A quick warning.

This episode contains descriptions of violence and self-harm.

When you look at the cochleas generations of Howard graduates and entertainers and nurses and professors.

And then you look at that side.

Do you see the difference?

Yes.

You know, the Flattoe family, it's a very different story.

The story of Gabriel Coakley is nothing short of astounding.

Before the fall of slavery in America,

this free black man in Washington, D.C., becomes a successful businessman, buys his family's freedom, and then achieves something that up until that point would have been any black person's wildest dream.

He secures reparations for his family's enslavement. In the decades after the war,

the Coakleys would continue to exemplify black excellence in progress. Whereas Gabriel Coakley,

the patriarch, broke freedom's ground with a windfall. The generations to follow would cede that ground with opportunity and accomplishment.

But their experience was the exception, not the rule. Like their counterparts in the north,

black people in the deep south were doing what they could to piece together hopeful lives

built on the fragile new freedoms won in the Civil War.

But for them, what's won could easily be lost.

The South, through the Civil War and well beyond, was a very violent place where black life

was considered cheap.

State violence, white supremacist violence, violence for being too ambitious, too

smart, too free were all commonplace. There was violence baked into the maintenance of the

Deep South's racial and social order and secondary intracial violence that seeped into the everyday lived experiences of black people in black communities that were legally restricted from social, economic, and political maturation.

...