman. MRD.vid1.127 Each family, Sherman, would get forty acres – a place in the sun - and one army mule on loan MRD.vid1.128 If Abeokuta failed to be Martin Delany’s promised land, Carolina coastline would be his Israel. MRD.vid1.129 On a cold clammy damp morning at 8 AM on Feb. 8th, Delany was welcomed by President Lincoln into his study MRD.vid1.130 at the White House. MRD.vid1.131 Lincoln had followed Delany’s doings for years. He knew him. On entering MRD.vid1.132 the executive chamber and being introduced to his excellency, a generous grasp of the hand brought me to a seat in front of him. MRD.vid1.133 AL: “What can I do for you, sir?” MD: “Nothing, Mr. President, MRD.vid1.134 but I’ve come to propose something to you, which I think will be beneficial to this nation in this critical hour of her peril.” MRD.vid1.135 AL: “Go on sir.” Delany and Lincoln discussed the value of black leaders for freed black Americans, and how so many feared black leadership. MRD.vid1.136 AL: “This is the very thing I’ve been looking for and hoping for; but nobody offered it. I have talked about it; I hoped and prayed for it. But up until now, it has never been proposed. MRD.vid1.137 “When I issued the Emancipation Proclamation, I had this thing in contemplation. I then gave them a chance by prohibiting any interference on the part of the army; but they did not embrace it.” MRD.vid1.138 MD: “But Mr. President, these poor people could not READ your proclamation.” MRD.vid1.139 While he spoke Lincoln was writing MRD.vid1.140 on a piece of paper. “Hon. E. M. Stanton: “Don’t not fail to have a meeting with this most extraordinary and intelligent black man – MRD.vid1.141 A. Lincoln.” MRD.vid1.142 AL: “Stanton is firing! Listen. He is in his glory. Noble man!” MD: “What is it? Mr. President” AL: “Why don’t you know? Charleston’s ours.” MRD.vid1.143 NARRATOR: Martin Delany later in April, caught a stage for the cradle of Southern animosities, MRD.vid1.144 which turned by the magic stroke of a pen and the raising of a sword MRD.vid1.145 into a new land of opportunity. MRD.vid1.146 He was to report to Gen. Rufus Saxton, a strong protector of freedman who commanded the occupation forces in South Carolina. 3 fire images MRD.vid1.147 MRD.vid1.148 MRD.vid1.149 MRD.vid1.150 MD: “I entered the city which from earliest childhood and through life I had learned to contemplate with feelings of utmost abhorrence, where the sound of the lash at the whipping post, and the hammer of the auctioneer MRD.vid1.151 were coordinate sounds in thrilling harmony, such as might well have vied for the infamous King of Dahomey.” MRD.vid1.152 “For a moment, I found myself dashing in unmeasured strides through the city. Again I halted to look upon the shattered walls MRD.vid1.153 of the once stately, but now deserted edifices. And but for the vigilance and fidelity MRD.vid1.154 of the colored firemen, there would have been nothing left but a smoldering plain of runs in the place where Charleston once stood.” MRD.vid1.155 NARRATOR: Chief Justice Salmon Chase in Charleston said: “A great race numbering four million is suddenly brought in freedom. All the world is looking to see whether the prophecies of the enemies of that race will be fulfilled or falsified. It rests upon the men of that race to tell.” MRD.vid1.156 Delany made it in time MRD.vid1.157 to see the flags changed at Fort Sumter, with his son, a young private, also there. And his old friend MRD.vid1.158 and comrade-in-arms William Lloyd Garrison who as he bade goodbye to a large adoring audience in Charleston said: GARRISON: “I have always advocated non-resistance; but this much I say to you, Come what may, never will you submit again to slavery. Do anything. Die first! MRD.vid1.159 But don’t submit again to them, never again be slaves. Farewell.” MRD.vid1.160 NARRATOR: Major Delany, the first black field officer in the U.S. Army, MRD.vid1.161 quickly organized schools, farms, MRD.vid1.162 farmers, freedmen and tried to reason with disenfranchised plantation owners, MRD.vid1.163 who were always trying to tie new freedman into enslaving contracts, exploiting their illiteracy. MRD.vid1.164 But Delany they loved. He was one of them and he told it to them straight. MRD.vid1.165 MD: “I came to talk to you in plain words so as you can understand how to open the gates of oppression and let the captive free. MRD.vid1.166 In this state there are 200 thousand able, intelligent honorable Negroes, not an inferior race, mind you.” MRD.vid1.167 “I want to tell you one thing, do you know that if it was not for the black man, MRD.vid1.168 this war never would have been brought to a close with success. MRD.vid1.169 Do you know that? MRD.vid1.170 Do you know that?” MRD.vid1.171 NARRATOR: But they would be asked to submit again - and soon. From the moment a bullet penetrated the Great Liberator’s brain at Ford’s Theater, no such a grand promise of land and freedom would ever hold. In May, just a month later, MRD.vid1.172 the newly appointed President Johnson ordered all these lands – those not properly surveyed - returned MRD.vid1.173 to some 300 plantation owners – even if MRD.vid1.174 someone else’s crop was already growing in the field. One freedman wrote to Andrew Johnson himself: MRD.vid1.175 “We have been ready to strike for liberty and humanity, yea to fight if need be, to preserve the glorious union. And now, we are ready to pay for this land. MRD.vid1.176 ‘Sign contracts with your old master and work their land as partners’ This was the plea to most freed blacks. MRD.vid1.177 Throughout that long summer, Delany’s superiors Generals Howard and Saxton avoided Johnson’s order and eventually defied them outright until September MRD.vid1.178 when they broke the news to the freedmen they loved so much. An Edisto Island freedman wrote his friend, MRD.vid1.179 Gen. Howard: “You ask us to forgive the landowners of our island. You only lost your right to arm in war and might forgive them. MRD.vid1.180 The man who tied me to a tree and gave me thirty nine lashes, who stripped and flogged my mother and sister and who will not let me stay in his empty hut unless I do his planting – that man I cannot forgive. . . General we cannot remain here.” MRD.vid1.181 NARRATOR: Many left South Carolina. Some stayed and were beaten. MRD.vid1.182 Delany fought: MD: “Every species of infamy, however atrocious, private and public, bare-faced and in open daylight MRD.vid1.183 is defiantly perpetrated under the direction and guidance of the despicable political leaders in the sacred name of ‘Republicanism’ and ’Radicalism.’ MRD.vid1.184 “But these Yankees talk smooth to you. Oh yeh. Their tongues roll just like the drum. They don’t pay you enough.” MRD.vid1.185 I was told to stay out of politics. NARRATOR: The forty acres and a mule promised to freedmen were already secretly being returned to the planters courtesy of the tireless machinations of Trescott and Williams in Washington. MRD.vid1.186 They even got Gen. Sherman to write President Johnson. On the brink of being court-martialed for his opposition, MRD.vid1.187 Gen. Howard wrote his superiors: “The lands which have been taken possession by this bureau have been solemnly pledged to the freedman. Thousands of them are already located on tracts of forty acres each. MRD.vid1.188 The love of the soil and desire to own farms amounts to a passion. MRD.vid1.189 It appears to be the dearest hope of their lives.” MRD.vid1.190 NARRATOR: Within two years, the Freedman Bureau had its main function of redistributing the lands to original owners and apologizing for it . . . MRD.vid1.191 Saxton was reassigned, Gen. Howard court-martialed, MRD.vid1.192 but Col. Delany – a survivor – pressed on. He had made himself too valuable to too many people in a very short time. MRD.vid1.193 Republican politicians, like Christopher Columbus Bowen, who controlled the patronage at the Customs House, hated his dangerously incorruptible independence MRD.vid1.194 and integrity, but like everyone, MRD.vid1.195 bowed to his almost messianic hold on the freedmen – MRD.vid1.196 this the long-awaited black leader. MRD.vid1.197 And on the other side, the old Southern aristocracy MRD.vid1.198 saw Delany’s magic too. And planned to use him someday MRD.vid1.199 for their own ends. As one old Southern editor put, in grudging admiration: “Martin Delany is a genuine Negro.” MRD.vid1.200 MD: “No one who knows me will doubt my African proclivities. I have possessions in Africa which I hope to enjoy.” NARRATOR: The old Southern guard watched and waited. They noticed Delany’s perceptibly growing disgust with corruption, greased palms and greed MRD.vid1.201 that fueled his own Republican Party’s machine. MD: The Freedman’s Bureau was allowed to continue to return those 63,000 acres to the planters. MRD.vid1.202 I told freedman to get educated to see what was going on. “Through two crop failures in 66 and 67, I told freedmen to rely on their muscles, MRD.vid1.203 their faith, and the righteousness of their cause.” 1870 saw almost all of those 63,000 promised acres MRD.vid1.204 were back in planters hands and some 90,000 of South Carolina’s freedmen MRD.vid1.205 had left in disgust and desperation. MRD.vid1.206 2,000 brothers and sisters set sail for my beloved Africa. The best of our people. Their hopes were gone before mine. Delany’s disgust deepened on a trip to New York City where he represented the state in a bond issue. And he found out that Governor Chamberlain MRD.vid1.207 had given his old college chum and roommate $750,000 in commissions. MRD.vid1.208 The Old Southern guard, watched and waited knowing that Martin Delany might be the key to regaining power. MRD.vid1.209 WADE HAMPTON: “We can control the Negroes if we act discreetly.” I would come to know people like Wade Hampton an embodiment of the old South who invited me to speak at barbecue gatherings. HAMPTON: “If it means we can protect our state from destruction, I am willing to send Negroes to Congress. They will be better than anyone who can take the oath of loyalty and I should rather trust them than renegades or Yankees. “My experience has been that when a Yankee can do a bit of rascality, the temptation to do it is almost irresistible.” MRD.vid1.210 NARRATOR: No one, though, would be a more fateful associate in Martin Delany’s long and broad lifetime as Wade Hampton, the old cavalry general, aristocrat and front man for the South. Who - yes, truly speaking personally for himself - wished for a better life for the freedman because he and Delany both fervently lived and advocated personal honor and a regimen of book learning and practical skills as every freedman’s road to true permanent economic redemption. MRD.vid1.211 It was only a matter of time that these two stars would head on a one on one collision and one of those two stars would orbit around the other. MRD.vid1.212 If only there had been more than just one Wade Hampton and one Martin Delany. America’s working, educated electorate would have emerged sooner. But the personal prestige, humanitarian and pragmatic ways of each man could only briefly capture the public imagination, MRD.vid1.213 while, at all other times, whites, blacks, Democrats and Republicans slid disgracefully into the abyss where guns and bribes were constantly used as the preferred path to personal power and glory. MRD.vid1.214 Pressured out of the Freedman’s Bureau in 1869, Delany was retired from public life, selling real estate and editing his own newspaper, when Rev. Richard Cain came to him one day in 1872 and urged him to help elect Franklin Moses. MRD.vid1.215 He might even get – for his efforts – a decent job later to support his seamstress wife, Catherine, and their large family. MRD.vid1.216 Delany could deliver freedmen’s votes. Hoping to enhance his own political fortunes in this state with a majority of black voters, and hoping to get more homesteads for freedmen, Delany stumped vigorously for Moses. MRD.vid1.217 Moses had always given lip service to Delany’s plan to attract Northern money to be long-term, low-interest loans to help the freedmen to buy and develop their own homesteads. MRD.vid1.218 Delany’s unvarnished truth-telling inspired the common people and irked those grubbing after filthy lucre. MRD.vid1.219 Wrote onetime governor B.F. Perry: “After mature reflection, I believe Col. Delany has exhibited in his speeches more wisdom and prudence, more honor and patriotism than any other Republican, white or black in South Carolina.” MRD.vid1.220 Delany wrote that, should the homeless become landowners, they would at once become proportionately interested in the affairs of state. Before either school house or church can be erected, he said the people themselves must be settled in homes of their own. MRD.vid1.221 Freedmen were leaving the state, denied the once promised forty acres virtually all back in original hands, and their life savings deposited faithfully in the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, now gone form mismanagement. MRD.vid1.222 Delany knew his plan could work. In three years he organized white cotton wholesalers and freedmen farmers on Hilton Head Island into a peaceable alliance that grew and harvested the crop profitably. Moses was elected. MRD.vid1.223 So was “Honest John” who boasted he bought his seat in the U.S. Senate for $40,000. MRD.vid1.224 But Governor Moses continued to drive even higher the state debt. MRD.vid1.225 It had already soared from one to over seventeen million dollars in the previous five years. Moses then raised taxes on freed holders to pay for all this. MRD.vid1.226 And he lined his pockets with priced pardons sold to 503 imprisoned felons. And they were all released into this heavily armed, hate-filled powder keg land. And Governor Moses gave Delany no job. MRD.vid1.227 Rev. Cain wrote Moses: “I had assured Mr. Delany that you would not break faith. He has staked all on your word. For Heaven’s sake, do not cast him away.” MRD.vid1.228 Seeing Beaufort’s old St. Helena Church summed up a visitors’ feeling in 1873 about every South Carolina town he saw: MRD.vid1.229 it was one of complete prostration, dejection, MRD.vid1.230 stagnation. MRD.vid1.231 VISITOR: “Utter stagnation marks its streets and everything is flavored with decay. The mockingbird sings as if winter has no meaning for them, MRD.vid1.232 the old mansions are permeated with the air of desertion. The merry tinkling that proceeds from the closed shutters of one of them seems altogether dissonant with the surroundings.” MRD.vid1.233 Bad crops, bad weather, a lost position in world cotton markets, a national depression – this all contributed. MRD.vid1.234 So by 1874, all of South Carolina, including Delany’s beloved St. Helena Island, looked like an armed camp. MRD.vid1.235 The Ku Klux Klan was forming almost three hundred rifle clubs that once beat two hundred freedmen and killed four more in nine months, in just one county. MRD.vid1.236 Freedmen either armed themselves, MRD.vid1.237 Or prayed the Federal troops would never leave. MRD.vid1.238 Some freedmen and their families slept in the swamps in the mild winter where the men in hoods and facemasks could not find them MRD.vid1.239 Wrote the editor of the Edgefield Advertiser in one of the states’ most strife torn counties: “Good people now look upon the entire electoral contest as a struggle between thieves and plunderers.” MRD.vid1.240 And they worried: “Among the whites is a class of men who hold human life of little value, MRD.vid1.241 and among the colored people there is a class who do not wish to labor and are known as habitual thieves or disturbers of the peace. MRD.vid1.242 Gen. Rufus Saxton wrote back his old friend Robert Smalls about these darkest of times in South Carolina: “I rejoiced when the right of suffrage came and I sorrowed when it was told that some had sold this precious birthright for a miserable mess of potage.” MRD.vid1.243 A few years earlier, Delany heard the church bells ring when the Fourteenth Amendment had been passed; but it was a hollow sound. MRD.vid1.244 He saw freedmen unable to read show up at the Freedmen’s Bureau with great baskets. The word, “Registration” sounded not much different from that other word: “provisions.” MRD.vid1.245 The Republicans’ vampire like bite into the state’s ebbing lifeblood blinded them to that emerging menace and giant, the old Southern Democrats MRD.vid1.246 and their gun-toting right wing rabble. Delany saw this disaster collision coming: MD: Again and again I warned the majority Republicans to go easy on the white planters MRD.vid1.247 because one day the shoe would go over to their foot. And sure enough it did. MRD.vid1.248 NARRATOR: Delany ran for lieutenant governor in 1874 on an independent reformed Republican ticket, getting 64,000 votes as corrupt Chamberlain won. MD: I lost my race but the planters got the shoe on their foot capturing the majority of seats in the statehouse. MRD.vid1.249 NARRATOR: Delany was made justice of the peace in Charleston when, as the gubernatorial election drew near in 1876 was indicted, courtesy of Governor Chamberlain, for misusing the funds of a dirt poor black church. MRD.vid1.250 Hardly. The implicit threat was: do not support Wade Hampton who was now the official candidate against Chamberlain with all the wealth and smart men the Old South could muster squarely behind him. MRD.vid1.251 Hampton and Delany always appealed to people’s desire for peaceful solutions based on reason and fair play. HAMPTON: “I pledge myself solemnly in the presence of the people of South Carolina MRD.vid1.252 and in the presence of my God that, if the Democratic ticket is elected – not one single right enjoyed by the colored people today shall be taken from them.” MRD.vid1.253 NARRATOR: As violence increased the extreme Democratic clubs secretly assigned one man to personally bribe or scare one freedman from voting, MRD.vid1.254 as Chamberlain’s campaign promises became more grotesque and desperate, Delany announced for Wade Hampton in September, 1876 MRD.vid1.255 – immediately putting his life at risk. Delany fought hard and spoke forcefully for Hampton. MD: Freedmen I told one and all were serving a new master now the radical Republican Carpetbaggers. I said the blackest truth out loud – a black man would not be allowed to lead, not just to live, but to lead. I myself always dared to do what the white men ever dared and done – to pull on every lion’s tail a white man has pulled. MRD.vid1.256 NARRATOR: On October 16th, C.C. Bowen promised me that our party of white and black Democrats could speak to freedmen on Edisto Island. MRD.vid1.257 Before the steamer left the Charleston wharf a number of Republican negroes gathered and they noisily demanded that they be permitted to take passage and threateningly declared that they wanted a chance to clean out those Democrats. MRD.vid1.258 MD: The audience at the meeting of some 500 or 600 “African citizens” was by far the most uncouth, savage and uncivilized that I have ever seen. The Republican Negroes started to beat their drums and left in a body. They would listen to “De Damn Democrats. MRD.vid1.259 They marched off and the women crowded around the wagon with their bludgeons with threats, and curses. MRD.vid1.260 MD: ”I rose to speak on the wagon. They interrupted me as I said: “I had come to South Carolina with my sword drawn to fight for the freedom of the black man.” MRD.vid1.261 I said “I had warned you against trusting your money to the Freedman’s Bank; and that you had, to your sorrow, paid no heed to my warning.” MRD.vid1.262 In violation of the agreement that neither party should carry guns or rifles to the place of meeting, MRD.vid1.263 the Negroes had brought their muskets and secreted them in a nearby swamp and in an old house near a church not far from the speaking ground. MRD.vid1.264 They marched out of the swamp with their arms and opened fire upon the whites who were unarmed. In the meantime I, Mr. William E. Simmons, and several aides to white men had taken refuge in a brick house adjoining the church. The Negro militia charged out of the swamp surrounded the brick house and tried to batter down the door. MRD.vid1.265 Failing in this, they broke open the windows and pointed muskets at us. We all escaped except for Mr. Simmons, who upon emerging from the door was knocked down and beaten to death. MRD.vid1.266 Six white men were killed and sixteen whites wounded that day. One black man was killed. The siege of Cainhoy continued for several days afterwards. MRD.vid1.267 White racists conducted similar assaults against blacks especially in Edgefield County. NARRATOR: Wade Hampton did win by a fiercely contested 1100 vote margin, provided in part by an estimated 3,000 Republican blacks who followed Delany’s example. MRD.vid1.268 MD: I had hurt the cause of my people beyond all imaginings. MRD.vid1.269 NARRATOR: Then Wade Hampton made history. With his election for governor still is dispute and the state in anarchy MRD.vid1.270 he met at the Willard Hotel with president-elect Rutherford B. Hayes, MRD.vid1.271 who held onto his election by one electoral vote. To keep his single electoral vote lead, Hayes and Hampton agreed that Hayes would support and confirm Hampton’s election and as Hampton wrote Hayes: MRD.vid1.272 HAMPTON: “If the Federal troops are withdrawn from the State House, there shall be on my part or that of my friends no resort to violence MRD.vid1.273 but we shall look for their maintenance solely to such peaceful remedies as the Constitution and laws of the State provide.” MRD.vid1.274 MD: U.S. soldiers were removed from the South on Hampton’s pact with Hayes - and I helped that. One person called it the abandonment of the colored race. MRD.vid1.275 Wade Hampton appointed me judge and I remained until he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1879. MRD.vid1.276 But the secret all white Charleston County Democratic committee methodically organized the state, county-by-county and parish-by-parish MRD.vid1.277 to crush the Republican party and all spokesmen for Reconstruction. MRD.vid1.278 My son drowned in the Savannah River. His body was found in December, late 1879. My wife Catherine, who had carried our family during my long absences, needed me. MRD.vid1.279 I was old. My children needed their college educations at Wilberforce. The books that set my dreams afire long ago belonged to them now. MRD.vid1.280 So I was there on the dock when a ship - the Azor - set sail for Liberia from Charleston harbor MRD.vid1.281 full of hopeful friends, with my fondest dreams on that distant shore. MRD.vid1.282 My torch had passed from me. MRD.vid1.283 His loving admirers gave him the Liberian flag on that dock for his many years of inspiration MRD.vid1.284 to act on their dreams. "Almost all his many children became teachers. His name is misspelled on his tombstone. His life’s work was lost when a library burned. And the ancestors of those who left for Africa in his lifetime and with his blessing still turn the native soil. MRD.vid1.285 MD: ”Act, act in the living present – but act. Speak the truth and leave the rest to God.” GRANDMA GRACI: No more stories, Martin. End THE VIDEO: The video broken out into segments on Flickr below: Martin Delany was a Harvard-educated physician, explorer who led his own scientific expedition to Africa; co-editor of The North Star newspaper; novelist; political theorist, judge in South Carolina, the first black field officer in the U.S. Army and described by Abraham Lincoln in February, 1865 after meeting him as " an extraordinary and intelligent black man." Martin Delany - Visionary - 1 www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBbR4_XVL9A TRT: 5:38 Martin Delany - Visionary - 2 www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IKkeh-oAJw TRT: 4:55 Martin Delany - Defiance - 3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=akOy0YTgveI TRT: 4:32 Martin Delany - Wartime - 4 www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoov745rJIQ TRT: 7:22 Martin Delany - Meets Lincoln - 5 www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FLy2e5k-lA TRT: 6:34 Martin Delany - Major Delany - 6 www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmsREGq81F4 TRT: 5:32 Martin Delany - Post-War - 7 www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfr5btQPF8M TRT: 2:20 Martin Delany - Disillusioned - 8 www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rdRT-_9mZE TRT: 4:17 Martin Delany - Charleston - 9 www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRmGweOo5A0 TRT: 5:37 Martin Delany - Betrayed - 10 www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdeCu7a4pww TRT: 6:01 Martin Delany - Going Home - 11 www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hj9nWbIfIo TRT: 4:29 OTHER SOURCES: Surkamp, James T. (1853). "To Be More Than Equal: The Many Lives of Martin R. Delany 1812-1885. West Virginia University Libraries. 9 Nov. 1999. Web. 26 Dec. 2010.
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camp with the HJ on the NW end of the Oodnadatta Track

Pets "a" Plenty, Adelaide, Australia
On our way to Uluru with Trudy and the kids. We got to Ayers Rock the next day, via Ebenezer, views of Mt Connor from a sand dune with Trudy, the dog, then a visit to Sunset Strip for photos before making camp in the Ayers Rock campground, where we saw a dingo licking down the BBQs. We popped down a few Km along the track for the night to get away from the trucks on the Stuart Highway at Marla. It was a pleasant spot with no noise or passing cars. We never thought we would head down this road again 20 years later, and travel most of the road a few times, once agin in the HJ, and then a few times to see Lake Eyre in the Landcruiser, Smoky. See a good description of what there is to see along the track. From www.westprint.com.au. Oct 2016 Friday Forum Editor’s comments are in green. Trip Notes – Oodnadatta Track, South Australia. Went from Maree to Oodnadatta this week. Best camp Farina by far. Best view Lake Eyre from lookout. Best experience- Arkaringa sunup and sundown. Best Tip- Flynet. Russ Oodnadatta track – good news is that the Marree man has reappeared. Andrew www.expeditionaustralia.com.au/2016/08/marree-man-geoglyp... With tracks drying out, it will be back to good driving conditions and if you want to include a link to my Blog when we were out there in August, it will give him and other viewers just what there is to see along this great drive. Stephen. www.exploroz.com/Members/58567.500/9/2016/Oodnadatta_Trac... We travelled the Oodnadatta Track in August this year, just before the recent rain. We were in our Patrol and towing an off-road camper trailer. Before the rain, the track was in very good condition and we enjoyed comfortable travel at about 80 kph. And there is lots to look out for, but most of it is easily spotted from the road. Here are some highlights listed below. First there is Farina – between Lyndhurst and Marree. Farina was a small township on the Old Ghan Railway line. Now in ruins, the Farina Restoration Group is slowly restoring the old buildings to prevent further decay. The Restoration Group has also placed informative signs around the old township. The ruins are on Farina Station and there is a very nice campground in the dry creek bed there. Marree is an interesting old town with a fine hotel and railway station. There are narrow gauge diesels and Tom Cruse’s old truck also at the station. You can get fuel and other supplies from the general store and some of the best homemade pasties going. Further along the track is Plane Henge. You will notice this from a long way off due to the unusual shapes appearing on the horizon. This is a sculpture park and worth a look at some of the unusual shapes and forms that have appeared here over time. There is also inventive use of existing structures, including the railway water tank that now looks like a dog. Lake Eyre South is next, and a lookout has been provided, via a turn off to the right, with a good view of the lake – which is mostly dry. Curdimurka Siding, was a former station for the railway line and is the next lump to appear on the horizon. As the most intact of the rail buildings not in a township, this is also worthy of a stop off. As well as the main building, there are a couple of tin sheds and rail tracks heading north to the decaying water tank and desalination tower. If you go past the water tank following the rail tracks will bring you to a bridge over Stuart Creek. There was a waterhole here when we were there with black swans, herons and ducks present. The Wabma Kadarbu Mound Springs, this time to the left of the road and along a rougher track, is another point of much interest. There are parking areas and board walks across sensitive ground to Blanche Cup and the Bubbler. Back on the Track and Coward Springs is only a short distance away. This is another camping ground on station property, set in amongst some large casuarinas with all amenities of toilets, donkey powered hot showers and natural spa for something quite different. There are a couple of old buildings from the railway era too. Another interesting stop off is Strangways Springs, via a turnoff on the left side of the Track, which is marked by a Pink Roadhouse sign. Here are the ruins of a pastoral station and the overland telegraph line. Walking tracks lead to some mound springs and further explores the history of Strangways. The next stop is William Creek and always worthy of a stopover. There is the pub, an airstrip for scenic flights over Lake Eyre, an outdoor museum and a pleasant camp ground with all amenities. At Algebuckina, the impressive railway bridge spans the Neales River. With an overall length of 578 metres it is the longest bridge in South Australia. There is also nice camping along the waterhole here. And finally, Oodnadatta, where you will find the Pink Roadhouse, the Transcontinental Hotel and the old railway station building, which is now a museum housing a very interesting pictorial display. Ask at the Roadhouse for a key to view the museum. There are several other railway or telegraph related ruins accessible from or close to the Track. The Oodnadatta Track might seem like it crosses a flat, featureless plain, but there is plenty to see along the way. Coward Springs Campground is a must-stay along the Oodnadatta Track. Once a station on the old Ghan railway line, the site was constructed in 1888 and abandoned before the line was closed in 1980. Greg Emmett and Prue Coulls have been here as your resident hosts since 1991. They have built facilities, planted hundreds of locally native trees, restored the heritage buildings and much more. In 1998 the site (which includes two houses, two in-ground rainwater tanks, a bore, date palms and athel pines) was added to the South Australian Heritage Register. Well worth a stop even just for a day visit to the ‘natural spa’. Jenny. We were up that way the end of August on the way to do the Madigan, which we had to cancel due to all the rain. There has been a lot of rain out there and parts of the track have been closed on and off for the last couple of months so the first thing to do is check road conditions. This can be done by checking the SA Outback Roads condition report. Just google it. Alternatively, you can call the Pink Roadhouse for info. I would also check the forthcoming weather forecast by any of the reputable Apps that use BOM as their source As this is a very frequently used track I would imagine the graders have been out after the recent rains? If so I think it would be in good gravel road conditions. As for places you must see, the best bet is to go to the Pink Roadhouse website and follow the link to Mud Maps, where there are a whole host of mud maps put together by the late Adam Plate, prior proprietor of the Roadhouse. From my perspective, things to see are Lake Eyre ...... If it is close to full, or you won't see any water from the edge. Algebuckina Bridge. This is on the side of the track with plenty of places to camp up Old Peake telegraph station ruins and copper mine ruins. Although this is about 20k off the track it will take 45 mins to get out there. You can camp here but there is limited space. Coward Springs is worth a stop to see the old Railway Station. You can also camp there for a fee. At the top end, it's worth heading for Dalhousie Springs to experience the hot thermal spring in the Witjira NP. Entry and camping fees apply unless you have a valid SA Desert Parks pass. When we were at Dalhousie end of August, we managed to get out to Mt Dare on the day the track was closed. This means the track to and out of Mt Dare was becoming badly cut up. It may be wise to check with Mt Dare and SA Parks to see if the track has been graded since. Otherwise, if it is open, it will be badly rutted. Malcolm and Trish
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Sea Life Manchester, Trafford, England

Sea Life Manchester, Trafford, England
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Barton Square Bridge

Sea Life Manchester, Trafford, England
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Manchester 82

Sea Life Manchester, Trafford, England
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Manchester 95 ( panorama w Trafford Centre )

Sea Life Manchester, Trafford, England
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MANCHESTER 228

Sea Life Manchester, Trafford, England
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MANCHESTER 276

Sea Life Manchester, Trafford, England
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The dome at the Trafford Centre

Sea Life Manchester, Trafford, England
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Pretentious or just plain 'NAFF'

Sea Life Manchester, Trafford, England
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Asda, Trafford Park

Sea Life Manchester, Trafford, England
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