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 donated his papers to the historical society and said they should not be opened
 in twenty-five years. I guess he thought when he did that in the 1960s that things
 would be different, but they opened them in the 1990s or something like that ...
 He was saying during the time there were only illiterate Negroes around, and it
 was different now because we had more intelligent Negroes to interact with.
 Well, he evidentiary didn't know anything about Virginia Union University,
 Howard University, all of the universities throughout the South. The only people
 they had to interface with were illiterate Negroes. Well, that may have been the
 people who lived near them. That means that their own segregation rules made
 them disadvantaged because they didn't have the advantage of knowing me.

W: Right, they didn't have access to all this expertise and wisdom.

S: That's right, and there was a wonderfully strong black community. I want to say
 that this didn't wait until way up here in the 1940s. In 1865, just after the Civil
 War ended, this person here, Governor Wells, was our first pastor ...

W: What was his first name?

S: Richard Wells, and he was our pastor just five years, the first five years after the
 Civil War. Then, he went to another church and stayed there thirty-nine years,
 but this one was only there five years. During that time he led a group of seven
 church members to Washington to visit Andrew Johnson. They took him a
 petition explaining how blacks were being treated in Richmond. Now, I will say to
 the people I am speaking with that they were talking about Georgian, and in
 Mississippi we know a lot about that, and Louisiana and what have you; but very
 little is said or known about Richmond. We had a very ugly period of
 reconstruction because we had a large, free black population and they had been
 free .. .We have family trees in here that show my family was freed back in the
 1700s. We have several families that could trace their family back to free
 members in the 1700s.

W: I think one of the things that tells historians or that it reminds historians is that
 there's a long lineage of African American freedom struggle. It doesn't suddenly
 get invented in the mid 1950s.

S: That's the whole thing. We think Martin Luther King invented freedom or
 whatever. I look at Martin Luther King, I look at his period; I look at my mother's
 period when she was writing about a plea to the She said, like when
 freedom from her mountain heights unfurled her to the end, told that men
 must have a right, and men must be men everywhere __ to thee is given the
 right to set the Negro free. If he's not hovering the smoked water away the battle
 Sand beat your banner shine afar or land like an unhidden star. Each dying
 Negro man I see looked at once to heaven and thee and smiled to see fly,