-Despite our perception that the past is something that has passed, the past is very much a part of the present.

It becomes a matter of convenience psychologically for us to sort of cast certain things into the past, trying to discard it.

The reality is that those things have not only a direct influence, but continue to play themselves out in the present.

[ Indistinct shouting ] -...people that look like you and I to be able to walk the streets... [ Shouting continues ] -The wealth disparities that we have and our tolerance for inequality, our tolerance for violence... is intimately connected to slavery and what comes after slavery.

♪ ♪ -This program was made possible in part by the Florida Department of State Division of Cultural Affairs and National Endowment for the Arts and by the following.

♪ -Why slavery anyway?

Why does slavery come about?

It is a very long way from here to West Africa, even by plane, so why would someone go that far to pick up boatloads of people, millions of people, and transport them back here?

♪ It turns out if you can get enough slave population to produce cotton, sugar, tobacco, other agricultural products, and then trade them to Europe, you can make a lot of money.

These plantations were part of a system of international trade, people coming from Western Africa, people coming from Western Europe, agricultural products going back there, finished products coming back here, and around this whole process of slavery, you get shipping, you get banking, you get international insurance.

There's a whole series of other industries to develop around it.

♪ At the point of agricultural production, you have people who are making quite a bit of money.

There are a lot of fortunes to be made.

♪ ♪ -Florida was a very dynamic and diverse place.

It was not this Disney World, Donald Duck society, where everything was rosy.

Florida had a history similar to Alabama and Georgia.

You had 45% of enslaved people in Florida, and that 45% produced 90% of all the cotton in Florida by 1860.

Cotton, which made Florida the most money, would not have been the product of choice had it not been for the labor of enslaved persons.

They were indispensable to increasing Florida's economy.

And Florida's economy would not have grown so quickly... ♪ ...had it not been for enslaved persons.

♪ -How else are great capitals to be employed in agriculture, in a new country, without slaves?

♪ [ Insects chirping ] -The roots in the center of Florida's panhandle, once known as Middle Florida, are not unique.

As the Southern story goes, European explorers stumbled across the area, conquered or expelled the indigenous people here, and claimed the rich, fertile land as their own.

In the 1800s, wealthy planters from the Upper South with family ties and political connections joined the battle to conquer the indigenous populations in an effort to dominate this new territory known as Middle Florida.

♪ -Their whole purpose for coming here was to remove the indigenous people by force and change the uses of the land into extensive cotton cultivation.

The land becomes the property of the federal government.

Florida's a United States territory, and so the land was surveyed and put up for sale.

From 1820 to 1860, you had what we call the second mass migration of slaves.

The first mass migration was moved from Africa to the Americas, particularly to the colonies.

But that second mass migration was from the Upper South -- Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and even some from Georgia to the Lower South.

♪ -In 1828, William Nuttal would forcibly march 40 of his enslaved workers from Virginia to his plantation, El Destino, in Jefferson County.

Like many planters, Nuttal chose to bring a disproportionate number of men.

Consequently, husbands, wives, and children were permanently and tragically separated.

-The colonel was going on a trip to buy land in this place called Florida.

Just before we left, the colonel sold my mother and brother.

I cried when I had to leave my mother and brother.

♪ -Page's master taught him to read and write.

He taught Page to read and write so that Page could work in his general store.

His mother and brother were sold on the auction block to raise the money that the master needed to make the trip from Richmond to Tallahassee.

♪ The trip took about seven to eight weeks.

♪ Whites rode in wagons, and the slaves walked.

♪ They would stop after 20, 25 miles each day, after which the slaves would pitch the tents and put things ready for the evening.

They would cook, and then, sometimes, they said although they were tired, their owners made them entertain them by dancing and singing and if someone could play the banjo or some other instrument.

♪ -Another example of forced migration can be found with Hardy Croom, who would use proceeds wrung from the labor of his enslaved people to purchase 2,400 acres known today as Goodwood Plantation.

He would then forcibly march his enslaved people for 29 straight days from North Carolina to Tallahassee.

♪ -Tallahassee really originates in the period of enslavement after Florida becomes a part of the United States.

Before that time, there really wasn't a Tallahassee.

Tallahassee doesn't start until 1821.

♪ The original intent, or the intent of a lot of people who arrived very early on after Florida becomes a part of the United States, the thinking, at least among many of the early arrivals, was that Tallahassee would be the new Richmond.

♪ It didn't quite work out that way.

This was a place different from Richmond -- lots of mosquitoes, lots of wild animals and other things that at least initially, it actually made it pretty tough going.

-They found a very hostile environment.

They had to deal with mosquitoes and yellow fever and what they call the yellow jack.

They also had to deal with an environment that was pretty violent.

If someone infringed upon your honor or questioned your motives or your integrity, the first thing you'd want to do was to duel them.

[ Gunshot ] That was rampant.

[ Gunshots ] -Over time, the plantations did develop.

A small plantation might be 500 or 600 acres.

Some of them are 5,000 or 6,000 acres.

♪ It was mainly the plantation system and growing cotton and tobacco and other agricultural products that allowed them to accumulate a great deal of wealth.

-The money to be made with slave labor would turn Leon and the four other surrounding counties -- Jefferson, Gadsden, Jackson, and Madison -- into the cotton belt of Florida by 1860.

The enslaved population would make up almost 70% of Leon County.

♪ ♪ -Many people want to come to a house like this and they want on the front porch a woman in a hoop skirt and a banjo being played, and that's what they think they want to see.

And, you know, that's not what went on.

There are plantation houses who wish to tell their stories after emancipation.

That way, they escape having to be involved with enslavement.

Too many of these houses focus on the wealth.

I use the term the language of power, which were the things they could put out.

Well, one of the languages of power here was the enslaved.

♪ -By 1850, the Goodwood plantation would have nearly 200 enslaved men, women, and children.

For all of their labor, a scant amount is known about these enslaved.

Little to no information is recorded about them outside of the financial value they represented as chattel.

-We use this phrase in modern economics where we talk about human capital, and we mean skill.

But taken literally, the enslaved population was a population of human capital.

♪ -The real wealth was in enslaved people.

They had a term for enslaved people -- "walking cash."

-Women generally sold less than men.

At one point, in some places, babies might be sold by the pound.

♪ -During the panic of 1837, the average slave was $800.

When cotton increased in price during the 1850s, the average prime fieldworker increased from $800 to $1,500, so it depended on the economy, much as today.

You can get a car, if the economy is bad, cheaper than you can get a car when the economy is better.

The prices go back up.

Slave prices were the same.

♪ -To finance his plantation operation, Hardy Croom would continue to sell his enslaved.

In 1832, Croom would travel to Louisiana and sell five women and three men for $4,000.

He would also sell a 10-year-old boy for $350.

He would write to his brother... -You will see that Negroes are high here.

-The value of those people collectively exceeded the total value of land in Leon County in the time period that we're talking about.

♪ -This race, so distinctly marked by nature with inferiority, physical, moral, and mental, has become a great class of laboring civilized people, domesticated with the white race and dependent on the discipline of that race for the preservation of the civilization it has acquired.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ -This house was built in the 1830s by enslaved craftsmen who were the property of Richard Keith Call.

Very likely, the people who built this house would have learned those trades while enslaved.

So they were typically in all the building construction in Tallahassee at this time.

They were the property of individual people who in the census would be listed as the copper workers or the blacksmiths or the carpenters, and the individuals who were listed in the census as the carpenters are profiting from the skills of these enslaved people.

So you have glasswork, you have carpentry work, you have saw-mill work, you have brick masons who are working.

There was also the process of felling old growth, longleaf pine down near Saint Marks on the coast, rough cutting those into things like the floor joists that you can see in the basement, making other cuts to get the floorboards or the trim and then even wood workers whittling that down into framing for the decorative elements in the house.

So it's a tremendous amount of work that probably took, best that we can tell, at least five years, so starting in the middle part of the 1830s and concluding towards the end of that decade.

-Some 200 skilled enslaved Africans contributed to Call's fortune.

Not only would they construct the grove, but the port of Saint Marks, the Tallahassee-Saint Marks Railroad, the State Capitol, and many of the plantations throughout middle Florida.

Bellevue Plantation was built with slave labor and later purchased by Catherine and Achille Murat, who was a nephew of Napoléon Bonaparte.

The labor and acts of indignation forced upon the enslaved without their consent often included sex, as evidenced by the list of so-called mulatto offspring serving as cooks and personal servants on plantations.

Achille Murat himself referenced a 15-year-old slave girl named Mary he purchased for $500.

When Mary became pregnant by Achille through sexual assault, she killed herself and her child.

♪ -Another Frenchman, Marquis de Lafayette, the famed military officer in the Revolutionary War, also has ties to Tallahassee's early plantation life.

♪ -Lafayette did not believe in slavery.

♪ Lafayette owned a township, which is now essentially the east side of Tallahassee.

It was 36 square miles.

♪ He sent over about 90 Frenchmen, and the idea was that these 90 free laborers would then come over and work the land.

And, of course, he gets some money from them, and they would outcompete the slave labor because the idea is that free people will work harder, faster, better.

That didn't happen.

They lasted for a very short period of time.

So he had a valuable tract of land, but he didn't have this cheap labor force, this forced-labor force, to work the land to make the money.

And so it didn't last very long, and he ended up selling off huge chunks of this rather large patch of land.

♪ -Ironically, the sale of Lafayette's land would allow many Tallahassee planters to expand their enslaved populations and land holdings significantly.

♪ -Francis Eppes, Thomas Jefferson's grandson, is considered the founder.

He wasn't the founder.

He played a major role... in creating what came to be Florida State University.

We know of the white benefactors.

We know of the people who donated money.

We haven't acknowledged that oftentimes, the money that was used to build what became FSU probably came from the labor of black bodies and the buying and selling of black bodies.

I don't think the campus would have existed without, you know, black labor.

White women, as well as black men and women, you know, played a role in building this institution, but oftentimes, we only hear of the great white man.

♪ -Be it further enacted that if a slave shall go at large without a written pass from his or her owner, master, or overseer, or shall fire hunt or shall keep a horse, a boat, or a canoe, such a slave shall be punished by the infliction of a number of stripes not exceeding 100 at the discretion of any justice of the peace.

-Most of the laws that were passed during this period were passed to govern the movement of enslaved persons and free blacks more than anything else.

-An enslaved person, really, any black person, had to be able to prove that they had a right to be, you know, where they were.

If you were going to visit your spouse or going to visit, say, a relative on another plantation and you were stopped by a group of whites and they ask you for your pass, you had to have a pass.

-Any white person could call upon that person for them to prove that they were where they were supposed to be, and if they didn't have that documentation, they could be put into jail.

Any kind of violations of the slave codes could result in lashings, and literally, in Florida law, it would designate a number.

And so something as simple as being off of the plantation without a pass could result in severe physical punishment, violence.

-Sometimes, the owner would just take a gun out and shoot you, and nothing would happen.

Who passed these laws, and who enforced these laws?

The very people who passed these laws were the same slaveholders who enforced them, and they decided whether they would enforce these laws or not.

♪ When it boiled down to it, I read several cases.

The judge said enslaved persons were property, much like horses and pigs, and at the end of the day, the owner could do just about anything he or she wanted to do with them.

♪ -Different plantations were more or less strict about, you know, selling people off or maintaining relationships between spouses, but the larger point is the slave population never controlled that.

Somebody else controlled whether or not your family would stay together.

Somebody else controlled whether or not you would have your children around.

-James Page's master never -- I found not one time did he whip or have anyone else to whip a slave.

He made it very clear if slaves, in his word, "misbehaved," they were to be sold from the plantation, so the threat of sale played on the psyche of many.

And many of them thought about how to approach resistance, given the fact that they knew that if they were caught, they could be sold.

♪ -Families are institutions that represent continuities, and even the emotional foundations of families are very much a part of how we live in the environment we find ourselves in.

Roles between the parents and children, the interactions between husbands and wives -- those patterns were very much set among African people, as they are among all people.

Slavery completely disrupted that traditional practice, from the rape of the woman to the destruction, even the castration, of the father to the responsibility of providing leadership for the children to preserve the messages of competence, to preserve the messages of self-esteem, to preserve the message of aspirations for self aggrandizement.

All of those things had to be oriented away from the natural parents, who would teach them the love for themselves, respect for themselves, and self-determination to the master.

♪ Me as husband, no longer feeling my responsibility as a husband, as a father, begins to build a kind of a psychological alienation from the responsibility that goes along with that.

So you didn't want people to be independent.

You didn't want people to be self-serving.

You didn't want people to be concerned about future generations or perpetuating who they were.

You wanted them to work as effective property, and to a great extent, that attitude continues to exist.

In many instances, that is perpetuated by the economic system.

Men now, though they are not on the plantation, they're in the prisons, and in the prisons, they are not able to provide the kind of responsibility and care for their families, very much like it operated in slavery.

♪ -You're in the Deep South.

You got the swamps, and it's a long way to Ohio.

I'm not saying that people didn't manage to run away from Florida and make it to the north or to Canada, but it's difficult.

♪ [ Dog barks in distance ] Most of the people who ran away were men.

They were probably young, and they were also committed to dying, if need be.

♪ ♪ [ Crickets chirping ] [ Dogs barking in distance ] ♪ -I tell you, for free blacks in middle Florida, it was hell.

To go to another state, for example, from Florida to Georgia, they would have to pay $200.

Many free blacks did not have $200.

That's probably equivalent today to thousands of dollars, so you were stuck.

And it became harder to free enslaved persons after 1830.

♪ -One notable free person of color was George Proctor, a builder in Tallahassee.

George Proctor would leave a lasting impression in Tallahassee through the buildings he constructed and sold, along with other business relationships he cultivated.

In 1839, in order to marry his wife, Nancy, who was an enslaved woman, George would pay $450 of her $1,300 purchase price and continue to make payments to secure her freedom.

Their union was fruitful, with six children, and George's work sustained them.

But the triumphant story of the free colored Proctor family would not survive the realities of the slave society that was antebellum Tallahassee.

♪ -There was a push to limit the number of free blacks throughout Florida because they thought that they could be instigators encouraging enslaved persons to either fight or run away.

That was the main fear of slaveholders about free blacks.

-Financial hardships beset the area due to a nationwide banking collapse, but as a free colored man, George had few to no options to escape financial ruin.

In addition to this predicament, there is evidence of betrayal at the hands of whites, which would ultimately result in George's wife, Nancy, and their six children being sold into slavery.

One of those children, Bahamia, was sold to John Finlayson of Jefferson County.

-I'll get my eyeglasses.

"State of Florida, Leon County, July 20th, A.D., 1860.

Know all men by these presents that I, Robert C. Williams, for and in consideration of the sum of $1,050 to me paid in hand by John Finlayson, one certain Negro slave named Bahamia, aged about 15 years, and do warrant him sound in mind and body and a slave for life."

He was different from any other slave that my granddaddy had bought.

He had been free, and he had learned to read and write and was educated.

And the other slaves -- it was against the law to teach them to read and write, so he was quite different.

And I'm sure my great-granddaddy, being a smart man, used those talents.

The settlement of my great-granddaddy's estate -- I've got a list of them by name and age, so I know exactly -- and value.

It was the most distressing thing to look at that settlement of his state.

The names of the slaves came down, and then the names of the mules started.

And they had to make a mark to show the difference where it was people and mules.

-Bahamia, born free, was sold into slavery in 1854, 11 years before the end of the Civil War and nine years before the Emancipation Proclamation.

In fact, the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, May 20, 1865, took place at the Knott House, a building built by Bahamia's father, George.

-My great-great-grandfather's name's Charles Rollins -- Charles Henry Rollins.

He is unusual in the sense that he was born in 1831, 1832 in Tallahassee, so he's an early Floridian.

His wife, Susan, is born in Georgia.

They marry about 1853, 1854, and around that time, something unusual happens.

The person that he had been enslaved to leaves Florida and goes back to Virginia, and Charles Rollins begins to rent himself out.

He would be able to go from plantation to plantation to find work, and then he would pay a fee to the person that he was still enslaved to.

He becomes literate and develops a lot of connections with the white population that was in control of running the city, and so one piece of land that he obtains very early on, which the family still owns -- he gets as an exchange for his work on the house of the Call family.

So this begins a process of wealth accumulation.

They rise up from the bottom because they actually own a piece of land.

They're able to build a house on it.

When the Freedman's Bank opened up, he was deposit number one.

♪ ♪ ♪ The formerly enslaved population was now legally free, but even that's not enough.

-They thought freedom really meant freedom.

Things may change on paper, but in reality, things stayed the same.

-After blacks were set free with no money or anything, the government initially talked about 40 acres and a mule, but the government decided, based upon all the pressure they received from former Confederates, that this was not a good idea.

They could not have a steady workforce if blacks had owned their own land, so there was an effort after slavery systematically to make sure that blacks would not become economically independent.

When you keep people poor, they have no opportunity in the system that we have designed, the capitalistic system, to advance.

-They were in a very precarious situation.

So they don't own any property.

They can't read, they can't write, they don't know where the opportunities are in the rest of the country because they've been enslaved on a plantation.

♪ So they have an immediate problem.

They need food, clothing, shelter, they need a job.

-Many formerly enslaved blacks will find themselves back on plantations working for the same people who had enslaved them reputedly for wages, you know, this time.

-What they know how to do is they know how to farm.

So they basically rent a piece of land from a large land owner.

In return for renting land and in return also for living in a house that's probably owned by the larger land owner, they would grow a crop, and then the larger land owner would get somewhere between 1/2 to 2/3 of the crop, which, of course, meant that the family doing the sharecropping would not ever really get out of debt.

♪ -When you're a sharecropper or a tenant farmer, you're always borrowing against your crop.

You never make enough to pay off your debts at the end of the season, and then you have to pledge not only your labor, but the labor of your children and your wife toward the next season.

So we talk about generational wealth, we're talking about generational poverty here.

♪ ♪ ♪ -All told, Reconstruction lasts from 1865 to 1877, but in truth, the years of progress are actually much shorter than that 12-year window.

-In Florida, the superintendent of education was a black man.

The secretary of state was a black man, so there was great hope.

-This first big wave of now we can say African-American political officials around 1868.

There's a lot of progress being made.

People are registering to vote.

Large numbers of formerly enslaved persons are in schools.

Church schools also doubled as regular schools for people to learn how to read and write.

The church becomes this place that it's not just religious worship.

It's a community center, and it's also where a lot of the informal leadership is, some of whom were people who were elites during the period of slavery.

And then you have people who were formerly enslaved persons who fought with the Union army, and they become leaders in the process.

-James Page, formerly enslaved by John Parkhill, would emerge as a preacher who supported education and enfranchisement in every way.

The church he founded, Bethel Missionary Baptist, remains active over a century and a half later.

♪ -Mr. Riley's childhood began here in Leon County.

John Gilmore Riley was born on the Parkhill plantation.

♪ He learned to read remarkably, though he was born into slavery.

♪ This man lived 97 years.

He was secretary of the NAACP, the first African-American principal at the first school for blacks to provide a secondary education.

John G. Riley owned a lot of property all over Tallahassee.

I've had some younger people -- our accountant even has said to me numerous times, and others said, "How did these people -- " He said, "It's remarkable how these people went through all of this oppression, didn't have high education, some third grade, fourth grade, but they became property owners.

They owned their own houses."

♪ There was something about the mind set of that earlier generation who didn't have what we had, but that was that determination, that optimism, that aspiration, that resilience, that fortitude that just kept them pushing and doing all that they could to make a better life.

♪ ♪ -The system of Jim Crow began -- again, people pick a year.

A lot of times, they'll say 1877, when Reconstruction comes to an end.

The local white population didn't just sit back and say, "Okay, we accept that these people are free."

You would get people who at one point in slavery, right, they were legally enslaved, and now there were these other economic arrangements which had the same force of keeping people enslaved.

So you arrest people for some trumped-up charge.

You lease them out so that the local and state government makes a profit, and because they have a criminal record, they can't vote.

Leon County, the African-American population outnumbered the white population six to one.

So what do you do when you are outnumbered and therefore, people will out-vote you?

You have to find a way of suppressing the vote.

That does not change from 1865 to 2020.

-In 1866, the Florida legislature determined any person of color who was deemed to be wandering or strolling about or leading an idle, profligate, or immoral course of life could be arrested and sentenced to 12 months of labor.

In addition, it was determined by the Florida legislature that a felony conviction would result in loss of voting rights for life.

♪ The Ku Klux Klan also emerged to intimidate and terrorize the newly freed men and women.

Unable to testify against whites in court, black families had little to no protection from the terrors and horrors perpetuated by the Klan.

-Social interaction meant that blacks and whites were on equal status, and that just could not be.

♪ -The law said that you had to be here, you couldn't be there, you couldn't have this job, you couldn't do that.

You had to defer to white people that you came in contact with, if you came in contact with them at all.

♪ -One of the enforcement mechanisms of Jim Crow was lynching.

If you tried to become politically independent, if you tried to become economically independent, not only will we kill you, but we will kill you in a very violent manner.

-It's justified in the Bible.

It was justified by scientists and anthropologists, and even after the Civil War, that this was an inferior race in a number of ways.

It says in the Bible that slaves are supposed to be obedient.

Somehow, they never got out of the idea, "Well, these people are not slaves.

They're emancipated."

-Four documented lynchings in Tallahassee.

Now, we know there were more than four, but only four that we have records of -- Pierce Taylor in 1897, Mick Morris in 1909, and then in 1937, Richard Hawkins and Ernest Ponder.

They were teenagers.

They were all taken out of Leon County Jail, which was over on Gaines Street, on the edge of Cascades Park.

The same story over and over again.

A group of whites, you know, came to the jail and met with no resistance in taking a prisoner, and whether it happened in your community or not, you were aware of these incidents of violence taking place.

And again, it's fear.

It's the fear that is used to control blacks.

-So there was this pattern.

A lot of the lynchings happened to people who, if you follow the story, they had been successful in some way.

For instance, I think it was one of the Rollins men who brought in the most cotton that year.

It wasn't too long after that that his barn caught on fire.

Luckily, they got the horses out and everything before it burned.

I remember very well the first electrocution that impacted me because it was of a young man.

He was one of the Beard boys, B-E-A-R-D. That was a large family of about eight children that we went to school with, and I just heard them talking about Abraham Beard would be electrocuted that next week or whatever it was.

In my mind, it just seems like that was such a dark day, like an overcast day, and it ended up that the lady confessed she did not tell the truth, that he did not assault her.

But it's too late.

-Tallahassee, when I first came here in '57... ♪ ...horrible little town.

[ Chuckles ] I hadn't planned to stay here any longer than I possibly could get away with.

I wanted to go back home, which was up in New Jersey, but the need was so great.

On Saturdays, people would come in from the country to the office in wagons, and they traveled from miles just to come in to see us because there was no care for them otherwise.

♪ We used to make house calls in those days.

People that ran the plantations contracted with us to come out to see their workers, which were people who were really very close to being in in a situation of slavery, and living conditions in those areas was just horrendous.

And you just kind of felt defeated.

You had somebody with an illness that you knew that back home in New Jersey, I could take care of and the patient would be fine, and with somebody that had no resources at all, you could tell them what to do.

But it just was impossible for them to follow your directions, so that became very frustrating.

It was always a kind of oasis made up of the universities, and we all stayed in those areas.

It's only when we got outside those areas that we got into the real militant evil kinds of Jim Crow.

♪ -I mean, I remember my grandmother just candidly telling me a story about a guy getting essentially water-boarded by the Klan, and she thought this is what was supposed to happen.

These were some uppity people that were being put in their place.

She would refer to black folks as "servants."

♪ I suppose that's the role that she had seen African-American people in as servants, and that was their place.

That was the natural order of things.

-I have a friend here who's my age who was a child of the Confederacy.

He was raised in Mobile, Alabama.

It wasn't till he went off to university that he laughs and said, "I didn't know the South lost the war."

"We wore uniforms, we celebrated.

We had balls.

We had, you know, blah, all around the Confederacy," and he said, "It was when I went away to university that I went, 'Oh, my God, we lost the war.'"

[ Chuckles ] You know, there's still people fighting that war.

♪ -The civil-rights movement, which was sparked by the kids on campus who said, "We're just not going to take it anymore," went downtown and sat down and said, "We're just going to stay right here, eat at this fountain.

We're going to ride this bus," and so on and so forth.

It was their spark that started everything, and it was led by the civil-rights leaders like King and so forth and so on.

And it all started in Tallahassee from the Hill, A&M and our our kids, and in various university centers throughout the south.

-Others in the community would join in with the students' efforts.

Many black churches served as meeting places, among them Bethel Baptist, the church founded by James Page five years after slavery ended.

During the civil-rights movement, Reverend C. K. Steele, the pastor of Bethel, supported the bus boycott that would result in the desegregation of busses in Tallahassee.

While advances were made toward civil rights, many of the economic legacies of slavery would persist.

-The difference in the inequality wasn't just because of differences in skills, the differences in education, hard work, and all of that kind of thing that we like to focus on.

♪ You had policies in place that were systematically racist.

♪ The effect of that is you get this huge racial difference in wealth during slavery.

It's locked into place and increased during Jim Crow so that by the time you get to the end of Jim Crow, say, somewhere between 1965 and 1970, the amount of difference in wealth is so vast... that you will have this racial problem locked in place for a very long time unless you specifically deal with the wealth issue.

♪ -The whole issue of the cumulative effect of slavery, generations forward in terms of financial advantages, wealth accumulation.

I mean, the variance of wealth accumulation even today between black and white is like 10 to 1.

-Definitely in Leon County, if you did a study of black property ownership, one would be amazed at the acreage that blacks once owned.

♪ -Having that land passed on one generation to the next, it made it cheaper to acquire other kinds of wealth, and that's part of what did not happen for the overwhelming majority of the black population.

They didn't have that wealth to pass on from one generation to the next.

-A lot of black families lost 30, 40, 60, whatever acres through devious acts.

Some had tax problems, keeping up the taxes, but then whomever's in charge can escalate those taxes to the point that you tax me out.

Some were just blatant... "I want your land."

My Uncle Lloyd was the last one owned the land, and there was this white doctor.

He's trying to buy, taking cash money, but Uncle Lloyd would say, "No, I don't want to sell my land.

I'm keeping it for my son."

Well, at 93, he took ill and was put into EMH hospital, and the doctor went to the bedside with the paper and had him to sign.

His wife, Aunt Lydia, at the same time was in the nursing home behind EMH.

The doctor carried the papers there and had her to sign.

Now, we were able to get the signatures nullified through Lawyer Parson because he said it was illegally done.

But that's just an example.

♪ -We are thinking about an institution, a structure that has, in fact, passed on paper, but in terms of its impact, it's still very much present.

-A lot of young white men walk with confidence.

They don't even think about it because they don't have to think about it.

But I think black people, male and female, have to.

♪ It's not necessarily tangible, but we've been conditioned, whether we realize it or not, that we have to behave in a certain manner.

♪ -We know that trauma so alters the human psychology that it actually could be transmitted from one generation to the other, that people continue to do things to try to defend themselves against reexperiencing the severity a trauma's all about.

For black people, the depths of the hurt that occurred in slavery are so great that it really becomes a frightening thing to even approach it, so for many generations, black people didn't talk about slavery.

Today, even, it becomes a very difficult conversation to conjure among people who could really remember.

♪ White people will have to confront the pain and the difficulty of the past that they want to deny.

Black people will have to look at the hurt and the consequences of what we've done to deal with the hurt and put that in the context, as well, of seeing what we did in spite of the hurt.

♪ -Today in Leon County and the surrounding area, there is little physical evidence or information regarding this painful shared past of enslavement.

While the names of the plantation owners are present throughout the city as street signs and neighborhood names, historically, there has been little to no mention of the 9,000 enslaved who lived and died here.

In the last few years, there have been efforts made to include the story of the enslaved at the few remaining plantations, and the recent designation of Emancipation Day as a paid holiday in Leon County are positive steps on a 1,000-step journey.

♪ -♪ One day as I was walking ♪ -♪ He told me now ♪ -♪ Down the lonesome road ♪ ♪ Oh, the spirit spoke unto me ♪ ♪ And it filled my heart with joy, joy, joy ♪ ♪ Said, "Child, I'm gonna leave you" ♪ -♪ He told me now ♪ -♪ Don't forget to pray ♪ ♪ Singing about I ♪ -♪ Lord ♪ -♪ I'm in his care ♪ ♪ Oh, Lord, now I ♪ -♪ I am in his care ♪ -♪ Well, I'm in my ♪ -♪ In my savior's care ♪ -♪ Oh, Lord, now, I ♪ -♪ I am in his care ♪ -♪ Well, I'm in my ♪ -♪ In my savior's care ♪ ♪ Jesus got his arms all around me ♪ ♪ No evil thoughts can harm me ♪ ♪ I'm in my Lord ♪ -♪ I'm in his care ♪ ♪ Oh ♪ ♪ Daniel, he was a good man ♪ -♪ Told me that... ♪ -This program was made possible in part by the Florida Department of State Division of Cultural Affairs and National Endowment for the Arts and by the following.