We carry with us the legacy of slavery and our ancestors who fought to preserve it. As commentator Jonathan Capehart puts it, slavery is “this nation’s foundational wound.”
We also carry another legacy of our ancestors: the stories of those who fought to end slavery and continued to fight against white supremacy when it ended.
My ancestors were ardent abolitionists. I learned of this in midlife from a handwritten journal kept by my great-great grandfather, George W. Richardson. His life story sat unread on my father’s shelf for decades until my father gave it to me.
For the past twenty years, my wife Lori and I have been retracing his steps across nine states, following the path he recorded in his journal.
I recount his story in my book, The Abolitionist’s Journal: The Memories of an American Antislavery Family.
George Richardson’s journal—all 334 pages written in neat cursive handwriting—describes his life on the edges of nineteenth-century America. He was born on a farm in New York in 1824 and lost his right forearm in a farming accident. As a young man he emigrated to the upper Midwest territories and became a circuit-riding itinerant Methodist preacher on the prairie frontier.
George and his wife, Caroline secretly—and dangerously—used their home in Galena, Illinois, as a stop on the Underground Railroad, spiriting at least one enslaved woman to freedom.
Their next-door neighbor in Galena, John A. Rawlins, would later serve as the closest aide and confidante to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.
During the Civil War, George Richardson volunteered as the white chaplain to a “colored” Union Army regiment posted in Memphis. He saw bloodshed and carnage in Tennessee and Mississippi.
After the Civil War, George, his oldest son, Owen, and three Black pastors founded a school in Dallas for the previously enslaved. The Ku Klux Klan burned down the school.
In act of defiance, the Dallas Black community rebuilt it in a single weekend. The city of Dallas then shut it down, and the Richardsons rebuilt the school again, this time in Austin.
Today the school thrives as Huston-Tillotson University.
But in the days of its founding, the school’s existence remained precarious.
Most Blacks in the Hill Country of Texas were sharecroppers and could not move to Austin to go to school.
If they could not get to the school, then George Richardson took the school to them. While Caroline remained in Austin running the school, George rode a circuit bringing books and lessons to impoverished rural Black settlements.
On one of these treks, George Richardson was tipped off that white vigilantes planned to ambush and kill him. Fearing for his life, he hid in the thick woods near a river until the danger passed.
“These were lonesome days,” he later wrote in his journal. He worried white vigilantes would find him. “When I lay down in my hack for the night, a little tremor came over me. ‘I am in the hands of my enemies, and I may not see the light again.’”
A gentle breeze blew open his Bible to the page of Psalm 17 and it gave him comfort: “Hide me under the shadow of thy wings, from the wicked that oppress me.”
A Black postal courier secretly stopped on his route to bring George food and word when the danger had passed.
Throughout his journal, George Richardson made clear that his deepest passion was more than about winning a single battle in the Civil War or freeing a single slave. He saw his life mission as the salvation of African Americans from bondage, ignorance, poverty, sickness and racial caste.
“I am willing,” he wrote an old friend eleven years after the close of the Civil War, “to let the Lord and the colored people of the South have the balance of my life; for this part of my life is so much clear gain.”
His motives were founded on his religious conviction: Bodies that were enslaved and minds that were uneducated could not read the Bible, and to him, that was a terrible sin.
But as he experienced first-hand the depravations of war, racism and poverty, his motives widened beyond abstract religious doctrine.
Living and struggling among Black people, his work became deeply personal. He wrote about Pastor Jeremiah Webster, his African American partner in the Texas school: “I had learned to love him as a brother.”
George Richardson retired in Denver, where he died in 1911 at the age of 87.
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As the years have folded into decades, the story of George and Caroline Richardson was nearly forgotten. My ancestors painstakingly recorded their memories, but their words sat on shelves, unread except by few.
Was this a benign amnesia borne from ignorance, or was this the metastasized malignancy of racism on our national soul masquerading as polite neglect? I once thought it was the former but now realize it was the latter.
Of course, it is easy to see how memories fade as new generations came forward and older generations died off. Others married into the family, bringing with them their own religions, politics, and prejudices. Situations and locations changed. Men left the farms, went into business, and their wives climbed the social ladder—the white social ladder.
The Republican Party of my ancestors’ upbringing, forged in the cyclone of abolitionism and civil war, became the party of industrialism and suburbanization. Their schools, workplaces, and social gatherings were smothered by theories of social Darwinism and the fake science of racial eugenics. Forgetting the cause of emancipation was easier than the work of remembering.
But the loss of memory in my family was more than this. We didn’t just lose our memory—we buried it in a graveyard of white Christianity.
The religious motivations of my ancestors are unrecognizable in the dominant conservation white Christianity of today.
Yet the stories of our ancestors who took a different path are still alive if we choose to listen. We do not have to accept the excuse that people are “captive of their times.” Our attitudes and actions are still shaped by those who saw injustice and took risks to right it.
Who we think of as our heroes, and how we remember them, still matters.
James D. Richardson is a former senior writer with The Sacramento Bee and a retired Episcopal priest. He is the author of Willie Brown: A Biography. His articles on state politics have appeared in numerous publications including The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle. He lives in Sacramento, California, with his wife, Lori.