Raise Your Head Up: Freedom Colonies in America

[Narrator] Funding for "Raise Your Head Up" is made possible in part by a grant from the Summerlee Foundation, dedicated to the support of animal protection and to preserving Texas history.

Additional funding is from Alex Labry, an educator and professional photographer based in Austin, Texas.

[gentle music] After the Civil War, more than four million formerly enslaved people were set free... but most had no place to go.

Wanting some autonomy over their own lives, many formed Freedom Colonies, living away from the racism of Jim Crow.

- We were kind of protected down in the country because we didn't have to run into so much racism simply because we were in our own place.

[Narrator] In 1988, documentary photographer Richard Orton began a decade-long project following the descendants of four of these Freedom Colonies: County Line, Shankleville, Dixie, and Mount Union.

- It was a revelation to me, the fact of its existence.

And yet as it turns out, there were hundreds of them in East Texas alone.

- One, two, three, go.

[young girl] This is where most of my family for generations has grown up.

And when I come back here, I just get a real sense of family and tradition.

- I want to try to let the young people see that you can be better, each generation should be better.

[Narrator] We'll examine the accomplishments.

- I just would like for the people in the community to understand that we have a lot of history to preserve.

[Narrator] Along with the challenges they face to keep these legacies alive.

- The economics are against us to ever recreate what we had at County Line.

[young girl] No one really has a great idea of what this place used to be like.

And the history is only kept through books and fading memories.

- So eventually our people, they're gonna realize, hey, we had a paradise out here and we didn't even know it.

[Narrator] Raise Your Head Up is coming up next.

[Richard] Okay, one last question.

What do Freedom Colonies have to contribute to our understanding of humanity?

- What does Freedom Colonies, repeat that question, Richard.

[Fred laughs] [Richard] I'm almost embarrassed, but I'm.

- No, no, no, no.

[Richard] What do Freedom Colonies have to contribute to our understanding of humanity?

- Hmm, that's a good question.

I've thought about it.

- That could take all day to explain, but I'll try to summarize it as briefly as I possibly can.

[gentle guitar music] I want to talk about restoring the knowledge to the younger generations about how we got where we are.

[Thad] There was a significant group of people that did something very different and that didn't really fit into the story of Jim Crow as it is usually told.

[Carey] Freedom Towns were those who decided that for their own wellbeing and to get control of their lives, to go off and create their own communities.

[Thad] They were scattered right across the South.

It was a whole other thing that African Americans had done after emancipation.

[Carey] The freed slaves who had virtually nothing but their own labor and their own minds created communities, created schools, went to college.

- How do you, in the worst circumstances ever, raise a bunch of children to feel good about themselves?

What lessons can we learn today from what they did back then?

[gentle guitar music] [Carey] The thing to know is that no matter what your circumstances are, you need to step up and take control of your life and do what you see needs to be done.

- I believe it was Martin King who said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

And hopefully that's the case.

But one of the things that we can't stop doing is we can't stop trying.

And you asked what can Freedom Colonies offer to humanity, was our focus was gonna be on justice.

[Willie] Whatever you do, do it with dignity.

Even if it's taking a cow to the field, you do it with dignity.

[gentle guitar music] [slide projector clicks] [tranquil music] [slide projector clicks] [slide projector clicks] [slide projector clicks] [Peyton] Backing up a little bit, I was just thinking about this.

How many photographs do you have after so many years?

- I don't even know, and I don't, I may not be able to count that high.

I don't know.

I have probably, I'm sure, thousands of negatives.

[gentle guitar music] To me, the precise moment that you press the shutter is a sort of magic and, uh, getting a frozen moment in time.

I was completely captured by the whole idea of documentary photography.

I had a lot of good fortune in the early going.

Texas, I mean, Nacogdoches area is the so-called old part of the state.

I mean, Nacogdoches is the oldest town in Texas and all that so I thought, you know, maybe I could find a community or some rural place that I could go and hang out and take pictures.

[gentle music] I went to County Line the first time the day after Thanksgiving in 1988.

[train horn blares] It's an unincorporated community in Northwest Nacogdoches County, about five miles from Douglas and about 20 from Nacogdoches.

So that was out in the middle of nowhere.

[gentle music] [group chatters indistinctly] And I'll never forget, I got there, I parked under the big, red oak tree in front of their house and got out and I saw a very large man in a hog pen.

And so I went over and introduced myself and told him that I was a photographer.

I was interested in taking pictures in the community and learning about the history of the place.

And he paused for a moment and said, "Well, I don't see why not."

And that's all there was to it.

- He, from that day forward, he and his wonderful wife, Leota, made me welcome in their home.

[wind blowing] [group laughs] [Woman] Recognize your own body parts.

[Man] Got a little fruit to the toot.

That means from the nose to the tip of the tail [indistinct].

[Beatrice] We're setting up for our barbecue meal, our main meal of Homecoming.

- Yeah, it's liver.

[group off-camera chatters indistinctly] [Beatrice] This is one of our most important ones.

But we get together for all kinds of events on all major holidays, minor holidays, parents' birthdays, siblings' birthdays, no reason at all, we get together.

[Peyton] With family [Beatrice] Under the tree.

[Peyton] Yeah.

[Beatrice] Down here.

[gentle music] [Peyton] Talk to me about County Line, like what is County Line and what does it mean to you?

- Oh goodness, where do you wanna start?

[Maye laughs] This is where I was bred and born, as we say.

We grew up, you know, picking peas, cotton, pulling corn, and you know, doing all, digging potatoes, you know, doing all the things that farm kids do.

- County Line, it's home to me, from the church, home church, to school to everything was all right here.

- It's home.

It's a place to come to, it's your roots and it's a place to come to, a place of remembrance, a place that you never forget.

And we are fortunate that it's a place that we always wanna come back.

Even if we don't come back to live, we want to come back.

[gentle music] [thunder rumbles] [rain splashes] [gentle music] - Early on, when I was in County Line, in terms of what I was looking for, I just wanted to record what I was seeing that struck me as being different from what I was used to.

[group applauds and cheers] I was very aware of being in a different frame of reference from whatever I was used to.

I mean, I'm a white guy in an African American community environment.

I mean, I was on somebody else's turf and I knew that.

I mean, that was in large part what intrigued me.

I had no idea that there was such a thing as a Freedom Colony.

[blues music] [Peyton] So tell me a little bit about County Line.

What is County Line to you?

- Well, like, I guess the uh, the traditional answer would be like, it's home, but that's not what it is for me exactly.

I mean, it is home, but it's like a home base.

Home is someplace where you go and you go there often enough to feel like you're comfortable.

And a lot of people here, they don't do that.

I'm seeing a few people for the first time in like 10 years.

So yeah, it's actually home for me, home base, but place has struggled.

I'd say it's definitely more appropriate.

[Richard] So when did you leave County Line and why did you leave County Line?

[Anita laughs] - I don't know if I should let you put this in there or not.

You might oughta shut it off for a minute.

I was probably a teenager and I only got to go to town twice a year 'cause my dad was, he was very, very protective of his daughters and he wouldn't let me go.

And when I did go, I had to ride on the back of the truck.

And I don't know if you remember where the Hitch Lot is in Nacogdoches.

[Richard] I know where, I've been told where it was.

- We had to park there 'cause we were not allowed to be in town, park in town.

We had to park there and walk.

[Richard] And walk.

- Mm-hmm, and it came from, you know why it was called a hitch lot, right?

It's because back in the day when they had horses, that's where they hitched them up.

Everybody did down there.

So then after people stopped with the horses, then the cars came along and we still had to park down there.

So I remember going through all that phase of my life, you know, with that.

And I was kind of, we were kind of protected down in the country because we didn't have to run into so much racism simply because we were out in our own place.

So I wasn't really exposed to that.

We were glad to go to town because we'd never been to town.

We were glad to go to town.

So we go to town and they provide us a little project and give us a house and give us some food stamps and we are happy, okay.

I was determined that wasn't gonna happen to me and my family, okay?

So now, and it's not anybody's fault.

It's, we need to learn, get educated.

It's our fault.

I'm not blaming anybody for that predicament, okay?

So what we need to do is realize what's going on and that there is, and my dad used to say, there is never gonna be any more land.

And it's very priceless.

So eventually our people, and I may not see it in my lifetime, but they're gonna realize, hey, we had a paradise out here and we didn't even know it.

And they're gonna start coming back.

[gentle guitar music] - The three of us was raised here, so we have somewhat attachment to this community.

But to be perfectly honest, the community is a different look right now than it was 20 years ago, 40 years ago.

Totally different.

This is the routine is that most of 'em finish school.

The ones that have a desire to better themselves, they go to college somewhere off and they get their degree and they seek for a job in some of the large cities and they end up making life there.

But as far as to get them to come back and live here, that's a tall order.

[gentle guitar music] - The economics are against us to ever recreate what we had at County Line.

I think I was telling you that my mother can speak to it better than I can, but when I was growing up, County Line was a busy place.

I mean, I'm guessing probably 250 to 300 people lived out there.

I might be high, but I remember you were talking about laying in the road when I was growing up.

You know, there was some crazy people down there.

- Oh yeah.

- And you couldn't lay on the road, you'd get run over.

- Whoa, yeah.

- And we always used to watch, you know, the roads weren't paved, so dust was always coming in the house from the cars.

I mean, it was a busy place.

- You could see them from the top of the hill because everything was cleared out.

- Man, I wish, I mean, I pray that more kids would come, but it's a, the family reunion, so out of that 200-some people, and I know some have passed on, and we get maybe 40 down here for a family reunion once a year.

It's too busy and disconnected from it to come.

- Sometimes I feel like people are afraid of condemnation because of the way they want to live and the way they want to be.

And it's on both sides.

I feel like older people need to lighten up and I feel like younger people need to grow up, but when you come here and you're under everyone's scrutiny, you have to grow up and learn to be able to take certain criticisms and run with it.

And maybe not just be so "Well, you just can't run my life."

That's why a lot of 'em leave.

And if anyone tells you any different or any, you know, one of my relatives maybe thinks different, that's, I've seen it, they've told me.

For the longevity of this place, I think, yeah, we have to kind of meet in the middle.

It's an intergenerational conflict, I think.

And I think that's an American problem right now.

But that's just the way it is for all sorts of communities.

You have one generation who comes in and then they build and they build and they build so that the next generation can prosper.

That next generation prospers.

They don't necessarily see anything.

They're further removed from the struggle that got them where they are.

They don't see it, they don't know it.

And then the next generation comes, they have no connection to it.

Sell it, give it away to the highest bidder, which would then lead to a rift and a drying up and carrying away by winds of time of this whole place.

No one really has a great idea of what this place used to be like.

And the history is only kept through books and fading memories.

[group chatters indistinctly] [wind blowing] [river water flowing] [wind blowing] [Willie] My brother and I and some cousins of mine, we would be playing dominoes and we always would talk about doing things to better the community.

What could we do?

We don't own anything.

- What we need, 10?

Get it then.

[Willie] It's a shame that we don't own anything in the community that we were born and raised in.

- 25.

- And as providence would have it one evening, as I was going down to play some dominoes, I noticed a for sale sign on the old VFW Hall.

- So when this facility came up for sale, it was like, we gotta do something.

This is in our own community.

[upbeat music] And to be able to reacquire this facility was something that this community deserved.

- So thus we have what is called the CFHPA, Center For Historical Preservation Association.

One, two The Connection Center.

[upbeat music] - The Culture Center on the former campus of Old George Washington Carver Elementary School.

One, two This is not any one person's facility.

It is about the community, and that's why it's called the Community Connection Center.

The primary goal was to preserve the history of this particular community.

We wanted to have a place for our young folk to be proud of.

I just would like for the people in the community to understand that we have a lot of history to preserve.

- I wanted to try to let the young people see that you can be an asset, you can do something positive.

It doesn't matter about whether your mama or your daddy or your grandma and grandpa went to college or not.

You can be better.

Each generation should be better, but you cannot do anything unless you own it.

And so my brother, Bobby, was adamant about owning something.

That's the reason why he put the time, the energy and then put his money forward to buy the Connection Center.

He was willing to make the sacrifice, step up front and do something about it, and then try to show the community where they came from and whose shoulders that they stood on.

[upbeat music] [Fred] Now, the plan for the smaller building over here is to be a museum.

And we've already started to collect some of the artifacts that we have around and some of the old school memorabilia and things of that nature for the museum.

- And so my brother, Bobby, when the opportunity presented itself, instead of talking about it, start being about it and doing something about it, he did.

[gentle piano music] [gentle piano music] - The Freedom Colonies have largely been ignored up to this point in our history books.

These are places where Blacks went after emancipation, formed their own communities, owned their own land.

And that's what really got me is I had no idea that was even possible so soon after being enslaved, that you could have Black landowners, not just a little bit, but hundreds of acres.

At its height, the Upshaws owned in excess of 600 acres.

While that required a great deal of work on their part to make it go, it also gave them a lot of autonomy.

And that was the other thing that intrigued me about County Line from the start is that these were Black folks who during the time of Jim Crow had a relatively autonomous existence.

White people were not around there.

It was a revelation to me, you know, it was, the fact of its existence.

And yet it, as it turns out, there were hundreds of them in East Texas alone.

[blues guitar music] - They were scattered right across the South.

It was pretty much left on the cutting room floor.

It was a whole other thing that African Americans had done after emancipation.

- The first real, formal introduction to this was Thad Sitton's book.

- "The Handbook of Texas" had over 200 of what turned out to be Black landowner communities formed in this period.

I never found a single scholarly article about any of these places.

So they were just unknown to the South, to Southern history.

From 1977, I started to try to find some African American scholar to tell about this so they'd go do it.

Something like 22 years later, nothing.

I said, well, if nobody's gonna do it, I oughta try to do it.

[dramatic music] It was a terrible freedom.

It was a terrible freedom because they were cut loose from slavery unprepared for freedom.

The slave narratives that were done in the '30s, there's some really incredible stuff about what it felt like on the first day, on Emancipation Day.

What was the situation of those people when they were cut loose?

Where did they go, what did they do?

What did it feel like?

I come to Madison County on the Trinity River on what they call The Island and started farming for myself.

For a number of years-- - All I had to eat was corn parched green and meat that I killed out of the woods.

And I ate lots of that raw as we did not have a very easy way of starting a fire.

Then after I got three or four children big enough to help me, I cut poles and built me a-- - Four-bedroom house out of logs and split out boards to cover it with.

That's what some people were, that's what somebody was ready to do, to be totally independent of whites and started a life.

That's an incredible, you know, he ate raw meat out there.

That's a killer quote.

[blues guitar music] [group laughs] - The community that I grew up in, which is considered the Bevilport Dixie community, was full of people that grew up under the auspices the same as I did.

You didn't have a fancy way of living or anything like that.

You just had a bunch of hardworking, industrious people who went about their business of taking care of their families.

And then in times of need, they took care of each other.

This is what makes, to me, a community be great.

But you know your great grandpa's name?

- He said Albert.

- Albert McCray, that's your great-grandpa's name.

Now we went, he got.

This is my grandfather.

This was a man that had nine children of his own.

Now he went, he got his high school diploma in kindergarten.

He got his BS degrees in the first grade.

He got his master's degree in the second and got his doctor degree in the third grade.

Now, that's just how awesome he was to me.

Now, Albert McCray was a kind of man that was very principally oriented.

He was very adamant about restoring and passing on the knowledge to the younger generations about how we got where we are.

And that is a lost commodity in our community.

These young people don't, a lot of 'em don't even know who their great-grandfather is.

They definitely don't, some of 'em don't even know who their grandfather is.

They just know mom and daddy, you know?

So we as a people in this community and maybe all over need to know who we are and where we come from and how we got to where we are.

So, but at any rate, everything you see here, I attribute it to him.

I can't, I cannot speak enough about what he did and what he is to this family.

And this is the legacy that we are carrying on here today because he started me doing stuff like this when I was way younger than this boy here.

I was about seven years old.

I was a very good milker.

I could milk a cow and take her back.

And one particular evening, I was taking the cow back and I had my head down as I was walking, trying to take the cow back.

And my grandfather was on the porch looking at me as I was taking the cow to the field.

And somehow or another it angered him that I had my head down.

I think he looked at me and thought that I was being despondent because I had my head down taking the cow to the field, and he just screamed at me, "Boy, raise your head up as you take that cow to the field."

So what he was saying was, and I didn't understand at the time, but I do now, whatever you do, do it with dignity.

Do it with dignity.

Even if it's taking a cow to the field, you do it with dignity.

And this is the kind of way he taught by example.

Now every year in the month of October, we would have what is called our hog-killing season.

More you bleed a hog, any animal that you kill in the woods, anything, you get the blood out of them right then, won't have that, that's just that much less you'll have in the meat, okay?

This was a means that what we learned how to cure meat.

This was a way of life.

We had bacon 365 days a year for breakfast if we so desire.

We had ham, we had sausage, we had smoked sausage, we had pan sausage, we had pork bones.

But everything that we ate, he raised or we raised on that farm.

The only thing that we went to the store for was perhaps flour and maybe a little sugar.

That was it.

Anything else, we didn't have any need to go grocery shopping because we raised everything.

All of these things was a way of life.

[tractor rumbling] He was very adamant.

A hog was not clean when we put him in the kiln to scald him and get the hair off of him, that's the way we did it.

But he always wanted the hog's head to be just as clean as the rest of his body.

Now, there was a reason, more so then than now, today, about the hog's head being cleaned.

Some people may be familiar with eating brains and egg, pork brains and eggs, which was something that a lot of people might frown on, but don't frown on it until you try it.

I would call it a delicacy.

And it was what my grandfather believed and tried to establish, to live off the land.

It is things like that that he did when he was sharecropping.

And he started to doing these things for himself as other Blacks that were up from slavery and what would be known as Freedom Colonists.

All of this information was handed down through the years from slavery all the way to my grandfather and on to me and even my son and my grandsons because I have taught my son and my grandsons the art of being able to butcher hogs.

The only part of the hog that we threw away back when I was a kid was a squeal.

And what I mean by the squeal, when I shot him, he said.

[Willie squeals] He make a noise and that was it.

[knife saws] [group chatters indistinctly] [trotter thuds] The next thing we're gonna do I'm gonna quarter him up or third him up, cut the shoulders right across here.

The ham part will be right across here.

The only thing be left is the middle.

Now, we're gonna take the meat from this part of it and we're going to put it into sausage meat to make our sausage.

[gentle acoustic guitar music] You take it inside the smokehouse, put brown sugar, cured salt on it, let it draw the water out.

Sit out there for about four or five days, then hang it up and we'll smoke it.

Best bacon you can eat.

[saw buzzes] [gentle guitar music] [Peyton] What are we doing?

- Making cracklings.

[Peyton] And what's that?

- The pig skin.

- This thing not only makes crackling, you can take the grease off of it and you can pour about three cans of lye in there, and then you can let that harden and then you can cut it out into blocks and you can make what is called lye soap.

And then this pot that you're looking at, you actually boil clothes in because people didn't have running waters and washing machines and stuff.

So they went to the well and they went to ponds, streams and got tubs full of water.

And when they got the clothes cleaned in the tub, then they take 'em and put 'em in the pot and they put fire around it and they get, the pot would be full of water and they put soap in there and they would boil the clothes, especially the whites.

The best washing I ever did.

Maytag can't touch me with this thing right here and a rub board.

That's all I gotta say about that.

[group chatters indistinctly] And these are the stories and these are the things that need to be told about all of the Black entrepreneurs that came along in the Dixie community to show the people of the community that where they came from and to whom, whose shoulders that they stood on.

And I'm gonna try to carry that legacy for as long as I can.

[gentle piano music] - One of the first things that happened after emancipation, and this is documented in local newspapers everywhere, they always comment on the lines of freed slaves at the courthouse legalizing their marriages.

[gentle piano music] The second thing that happens is the decision on where to live, where to stay.

You know, no one knew what was gonna happen.

There were all the rumors about, you've heard 40 acres and a mule, and all of these rumors, no one had decided how they were going to be dealt with.

- Not only were these people unprepared for it, but they were persecuted by whites that took a very long time to adjust to losing the Civil War.

The slave owners had made sure they were unprepared for freedom.

Literacy was totally discouraged.

They were at many places kept in the dark about local geography.

They didn't know where they were or what they were close to.

[somber music] A lot of them just set off walking around, days of just walking the roads and looking to see what was outside of the place that they had spent all their lives at.

[somber music] - Traditionally, we looked at this from a political perspective and an economic perspective that had Blacks as victims, or they were agents that were operated on.

They had little agency.

And that was never true.

The Freedmen Towns clearly depict agency, those who decided that for their own wellbeing and their own, to get control of their lives, to go off and create their own communities.

- I mean, if you went into the local courthouse town, it was almost like there had never been any Hispanics or Blacks that lived there.

The County Historical Commission was all white people, and either they didn't know they had Black landowner communities in the county or they didn't want them to be publicized.

And some of the places were so poor that they had to, they recycled dirt from the smokehouse floor.

These people paid a price for living in these communities in terms of what their medical care, in terms of what they had.

But they chose to pay the price.

[choral music] Yes I'm on the battlefield Of my Lord Yes I'm on the battlefield Of my Lord When I promise Him that I I will serve Him till I die I am on the battlefield Of my Lord [congregation applauds] - In the African American community, there are so many people who don't know their history.

And so that's what makes Shankleville so unique.

We can trace our roots back to three, four, five generations ago and say, you know that I know that my ancestor was here in Texas, making Texas what it is today.

My healer My deliverer - To me, Shankleville is, it's a symbol of my family.

This is where most of my family for generations has grown up.

And when I come back here, I just get a real sense of family and tradition and I can see how my family as a whole has become what it is.

- Today we're feeding approximately 150 people for the annual Homecoming.

It's our 72nd Homecoming today.

- The annual Shankleville Homecoming is an activity that was designed for descendants of Shankleville to come back and share experiences and to have fun, enjoy family and to raise money to clean the cemeteries and make sure that the loved ones that are buried out there, graves are taken care of continuously.

- Everyone has a special feeling of love about this community and feels the need to come back and reconnect with everyone, reconnect with cousins.

And you don't know how you're cousins, you just know that you are because you're from the same place.

[choral music] - I'm the son of Harold Odom, who was the oldest son of A. T. and Addie Odom and A. T.

Odom is the, I think the great-grandson of Jim Shankle.

So you started at let us down and that's how I got my connection to Shankleville was through birth, by my daddy.

This house keeps our family reunion going.

If we didn't have this house, our family reunions that we hold on every even-numbered year Father's Day weekend will stop.

- This is a great community, we love you.

Congratulations to all the participants.

- One, two, three, go.

[Man] All right, maybe you got some James Brown, "Get on the Good Foot".

[group chatters indistinctly] Oh, they're working.

- That sycamore tree behind you there, every year we say it's dead and gonna be gone.

And that's where we start the reunion and everybody looks forward to it.

It's five buildings for the historical site.

You got the main house, you've got the smoke house, you've got the crib, you've got the chicken coop, and you've got the garage and Big Poppa's workshop.

The goal is to roll it back and make everything look as near to how it may have looked in 1945 as we can.

I learned that Big Poppa was an amazing person.

He built his house in 1922 with no electricity and a fifth grade education and no plans.

And what we're trying to do is to try to make it look like it looked that so that if they walked in here today, Big Mama, Big Poppa, they would recognize their house as being their house.

[water flowing] So we cleaned the spring out yesterday, so hopefully we got a good pool of clear water that we can sample and get a chance to taste what it really, really is like to have good, clear water.

[upbeat music] Jim and Winny Shankle were owned by a slave owner in Mississippi.

And the slave owner in Mississippi decided that he wanted to sell Winny and the kids.

Jim was left in Mississippi and very distraught because his Winny and the kids were gone.

And Jim just says, I'm gone.

He took off, became a runaway slave.

Then traveling at night, with clothes on his back going from plantation to plantation, trying to find out if anybody saw his Winny and kids coming through.

He finally got enough information to know that they were in Texas.

As the story tells it, Winny was down then she heard a whistle in the woods.

And Jim got a special whistle and Winny looked up, said, that sound like Jim's whistle.

Whistled again and it was Jim.

And so Jim and Winny were united, reunited here at the spring.

We don't know what all went on on that reunion when they finally got together after all that traveling and all those, at times they were apart, all right?

But I would venture to say that they had a good embrace.

And then the Emancipation Proclamation news finally came.

So he got 5,000 acres that he amassed here in Shankleville.

But the love story is what connects everybody together, because Jim loved Winny so much that he had to come to find his Winny.

He said, you know, it cost me my life, so be it.

I'm going find my Winny.

And as I say, and the rest is history and the rest is history.

To Jim and Winny.

[gentle music] - These were people who, if you grew up in a town and you were Black, you got a big dose of Jim Crow, you were segregated, you had to be careful where you went uptown.

You had to not look at a white woman.

You had to get off the sidewalk when whites were coming along.

But in Freedmen's element, people grew up without that.

When parents would take children from a Freedmen's settlement into, say, Nacogdoches, they'd have this big talk the night before to their children and say, "You're gonna stay in the wagon.

You understand?

Do not talk and do not say," you know, because they're, these children are not used to watching out for white people and they're about to go into the citadel of white people in the courthouse town.

Part of my motivation for studying them was they were a historical scoop that nobody knew about that didn't fit in the general pattern of what happened during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow times and the bad old days until the schools were integrated.

And this notion of going someplace where you don't have to put up with Jim Crow.

If you get far enough back in the woods and you get your own land, you can, and if you're willing to take what you can get there and live like you have to live, you know, and there was a kind of something about all the people that I interviewed.

[gentle music] - And there was one lesson that all of America should take from Black America, it is how do you, in the worst circumstances ever, raise a bunch of children to feel good about themselves?

When everyone in the world, every media, every book, everything they read, see, feel in the broader community is telling them they are less than, worthless, nothing, how in the world do those people grow up and still think that they're worthy and valued?

[gentle music] - There's a strong sense of pride that comes along with knowing your history.

But when I think about, you know, the power of knowing your history, first of all to survive the ship over here and in the circumstances that they were put in.

They were dying together, packed in there, some of 'em jumped overboard.

Those slaves who survived that were strong.

Then to come over here and survive slavery.

For me, it gives me such a great sense of pride to know that history.

You don't know what you have 'cause you take it for granted unless you become conscious of it or if you are threatened to lose it.

A lot of times people don't know their history and when they don't know their history, they don't know the pride, the sense of pride that comes along with just being able to survive what we as a people have survived.

[Richard] Should our history textbooks include information about Freedom Colonies?

If so, how can we make that happen?

- The only way to make it happen is to do it.

So ultimately, the people who write the books have to do it.

[upbeat music] I think it's more important to get it into the classroom and the public schools.

The richness of Texas history is the history of the people and all the people.

And so it shows that in spite of the racism, in spite of the violence, that this was, I mean, we need to understand that in the worst of conditions, human beings find a way to live, survive and often thrive.

And taking control of their lives and their environment is the way they tend to go about doing it.

So I think the best thing that it does is having us stop look at African Americans merely as victims of racism, and show African Americans as taking control of their own lives and their own futures as best they can in difficult circumstances.

The freed slaves who had virtually nothing but their own labor and their own minds created communities and did many other things too, created schools, became school teachers, went to college, moved into the cities and became, you know, industrial workers and middle class people and teachers.

The thing to know is that no matter what your circumstances are, you need to step up and take control of your life and do what you see needs to be done.

And I think this is the message for young people, as their ancestors did.

- About three years after I started going out there, on a homecoming Sunday in church full of people, Leota Upshaw, she stood up and claimed me as her foster son to everybody's shock, mine and I'm sure everybody else.

I was essentially adopted into this Black family.

And I do consider them my second family.

And they, at this stage in time, I'm sure they consider me a part of the family too.

[camera shutter clicks] Freedom Colonies have largely been ignored up to this point in our history books.

That is beginning to change.

I can see it happening.

It's a part of American history that needs to be more generally recognized because it presents African Americans freshly out of slavery in a much stronger light.

[camera shutter clicks] They were not always sharecroppers or domestics because these folks created communities of their own under very difficult circumstances and they made it work.

It's hard to say enough about that.

I mean, it's a very personal and emotional experience for me.

And it has made me, I think, a better person, a more widely understanding person.

So it's both ways.

It's an important part of our history that needs to be better known.

And for me personally, it has expanded my relationships in important ways.

- Every day I think about making this a day at our ancestors' wildest dreams.

And I would like to see more togetherness, more cooperation.

And then from there, how far we've come, but then still how far we must go.

I believe it was Martin King who said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

And hopefully that's the case.

I certainly hope that it is.

But one of the things that we can't stop doing is we can't stop trying.

So what I can say about Freedom Colonies and humanity is that they can teach us a lot about justice and injustice.

[upbeat music] [Richard] When will I see you, he's been talking about you.

[laughs] [Richard] Now we got you on film, so now, you know, you're, what is your responsibility, Luke, after your daddy's old and can't do anything, what are you gonna do on this land?

- Feed the cows.

- Feed the cows.

[Richard] Okay.

- Shoot the whole piece.

[laughs] [Richard] We got it recorded.

[laughs] [upbeat music] [Narrator] Funding for "Raise Your Head Up" is made possible in part by a grant from the Summerlee Foundation, dedicated to the support of animal protection and to preserving Texas history.

Additional funding is from Alex Labry, an educator and professional photographer based in Austin, Texas.