NARRATOR: Tunis Campbell was 53 years old when he set foot on the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia, eager to carry out his vision for the future of blacks in the South.

Born in New Jersey in 1812, Campbell had shown an early interest in politics and the debate over slavery.

RUSSELL DUNCAN, HISTORIAN: He was the only black child in a school in Babylon, New York, training to be a missionary to Liberia. When he graduated from the school at age 18, he decided that colonization of blacks to Africa was a mistake, and threw himself into the anti-colonization effort.

NARRATOR: A charismatic preacher and abolitionist, Campbell sometimes shared the stage with the black leader Frederick Douglass at meetings and conventions during the 1840s and 50s.

In 1848, after working as a hotel steward, he wrote a book about hotel management, where he stressed the dignity of black people and put forward his ideas on organizing laborers.

When the Civil War broke out, Campbell volunteered to join the Army, but African Americans were not yet allowed to do so. Undeterred, he persevered until the War Department agreed to send him to South Carolina to aid in the resettlement of freedmen there.

ERIC FONER, HISTORIAN: This is a time when African Americans in the North felt that there was more opportunity for them by moving to the South. Usually blacks, in our history, have moved from the South to the North when they got a chance to improve their conditions. He saw the Civil War -- and Reconstruction -- as a time to really uplift African Americans in the South, and he felt he could play a part in that.

NARRATOR: At war's end, Campbell was named superintendent of five Georgia Sea Islands by the Freedmen' s Bureau, the federal agency charged with overseeing the transition from slavery to freedom.

He brought his wife and two sons down to help with the new settlements and sent appeals to Northern aid societies for material support.

READING, TUNIS CAMPBELL: "Sir: These people want clothing for they are robbed of everything. We place them on the islands to work, but they must be covered, or the work of raising them morally or socially must fail. I want to open schools on all of the islands, therefore please get all the clothing and books you can...Send eight No. 11 plows, six cultivators. Get the improved ones."

NARRATOR: Campbell set up an independent government, headed by himself, and distributed land to the freedmen, following Sherman' s Special Order 15, which made 40 acres of land available to black families in Georgia and South Carolina.

NELL PAINTER, HISTORIAN: Tunis Campbell saw a chance to make a black settlement, to empower black people by keeping white people off. He was able to make a kind of black enclave in which black Georgians had access to politics, to schools, to churches, to do the sorts of things that were inherent in the promise of Reconstruction.

NARRATOR: Campbell believed that, with his help, Southern blacks could learn to be self-sufficient.

READING, TUNIS CAMPBELL: " White people say I preach too fine sermons -- and find fault with me for preaching above the colored people. I say they will become educated so as to understand what I mean."

NARRATOR: But Campbell' s experiment was met with outrage by the islands' former landowners. In 1866, the black leader was ousted after President Johnson restored the land to Southern planters.

Unfazed, Campbell moved back to the Georgia mainland and decided to run for office in the first state elections to allow black men to vote. He was elected State Senator with two thirds of the votes.

Soon, however, he and his fellow black legislators became the target of the white majority in the Georgia legislature, determined to expel them.

The 32 black legislators were forced out in September of 1868, but a year later they returned to the Georgia Capitol after Congress intervened.

NARRATOR: Eager to have a more direct impact on the lives of his constituents, Campbell decided to focus on local politics in his black-majority county, where he was a justice of the peace.

DUNCAN: As African Americans encountered local government, for the first time in their lives they were encountering black bodies and black faces behind the desk, faces that were accepting, faces that knew who they were, what they had been through; the community that understood what they were fighting for and what they were fighting against.

NARRATOR: Campbell was determined to play a role in the changing labor relations between freedmen and planters.

He advised laborers not to sign contracts that weren' t satisfactory to them, and to be assertive in demanding their rights.

Campbell's political adversaries and the white planters in the area resented his growing power. They kept him involved in a myriad of lawsuits, charging him with abusing his office of justice of the peace.

NARRATOR: After the Democrats regained control of the government in Georgia, Campbell's enemies succeeded in having him arrested and sentenced to forced labor.

DUNCAN: It's striking to try to imagine a man of 64 years old, dragged from a jail and sent to a labor camp in middle Georgia, a man who had been so much to Reconstruction in Georgia, a man who had focused his energies on helping his black constituency, on trying to establish equality, finds himself a victim of Reconstruction and of the idealism that he had so profoundly professed.

NARRATOR: After serving one year, Campbell was released and moved North with his family.

He spent his last years doing missionary work for the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Boston. He died there in 1891. He was 79.

Back in Coastal Georgia, though, Tunis Campbell' s legacy didn' t die with him.

DUNCAN: Campbell had created such an environment of reform and change, and a powerful black community, that many other leaders begin to emerge. People with ambition to be sheriff, ambition to be justice of the peace themselves, people who disagreed with Campbell.

NARRATOR: The black political machine erected by Tunis Campbell would last until 1907, when Georgia took away the right to vote from blacks.