A quick warning, this episode contains descriptions of violence and self-harm.

When you look at the cochle generations of how we're graduates and entertainers and nurses and professors

and then you look at that side do you see the difference? Yes, you know the

flat toe family it's a very different story. The story of Gabriel Cochley 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 achieved 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 Coghley, 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 one in the civil war but for them what's

one could easily be lost?

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

...