The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

Bells ringing

HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.

The American Revolution was an inspiration to black people. They hoped the words of the patriots would apply equally to them, but they were wrong. When the armies left the fields, we were a country of farmers founded on notions of freedom, and our largest farms were worked by slaves. There were 700,000 slaves in the United States at its birth. They had no rights and no power, yet they were determined to hold America to its ideals. Their struggle would last for generations, and that struggle would fundamentally reshape the character of our nation.

GATES

Sheffield, Massachusetts. At the time of the American Revolution, this was slave country. Slavery was legal here, just as it was in each of the 13 colonies... but the Revolution brought new laws to this land, and here in this farmhouse, one slave began to test those laws. Her name was Mum Bett. For decades, she served meals in these rooms. Then she heard talk around the table of a new Constitution that said all men were free. So Mum Bett decided to act. She ran away to the nearby town of Stockbridge, where she convinced a young lawyer to help her file a suit. Other slaves had sued their masters before, but this case was different. Mum Bett was challenging the very existence of slavery in Massachusetts. Her argument was that slavery violated the most basic principle of the American Revolution, that all human beings were created equal. It was a powerful argument, and she won. Mum Bett's victory echoed across the young nation. Within two decades, every state in the North was on the road to abolition, and this political transformation was accompanied by a religious one as an evangelical revival spread across the country proclaiming that all races were equal in the eyes of God.

MAN

You have these big, outdoor preaching sessions where people gather in large numbers to hear a charismatic preacher give the word of God. Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel Daniel, Daniel?

BROWN

A lot of it is the language of Exodus, which is something that's very dangerous for s slave society because when people begin to read the story of Exodus and think about the delivery of God's chosen people from bondage in Egypt, they begin to think about their own delivery, and they begin to interpret that as God's mandate for them to become abolitionists, and so that becomes very important in a white awakening to the evil of slavery.

MAN

Didn't my Lord, Daniel Why not every man?

GATES

The evangelical movement also offered opportunities to black people, among them a young slave named Richard Allen.

Rooster crows

GATES

Allen grew up on a Delaware farm much like this. In the woods nearby, he heard traveling preachers say that slavery was a mortal sin, and Allen hatched the plan to make his master listen. His master was religious, but not in any kind of intensive way. Richard Allen really tried to cultivate that. Sounds like Richard Allen was a bit of a trickster. Allen was a quietly intensive man who was always plotting to gain his freedom. So once he gets his master's trust, he convinces these antislavery preachers to visit his master's house, and when they do that, he know what they're gonna say. They're gonna convince Allen's master that he is sinning and is gonna go to hell unless he emancipates. Allen put the kajunga on him, man. Well, as he puts it in his autobiography, soon after the preachers visited his house, "my master allowed us to buy our freedom." So he knew what he was doing every step of the way. Now free, Richard Allen set out to share his faith with the world. He soon became a preacher himself, spreading the message of equality, and in the winter of 1786, he arrived here in Philadelphia.

Horse neighs

GATES

At the time, Philadelphia was the largest city in the United States and home to a burgeoning abolitionist movement...

Gavel bangs

GATES

that opposed slavery on religious grounds. It was also a magnet for a steadily growing population of free black people.

NEWMAN

Philadelphia, it's the Harlem of early America. This is where people go to make their way in culture, to find new job opportunities, to bond in a social way.

GATES

Allen was invited to preach in a white church that was caught up in the spirit of the time. It must have seemed like he'd reached the Promised Land, but Allen soon faced a hard fact. Freedom was one thing. Equality was something else.

NEWMAN

Race rears its ugly head. White preachers there separate black Congregationalists. By the 1790s there's gonna be a black pew which is separate and above the white pew, and Richard Allen thinks that this violates everything he learned.

GATES

Emboldened, Allen made a decision that would change history. He and his friends decided to stage America's first sit-in.

NEWMAN

They gonna march into the church. They're not gonna sit in the Negro pews. They're gonna go down into the front of the church, and they're gonna sit with other congregants. So Richard Allen is praying. His great friend Absalom Jones is praying next to him. White preachers come up, tapped him on the shoulder, and say, "You got to get out of here," and after prayers are over, Richard Allen, together with all the other black congregants, get up, march out of the church in a body, and, as he says, "We never returned."

GATES

Allen resolved to start his own church, an African American church, the first of its kind in the United States. His efforts began humbly. He bought a blacksmith's shop, dragged it onto a vacant lot, and set up a temporary parish. Then he spent the next 23 years struggling to make it permanent.

Organ playing "Holy, Holy, Holy"

GATES

Allen's church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, still thrives today. Holy, holy, holy This is just one of its 7,000 congregations around the globe. Got to tell you, you all look wonderful down here. Holy, holy, holy...

MAN

To a person from the early 19th century, Richard Allen would have been like what President Barack Obama is to us today. He did what nobody thought was possible. And he showed that black people could create and sustain their own institution. Oh, absolutely. You look at the modern civil rights movement, really, the blueprint was laid here. It started here, indeed. I mean, for example, Rosa Parks. Here she is, an AME member, a stewardess in an AME church in Alabama, and I am convinced that having heard the story of Allen's walkout all of her life, that as she sat on that bus, deep down, she knew that she was not stepping out into uncharted territory. All need the Bible You need the Bible

GATES

Allen's church was a powerful rebuke to the very existence of slavery. If black people could build a place like this, what couldn't they do? For one hopeful moment at the end of the 18th century, that question hung over the entire nation, North and South. Some Southerners began to free their slaves. Small free black communities began to spring up in Southern cities, and it briefly seemed as if America might actually live up to the promise of its Revolution... but the moment didn't last. The agrarian South was simply too dependent upon slave labor. Southern lawmakers began to erect enormous obstacles in front of masters who wanted to free their slaves. It was a crushing blow to the African Americans still held in bondage, but some refused to accept it. On Sunday, August 10, 1800, a group of slaves gathered near this creek on the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia. Sunday was their day off, but this Sunday, they'd come to plot a revolt, summoned by a young blacksmith named Gabriel. Here's a guy who, if he lived in Mum Bett's Massachusetts, things would be different. He's got a skill. He's literate. He's respected, but he's tied to the plantation. Gabriel recruited followers from miles around, armed them with homemade swords, and organized them for battle. His plans called for 3 separate slave armies to seize the Virginia capital and kidnap its governor. Slavery was to be ended by negotiation, but it never happened.

Thunder

GATES

On the day of the uprising, a violent storm hit Richmond. Trees fell, and bridges were washed away.

Thunder

GATES

Gabriel decided to postpone...

Thunder

GATES

but when the storm broke, two slaves panicked and told their masters. The rebels were rounded up, tried, and sentenced to death. In the end, in your judgment, was Gabriel a patriot? He believed in what the Founding Fathers claimed were American ideals. He believed in freedom for all people. He didn't want to kill people for the sake of killing people. He wanted to kill a handful of people to free several hundred thousand enslaved Virginians, and that, I think, makes him a patriot. Slaveholding Virginia took a different view of Gabriel. He and his fellow rebels were marched down this path to a gallows. Then they were executed and buried in unmarked graves beneath this field. In a sense, their deaths marked the end of one era and the start of another.

NARRATOR

Cotton is king. In 1781, a New England farm boy named Eli Whitney put together a few boards and rollers.

GATES

Many of us learned this story as children. Eli Whitney, a Yankee tinkerer, invented a machine that launched the Industrial Revolution. What we didn't learn was that Whitney's cotton gin also launched a new phase of American slavery, a phase in which ideas about black freedom were overwhelmed by the need for black labor. It would be the nadir of African American history... and it all started with a simple, white plant.

MAN

It was economically unfeasible to grow cotton before the cotton gin because it took one individual about 10 hours to produce one pound of usable cotton. One individual, 10 hours, one pound... Right. of clean cotton. Right, clean cotton, and so even the first primitive gin could produce about 50 pounds of cotton in one day, and very quickly, they'd grow until eventually producing thousands of pounds of cotton a day. And this is the greatest economic boom in the history of the United States. Oh, sure. The whole country is benefiting from this. Yeah.

GATES

What made cotton so desirable? A perfect storm. In the 1790s, America's oldest crops, like tobacco, were depleting farmland and dropping in value. At the same time, the textile industry in Great Britain was exploding, creating enormous international demand for cotton clothing. Eli Whitney's gin merely provided the motor for a global economic machine, and slavery was its fuel.

DEYLE

Everybody was getting a piece of it-- all these Northern bankers and marketing people, folks who owned the ships that transported the cotton. Everybody was getting a piece of the pie.

GATES

Cotton utterly transformed the United States, making fertile land from Georgia to Texas extraordinarily valuable. The fact that Native Americans lived on these lands was a temporary inconvenience solved by a policy of Indian removal, the massive replacement of Native populations with slave plantations. It's a part of our troubled history that can still be seen from the air.

DEYLE

If we were flying over this prior to European settlement, we would've seen large fields of corn and beans, trees, and squash. When the first English began moving in here, they begin chopping down the trees and expanding the fields available for cotton.

GATES

The enormous profitability of cotton undermined the principles of the American Revolution and forever altered black life. The more money the planters made from growing cotton, the more cotton the planters wanted to grow, and that took more slaves. Slaves in the Upper South became incredibly more valuable as commodities because of this demand for them in the Deep South. They were sold off in droves, and that created a second Middle Passage, and, in many ways, the second Middle Passage was just as devastating as the first. To feed King Cotton, more than a million African Americans were carried off into the Deep South. That's 2 1/2 times the number that were brought to the United States from Africa. It was the largest forced migration in American history... and it filled the countryside with a haunting sight-- slaves chained together marching south.

Chains rattling

WOMAN

You'd hear the clanking of chains as the enslaved people walked through here. Like a prison gang. Exactly, exactly. The men usually were in front, and they were always chained by the necks and by the wrists. Hmm. Women weren't always chained, but sometimes they were. I always tell people to think about the 5 senses when you talk about slavery. So what do you hear? What do you think? What do you taste? What do you smell? You'll hear weeping and sobbing and wailing, and oftentimes when families were separated, you'll have slave narratives talk about how they heard their mothers screaming up until the distance, until the wagon was gone, or even when the wagon was gone, they could still hear the screams, screams from the mothers. Do you have nightmares about it? Do you dream about it? Yes, yes. It's the stories about women and being raped. Here they are, walking 200, 300 miles' journey, tired. Then at night, they were being raped. I can't imagine the kind of shame that enslaved people felt, and if there was a partner around, to have to witness that, somebody putting their hands on their partner like that, must have been really difficult. It must have been a nightmare. Yeah.

GATES

The second Middle Passage lasted roughly 70 years, from 1790 right up to the Civil War. For black people in the South, that meant 70 years of near-constant upheaval. Slave families that had been stable for generations were suddenly and irrevocably shattered. Every time somebody was sold, people would come out of the fields to say good-bye to the people who were leaving, and they had certain hymns that they would sing about seeing each other again in heaven, and so that music and paying homage to those people was really a way of saying they did have bonds and then when those were being broken, they had to have some kind of way of saying good-bye.

CHORUS

Look down Look down That long, long, farm road Where you and I-- I must go

GATES

The rise of cotton affected every African American, even those who were free. This was especially true for the free black people who remained in the South struggling to build lives within a slave economy. Some made decisions that are difficult for us to understand today. This cemetery holds the remains of the Brown Fellowship Society, an elite organization of free black men in Charleston, South Carolina. They came together to promote their common goals, their common purposes, mutual elevation, social advancement, but... The Society's members were craftsmen and tradesmen. Many of their clients were white slave owners, and some chose to buy slaves for themselves, but their motives were complex. We can't shy away from the fact that you had free blacks that owned slaves and used them in the same way that whites did, but we also know that you had people who were free who were-- quote, unquote--"married" to a slave spouse, and what they might do is purchase the enslaved spouse, but now the law would not allow them to emancipate the person, and so they end up holding the individual, who's really their husband or wife, as a slave. Why didn't they challenge the status quo? They didn't challenge the status quo because they understood how precarious their freedom was. Try to imagine having to purchase your own spouse. That was the reality for some free black people in the South. They existed on the margins of the largest slave society in the history of the world. The white planters who stood above them were making more money than any other group in America. They set the political course of our nation by controlling its wealth, crafting a new landscape with new centers of power... like Natchez, Mississippi. In 1800, this was a trading post. 50 years later, there were more millionaires here per capita than anywhere else in America, and in their day, money flowed from a place just nearby. This is called Forks of the Road. It's the dividing point on a rural highway right outside Natchez. It may look like a sleepy intersection, but this was once the second largest slave market in the United States, a place where black people from the Upper South were brought to be sold into the Deep South. This was a specialty market. You go to certain places you know where you can get what you want. Mm-hmm. That was this place. If you wanted a field hand, you can find them here. If you wanted somebody with more technical skills, you can find them here-- builders, carpenters, any and everything you were looking for. This was like a shopping center. What is was was like going to Costco or Walmart, but the product that was being sold... Were human beings. were human beings. Tens of thousands of slaves were sold at Forks of the Road, and the planters who bought them weren't just buying workers for their cotton fields. They had a very specific interest in women.

WHITE

You wanted men for the heavy labor, and you particularly may have had an interest in females for their ability to reproduce the next generation of enslaved people for your particular plantation.

GATES

The high cost of purchasing even a single slave meant that most masters tried to breed their own labor force, and some went to great lengths to make it happen, from forced pairings of slave couples to rape. Of all the major slave societies in the New World, only in the United States did the slave population naturally increased over time. The 400,000 people that we imported from Africa had become nearly 4 million by the outbreak of the Civil War. The numbers are staggering, and so was the violence required to keep them all under control. This small museum in Walterboro, South Carolina, holds evidence of that violence, objects that seemed to come from the Middle Ages. Oh, man, look at that. Yeah, for the neck. A whip. Right. They would pour salt in the wounds of people after they had been whipped-- men, women, children whipped. Slave muzzle. Mm. What had that person said? Why was that person being muzzled? What always strikes me when I look at items like this, probably some enslaved blacksmith created these items. Mm. He had to make the instruments for your own oppressor. Exactly, exactly. What choice do you have? The shackles... Mm...

BROWN

You have all these implements of torture which are tools for punishing people, right, who don't do what they're supposed to do, but they're also symbolic, right? So if you see someone muzzled or whipped in your community, you're warned what not to do. It creates this pervasive sense of fear and terror. Slave doesn't have to mean that you're whipped every day, you're raped every day, that you're tortured every day to be incredibly destructive to one's spirit and soul and being. You just have to commit such shocking violence upon the bodies of a few examples that nobody else would dare to think about it. Now, the funny thing is, people still do dare, right, right? You still do have people saying, "Well, whatever they got, it's got to be better than this."

GATES

Early on the morning of August 22, 1831, a group of slaves crept into the plantation house that once stood on these Virginia fields. They killed the planter and his wife. Then they killed the children. The bloodiest slave revolt in American history was under way. Over the next two days, more that 60 white people would die.

WOMAN

They go house to house, and as they go, they pretty much kill every man, woman, and child that they can find. It was incredibly personal. The people that these rebels were killing were often people whom they've grown up with, whose parents had enslaved their parents.

GATES

The slaves were led by a man named Nat Turner, a self-styled prophet who claimed that God had told him to slay his enemies. In hindsight, his motives seemed much simpler. Why did he do it? Why him? Why here? Why then? He did it because slavery was awful. Slavery was horrible. He did it because daily he was watching communities be torn apart. He did it because he knew the stories of women abused by slave owners. He knew the stories of how, from farm to farm, being split up was horrible... Mm-hmm. and he knew the constant threat of being shipped away. Turner's revolt was crushed on this field by a local militia. Looking back, it's easy to see it as a suicide mission, the desperate act of a people pushed too far, but it was more than that. Turner made real the secret hopes of millions of slaves, and he sent shockwaves across slaveholding America.

BROWN

The Nat Turner revolt happens in an international context where not only are the abolitionists in the North beginning to gear up their agitation against slavery, but also in the British Empire, slavery is on its last legs. In 1838, it's over, and slavery has ended in the British Empire. Southern planters are overwhelmingly concerned with this. They know that if slavery is not defended aggressively, it's gonna be over, right, and Nat Turner is just one warning signal among many that they're on the losing side of a global battle

GATES

In the wake of Turner's revolt, Southern planters defended themselves by launching an intense ideological campaign projecting an image of happy slaves and benevolent masters, arguing that their way of life was beneficial to both races.

MAN

There were some proslavery writers who argued that what slavery really was was the possibility of perfecting the human condition. It's like Americans have been given this gift of Africans. These were people who came to see slavery as something not just good, but natural, permanent, possibly the way you create the ideal community, the ideal world.

GATES

Scientists even tried to prove that black people were part of a different species, a species suited for slavery by nature.

BERRY

They would actually start measuring the size of black people's skulls, and they would talk about how they were not as intelligent because of the shapes of their heads, the size of their brains, and then they would look at things like how robust they were in terms of not their brains, but their bodies, and they'd say, "Well, look at their physical bodies. They're made for this kind of work."

GATES

Even in the North, these racist attitudes held sway. Newspapers brimmed with grotesque caricatures of free black people. Laws were written to restrict their rights, and racial violence became commonplace.

BROWN

There are a lot of white people in the North who are just plain racist and don't want black people around, and so black people find that they're restricted to certain jobs and certain industries. They find they're restricted to certain places within a city. They find they're only allowed to bury their dead, right, in burial grounds for black people.

BLIGHT

Free blacks, North or South, were this kind of an American caste set apart. They lived insecure lives, threatened lives, and we know this because of certain mobs, riots. A black orphanage in New York City was burned. Black schools were sometimes attacked. They were always weak in cohesion, weak in wealth, weak in power, but, nevertheless, they were survivors, and they had leaders.

GATES

Despite all they had endured, free black people refused to be intimidated. They had been in America too long and invested too much to back down. In their families, churches, and jobs, they showed that they were fully capable American citizens... and they understood that as long as slavery continued to exist, no black person could be truly free. So they began to agitate for abolition with increasing force. They allied themselves with a few sympathetic whites in the North in order to raise a chorus of voices against the slaveholding South. Perhaps the more powerful voice came from a young man who simply told his own story. Frederick Douglass was raised by his grandmother Betsy Bailey in a cabin near these Maryland woods. For the first 6 years of his life, Betsy was the only family he really knew, but then one morning, Betsy led him away from their home. She had been told to deliver him to work on a plantation 12 miles away. Douglass had no idea what was happening, but Betsy did. She had brought him here for one reason and one reason only, this boy that she had raised and loved, and that was to abandon him. When they reached this house, Betsy told him to go play with some other children. Then she slipped away. He never saw her again.

BLIGHT

The way he remembers it in the autobiographies is as a childhood trauma, laying on the ground crying, and for a 6-year-old it was as though his world had ended.

GATES

Douglass would spend the next 14 years in slavery, yet he refused to be broken. He kept trying to escape, and on his third try, he succeeded.

BLIGHT

He takes a train. He takes, actually, two trains, 3 ferry boats, goes through Philadelphia, crosses the Susquehanna, the Hudson. So it was highly planned down to the moment he would jump on the train.

GATES

Douglass ended up here in the whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, home to a small free black community and central to the burgeoning abolitionist movement. This is the place where he discovered himself in many ways. How do you mean? Well, he was, like many others, simple an escaped slave, and he discovered a voice, a role to be an antislavery agitator, to be a revolutionary, if you will. One of the first speeches he made was in the church. Douglass found work on these docks, joined the black church in the town, and began to speak out against slavery. Soon, he caught the attention of white abolitionists who desperately needed black voices.

MAN

White abolitionists could be militant and committed, but in their voices the slave experience would be abstract, whereas with Douglass, he was a manifestation of the principal charges that the abolitionists were making against the slave regime, especially its destruction of the family life of slaves. He could speak directly to that in terms of his own family.

GATES

In the summer of 1841, Douglass came here to Nantucket, Massachusetts, to speak at an antislavery convention. In the audience sat William Lloyd Garrison, the leading white abolitionist of the day. Douglass was just 23 years old, but he was about to alter history.

HOLT

It was his first speech before an integrated audience. So he was very nervous. Douglass finishes his speech. Garrison leaps up and says to the audience, "Do we have here a chattel, or do we have a man?" and the audience responds, "A man." "And should this man be returned to slavery?" and the audience roared no. Frederick Douglass was launched. Yes. He was invited to join the Anti-Slavery Society as a lecturer. They hired him on the spot. They hired him on the spot, man.

GATES

Douglass began to travel the North giving speeches, living proof of our nation's fundamental hypocrisy, showing audiences that a black person was every bit the equal of a white person.

BLIGHT

Frederick Douglass gave us a critique of the United States that's unique and as powerful as any we've ever had. He's speaking to history, to the nation, to the world about the meaning of the United States and how it has betrayed its promise. There's no better voice of that story and that pain and that promise than Douglass. I mean, he's the Martin Luther King and then some of the 19th century.

GATES

Douglass and his allies in the North forced slavery into national politics, making it an issue of intense debate. In the South, slaves pressed the issue themselves by running away whenever and however they could. Their stories filled a growing abolitionist press, giving rise to rumors of a vast network for escapees soon called the Underground Railroad. Part folklore, part propaganda, the Underground Railroad was never as large as we often imagine, but it was real. A loosely organized network of safe houses in the border states helped more than 20,000 runaways make their way to freedom. The network was run by free blacks and sympathetic whites, and it required immense courage from them all. This is one of the few documented safe houses on the Underground Railroad and the site of at least one remarkable escape.

WOMAN

Mary Corbett heard a knock on the door and it was an enslaved man who was fleeing, and the sheriff was after him, and he pleaded to her to help him. So, she brings him into the house and they go all the way up to the attic area, and she points to a very, very, very small, little door in the eaves and suggests that he try to crawl in there and hide himself. LARSON,

VOICE-OVER

There's a pounding on the door. The sheriff and his posse are with him, and she opens the door and lets them in, and she tells them they're welcome to search any room in the house. Stop. Turn around. And here's the cupboard that Sam hid in. That? Yes. Mary Corbett brought him up here and he-- and he squeezed himself in there. My God. It's just so tiny.

LARSON

And the sheriff decided not to look, because they didn't think that a man could fit in there. They would've just caught me. Ha! I'm too claustrophobic to go in there. I just said, "Look, let's make a deal." But if the sheriff is after you with his dogs and guns, you might find a way. That's incredible. No wonder they didn't look there. Right. Amazing.

GATES

Infuriated by all the runaways, southerners pushed for harsh laws to stanch the flow, culminating in the notorious Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a watershed moment in American history. The law required northerners to help capture anyone even accused of being a runaway slave... turning the north into a police power for the south. It also placed every free black person in terrible danger.

WOMAN

Every time you walked on the street, you were subject to being claimed as a slave. You're living every day afraid and watching over your shoulder to make sure that you're not being watched by someone who was looking for you or someone else and would happily take you if they can't find the someone else.

GATES

As bounty hunters flooded northern cities, black people began to look for freedom in ever-more-distant places. Small numbers had been running away to Canada since the Revolutionary War. Now they began to come here-- to Niagara Falls on the Canadian border--in droves. Why Canada? No slavery. And no slavery meant no slave catchers. In Canada, a black person could serve on a jury. A black person could vote. A black person could own property. A black person could become a citizen. Canada was for black people what the United States was for white people-- the land of the free, the home of the brave. Over 10,000 African Americans fled to Canada in the 1850s, including the most well-known conductor of the Underground Railroad-- Harriet Tubman. Tubman settled here, in the tiny town of St. Catharines, and joined this church, which became a hub for runaways. There are black families still living in this town who trace their roots back to those runaways, people whose ancestors took an almost unimaginable risk.

WOMAN

Here is just one portion of the descendant wall from 1838 all the way to today. This is portions of the Cassiel family... You had to get out of the south, and you were on your own. What did you have? You didn't have a map, you didn't have the education, you had nothing. So, you had to be able to rely on the north star, and yourself. I want to point out my immediate family. So, this is all my mother's side. This is the home team. Yeah. This is my mom's mom. And then, bounty hunters are after you. So, there was a lot at risk, and not many would do it and those that did, I mean, it's documented-- you had to be a little bit bent. You had to be... ha ha ha! You had to be totally crazy. Yeah. Ha! Yeah. When I was a youngster, we knew of the stories, but I never appreciated any of it, never looked back or even thought about it, until I was grown, and then it's like, "My God, my people did that? That's how we got here?"

GATES

The very existence of these families, an entire community of people descended from escaped slaves, is a testament to their strength.

BROWN

When I think about the Underground Railroad, it makes me want to claim slaves, right, as my ancestors, because they were genius in order to pull something off like this. I think about this and I think, wow, you know, slavery is not a shame on me, because my ancestors were some of the most creative, resourceful people in the history of the United States. That's a shame on the slaveholders. But there's no stigma that I bear by being descended from people who could do something like that, you know, who could pull something like that off.

GATES

Unfortunately, the Underground Railroad was out of reach for almost all slaves. Only a fraction ever made it to freedom. Their stories are inspiring, but their experience was not typical. As the Civil War drew near, almost 4 million slaves remained trapped in a nation still struggling to resolve its most fundamental contradictions. Their lives were desperate, and the choices they faced are hard to contemplate. Covington, Kentucky-- the northern border of the slaveholding south. In January of 1856, an enslaved woman named Margaret Garner lived here on a farm. Margaret was 22, she was married, with 4 children. Freedom lay just 5 miles away, so she and her husband decided to run. They traveled by night and made it here, to the banks of the Ohio River, at dawn. This was the barrier between slave Kentucky and free Ohio. It was a quarter-mile wide and frozen solid.

WOMAN

They got here just before sunrise.

GATES

They must have been exhausted and terrified. And--and cold. And cold, yeah, and they look over there, and there's nothing but ice. Frozen solid. A natural foot bridge. A natural foot bridge to freedom. The Garners walked across the river, risking their lives with every step. And then, they arrived at a small house in Ohio, owned by a free black man. But their triumph was short-lived. Within hours, federal marshals had tracked the family down. They got a big block of wood and start ramming in the door. They try to go into the windows, and outside, a crowd is gathering, just to see this scene taking place. Inside, there's mayhem, there's alarm. People were hysterical at the thought that they were so close to freedom, and had only enjoyed it for two hours, and now, you know, it looks like they're gonna be returned into bondage. Nightmare. Yes. Barricaded in the house, Margaret Garner did something unthinkable.

TAYLOR

As the marshals were battering in the house, Margaret Garner decided, rather than return to slavery, she would kill her children.

Door creaks

GATES

When the marshals finally broke in, they were confronted by a horrible scene. Margaret had slashed the throat of her daughter Mary. Mary lay on the floor dead. Hiding in the next room were her two young sons, still alive, but bruised and bleeding. Margaret, knife in hand, was quite clear about what she'd done and why. The only direct quote we have from Margaret Garner about the murder was she says, "I did the best that a mother could do, "and I would've done better and more for the rest. I've done the best I could." Meaning "I would've killed them all... Right. If I could've." And for her, she said, she said this to a couple of visitors who saw her when she was in jail, that this was freedom. She called her deceased toddler a bird for having flown into freedom. Margaret Garner quickly became a legend, celebrated and condemned across the country. What she had done became fodder for both sides of the slavery debate. Southern whites claimed that Margaret showed that black people were subhuman, capable of monstrous deeds, and in need of their master's paternal care. Abolitionists claimed that Margaret revealed the essential inhumanity of bondage. Margaret Garner stood for powerful ideas, images on both--all sides, and perhaps not enough for her own side. Just like "I'm not a poster child for abolitionism "and I'm not a defective mother, "but I am a woman who knows what it feels like, looks like, means to be a slave, and I don't want that for my children." Margaret Garner's story had a final tragic turn. An Ohio court ruled that as a slave, she was property, and couldn't be tried for murder. So, she was given back to her owner. And here, on a riverboat heading south, Margaret made one last decision about her family. She let her infant daughter Celia slip into the icy water and drown. If Celia had only lived 9 more years, she would've been free, but Margaret couldn't have possibly known that. Margaret preferred to kill her own children rather than to allow them to live the social death of slavery. It was a horrifying decision, but it tells us something about the America of its time. Slavery was so deeply embedded in the nation that violence seemed the only way to end it. And much more violence was coming. Next time on "The African Americans"... The country erupts in civil war. Lincoln would've seen black refugees camped out all over the city.

ANNOUNCER

But what would freedom bring? What's happening during Reconstruction is black people become a threat to white supremacy. "The

African Americans

Many Rivers to Cross." "The African Americans" story continues online at pbs.org/manyrivers with streaming video and more. "The Many Rivers to Cross" is available on DVD for $34.99. The companion book is also available for $34.95 plus shipping. To order, call 1-800-336-1917.