chapter 2 From Whence We Came
Page 17 →Humans have a need to belong—to identify with a core unit—and to know from whence we came. We have embraced family and other institutions bigger than ourselves to give purpose to our being, to be able to put our lives in a framework that doesn’t begin and end with our short lifetimes. We draw solace from a recognition that we are the living extension of a tradition that began long ago and will continue long after we are gone.
In his riveting play, The Piano Lesson, August Wilson underscores the importance of family lineage in his portrayal of the Charles family’s conflict over selling an heirloom piano. The piano bore carvings depicting the family’s history during slavery. The dilemma of bartering the past for opportunity in the present was resolved through a gut-wrenching realization that the carvings embodied “the story of our whole family,” preserved through the blood and tears of many ancestors.
The history of most African American families began with slavery. The African slave trade is a complex story with many complicit actors, including many Africans themselves. Notwithstanding its origins, there is universal agreement that the institution of slavery was a dehumanizing experience for African Americans. Forcibly exported from their homeland in Africa, across the great Atlantic Ocean to a new world thousands of miles away, to labor under a wasteful economic system, these Black souls were stripped of their culture and physically and mentally abused. While the framers of the Constitution indulged in the hypocrisy that African Americans Page 18 →were somehow less than human, this perversion amounted to selling the soul of the nation to the devil in exchange for economic prosperity.1 It would prove to be an interesting irony that, instead of being plucked from the heart of darkness as rationalized by their captors, these noble people would be thrust into a depraved circumstance disguised by all the trappings of an advanced civilization.
Slavery was a defining experience for the nation. It would be described as America’s original sin.2 A nation formed by people fleeing persecution and seeking freedom nevertheless engaged in or tolerated a most heinous cruelty to its dark brethren. A nation that exalted the rights of man and spoke eloquently of all men being created equal nevertheless demeaned its Black neighbor as property and defined him in the federal Constitution as three-fifths of a person. United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney of Maryland attempted to resolve what had become a moral issue with legal sophistry in the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857. Declaring that Congress could not outlaw slavery in any territory, Taney gave legal validity to the gospel of white supremacy. He wrote that Black individuals were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”3
It was inevitable that America would atone for the sin of slavery. However, very few expected that atonement would take the form of a devastating Civil War.
Early Education of Slaves
When the guns fell silent at Appomattox, the greatest deficiency of the newly freed slaves was education. Ninety percent of Black people could not read. Knowing all too well from the experience of the American Revolution that education creates rising expectations for liberty and social justice, most white people did not want Page 19 →literate slaves. The mere thought of slaves reading John Locke, as their enslavers had done before, was a frightening prospect.4 The slave’s mind was deliberately allowed to atrophy because of fear that education would bring about rebellion. That fear was validated by Denmark Vesey’s plan to stage a slave revolt in Charleston, South Carolina in 1822, and the execution of a slave rebellion by Nat Turner that resulted in the death of fifty-five white people in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831. Both Vesey and Turner learned to read and write at an early age and therefore could articulate the inhuman conditions of slavery. The words of Elijah Green, an ex-slave of Charleston, is a strong testimonial of this fear: “And for God’s sake, don’t let a slave be catch with pencil and paper. That was a major crime. You might as well have killed your marster or missus.”5
Although the slave codes prohibited teaching slaves to read or write, some slave owners (especially their children) ignored the law, particularly regarding so-called “house slaves.” Frederick Douglas was a house slave taught by his mistress. While the instruction of one or two slaves was not a serious violation of the law, the establishment of slave schools was a far more serious matter.6
Laws were also passed making it unlawful to instruct free Black residents, who made up about 300,000 people in the South in 1860. Free Black residents, many of whom were offspring of their former white enslavers, held a legal status above slaves but below white residents; they had the right to own property but were socially segregated from white people and were held in a subservient condition by force of law. Notwithstanding laws prohibiting the education of free Black people, instruction was carried out clandestinely (often at night) by educated white and Black people. Although African American churches shouldered most of the burden of educating free Black people, independent Black schools existed in a few places, such as Charleston and Savannah.7 In Charleston, the Brown Fellowship Society, a group of wealthy light-skinned free Black people, Page 20 →subsidized the Minor’s Moralist Society, which educated free Black people.8 South Carolina and Louisiana were home to the South’s wealthiest and best-educated free Black communities.
Education of My Ancestors During Slavery
My maternal and paternal ancestors were captured in West Central Africa, in the geographic regions of Nigeria and Cameroon, forced to endure the horrors of the Middle Passage, and enslaved on plantations in South Carolina.9 Recent DNA research has established that 5.7 million of the 10.7 million Africans that survived the Middle Passage were taken from West Central Africa.10
Although my maternal and paternal ancestors were born into slavery, over the generations several of them learned to read and write. They became literate through the beneficence of charitable white people who taught them on the plantations, or they secretly learned from fellow slaves who were literate. The oral history of my family is replete with stories of rape of Black slave women.11 These brutal and demeaning liaisons produced mulatto offsprings who were often cared for and educated by their enslavers. That several of my ancestors became ministers of the Methodist Episcopal Church shortly after emancipation reinforces the view that they studied the Bible while enslaved. Since the practice of religion was permitted on some plantations because it was perceived as a harmless and controlling influence, studying the Bible became the vehicle to literacy. It is amazing how this educational loophole was cleverly exploited.
Maternal Ancestors
Riley–Brown Lineage
My maternal lineage can be traced to two plantations in South Carolina. One set of maternal great-great-great-grandparents, William Rivers and Sealy Rivers, lived on the Murry Robinson plantation near Orangeburg, South Carolina, my birthplace.12 Sealy (born Page 21 →ca. 1800) was a slave; the race of her partner, William, is unclear. William and Sealy bore a child, Peggy Gisentane, my great-great-grandmother (born ca. 1832). My great-grandfather, Charles Thomas Riley, born a mulatto slave on April 29, 1850 (died February 3, 1915), was the offspring of Peggy and John Riley, the white overseer on the Murry Robinson plantation.13
The other set of maternal great-great-great-grandparents were Simon Thomas and Liddie Thomas who lived on T. T. Inabinet plantation near Orangeburg.14 Liddie was a slave; the race of her partner, Simon, is unclear. Simon and Liddie bore a child, Annie Thomas, my great-great-grandmother (born ca. 1830). Annie and Charles Boyd, her enslaver, had a child, Melrena Boyd, in 1856. Born a slave, she was my great-grandmother.
Charles Riley and Melrena Boyd married and gave birth to Lillian Aletha Riley (September 9, 1879–July 9, 1942), one of my maternal grandmothers.15 Although Charles Riley was born a slave, he learned to read and write by studying the Bible. After emancipation, he became a minister and a successful farmer. He donated the land to build Mt. Zion Methodist Episcopal Church in Jamison, Orangeburg County, where he pastored. The town of Riley, Calhoun County, is located a few miles north of Jamison and is likely close to where the Murry Robinson Plantation was located. The congregation, which included carpenters, banded together to build the wood-frame church structure.
I am unaware of my other maternal great-great-great or great-great-grandparents. My other maternal great-grandmother, Sarah Major, was born a mulatto slave (1841–July 1, 1911) near Orangeburg. She was a house slave on Asbury Noah Wannamaker’s plantation in Orangeburg County.16 The Wannamaker family linage traces its roots to Austria. Sarah was taught to read and write by members of the Wannamaker family. Evidence of her literacy is established by correspondence between Sarah and her sister, A. J. Clarke, who lived in Yorkville, South Carolina.17
Page 22 →Among Sarah Major’s possessions at her death was a damaged nineteenth century violin. The violin label reads “F. Breton breveté Mme LA DUCHESSE de S.A.R. D’ANGOULÊME 1816 Breton Made in Germany.” The musical instrument is likely an antique, handmade violin from the workshop of François Breton, a renowned luthier, in the early nineteenth century. “Breveté” signifies that the maker held a patent or special authorization from Duchess d’Angoulême, a royal patronage that indicates a high-quality instrument.18 Sarah Major was likely given the violin by the Wannamaker family because she played the violin and could read music. Sarah’s ownership of the Breton violin, which I now possess, is further evidence of her literacy during slavery. I took violin lessons for several years and know how difficult it is to play that instrument well.
According to family oral history, Sarah Major bore a child, Lawrence W. Hook, in 1865 with a member of the Wannamaker family. Asbury Wannamaker’s wife’s maiden name was Lavinia Mahaly Hook. The 1880 Federal Census lists Lawrence Hook as the stepson of Edward Brown and Sarah Brown. Lawrence was fair-skinned and was called Bubba Lawrence. Later in life, he had a contract to carry mail from the Orangeburg Post Office to the Atlantic Coastline Railroad, which made runs between Miami and New York City. He was very intelligent and quite gregarious, and because he could pass for white, he had many friends from both races. He was tall and had a commanding presence, often calling himself the “Buckra.”19
After Sarah was emancipated, Asbury Wannamaker gave her twenty-one acres of land, cut off from the Wannamaker plantation, as an expression of his gratitude. At age thirty-four, Sarah married Edward W. Brown, my great-grandfather, on August 28, 1875. Edward was born in 1855 in Manning, Clarendon County, near Charleston. Although he had a mixture of Cherokee Indian blood, he was listed as a mulatto in the 1880 Federal Census. The oral history of my family recounts his escape from likely death at the hands Page 23 →of certain white residents by swimming across the Santee River separating Clarendon County from Orangeburg County.
My great-grandfather, Edward W. Brown, as a middle-aged man. Author’s collection.
Edward Brown was a carpenter and his ability to read and write is established by multiple correspondences, including his execution of a 1905 contract to build a house.20 Although his legal and social status is uncertain, he was likely born a slave but later became a free Black. The Brown family was very prosperous, with income generated from farming and Edward’s carpentry business. He owned three houses located on a 1.5-acre parcel of land in north Orangeburg. One of their prized possessions was a Mira music box with metal discs. The Mira music box (polyphon) was produced by the Swiss company, Mermod Frères, sometime between 1890 and 1910. It was among the finest and best-sounding disc music boxes ever made. I played the music box often while growing up and admired its superb tonal quality and rich sound.
Page 24 →Edward Brown and Sarah Major produced four sons, including my grandfather, James Alvirgus Brown, who was born on April 8, 1877. The other sons were Loney Edward Brown (August 9, 1874; death date unknown), Richard Walter Brown (June 24, 1880–May 23, 1926), and Ferdinand M. Brown (February 3, 1884–January 19, 1924). Loney Brown, with his very fair complexion, chose to “pass” as a white person and moved to Redding, Pennsylvania. He married a Caucasian woman and had four children. Loney kept in touch with his core family secretly until he died. When he wrote to his family, he did not provide a return address.
James Alvirgus Brown and Lillian Aletha Riley married on September 9, 1904, at Mt. Zion Methodist Episcopal Church. They had six children, including my mother, Anne Elizabeth Brown, who was born on August 11, 1912. The other children were Allie Brown (August 29, 1904–June 22, 1930), twins James Albert Brown (May 11, 1905–January 14, 1991) and Hattie Alberta Brown (May 11, 1905–April 6, 1994), Leroy W. Brown (April 11, 1907–October 19, 1976), and Sarah Cornelius Brown (January 7, 1911–December 14, 1915). The first child, Allie Brown, was born out of wedlock. To protect the social standing of the Brown family, Allie was adopted and raised by his grandparents, Edward and Sarah Major Brown.
King–Riley Lineage
The Riley and King families are connected through the marriage of Alonzo King to Josephine Riley, the sister of Lillian A. Riley, my grandmother. Alonzo had a sister, Lillian “Nannie” King (October 9, 1881–December 4, 1973). I knew Aunt Nannie very well while growing up. She lost her eyesight in her later years because of glaucoma. Aunt Nannie was married to one of Edward and Sarah Brown’s sons, Ferdinand. When Sarah Major Brown died in 1911, leaving Edward Brown a widower, Edward later married Aunt Nannie, who was widowed after Ferdinand died in 1924.
Page 25 →Alonzo and Lillian King trace their lineage through Alfred King, a slave, who was the offspring of Henry Moorer on the Moorer Plantation near Orangeburg, and Mary Royal, a slave, who lived in a dirt floor cabin on the plantation.21 After emancipation, Alfred King decided not to adopt the surname of his plantation owner and father, Henry Moorer. He was so embittered over the enslavement of his family by his father that he rejected the idea of taking his enslaver’s surname. Ultimately, feeling like a king as a freed man, he chose the surname of “King” to make a statement that he was beholden to no one. Nearing death, Henry Moorer tried to give Alfred part of his estate, but Alfred refused to accept it.22
Paternal Ancestors: Green–Bowers Lineage
I am unaware of any paternal great-great-great-grandparents. One set of paternal great-great-grandparents are Sandy Green from South Carolina and Laura Fagan from Georgia, both slaves. They had a son, Thomas “Tom” Green, who was born a slave on May 10, 1842 (died October 8, 1918). Tom was born on Jacob Green’s plantation. Jacob Green owned twelve slaves, ranging from two to thirty-six years of age, at the time of his death in 1859. When Jacob Green’s estate was probated in the Marlboro County Probate Court on July 11,1859, Tom Green was listed in the “Inventory of Appraisement” at a value of $1,250 at age nineteen. One of his brothers, Knight Green, was recorded as being “unsound” and valued at $1000 at age seventeen.23 It was sobering to read the appraisement document, which valued human bondage just like other property listed, including horses, plow gear, carpenter tools, bushels of wheat and corn, and furniture.
Thomas Green, my great-grandfather, was a minister and cotton farmer. He learned to read and write by studying the Bible during slavery. In 1909, he donated the land to build Hopewell Methodist Episcopal Church in Tatum, South Carolina, and he preached there during his lifetime. I recall my family’s annual trips to Hopewell Page 26 →on the second Sunday of August for a Big Meet, which was a gastronomical event where church members shared an abundance of home-cooked food.
Hopewell Methodist Episcopal Church, Tatum, South Carolina. Author’s collection.
Tom Green accumulated a large amount of wealth in real estate, owning three tracts of farmland totaling 277 acres located in Bennettsville and Tatum. His homestead was surrounded by 135 acres of tillable farmland. The other two tracts consisted of the 109-acre Dunbar Plantation and 33-acre Bennettsville Place.24 At that time, the average size of Black-owned farms was about 10–20 acres. The homestead property is still owned by the family—145 years after its acquisition by Tom Green in 1880.
In many communities in the South after the Civil War, Black residents who owned substantial farmland had to hide or disguise their success so as not to provoke envious white people who had less. Fortunately, Tom Green was able to escape white resentment despite his large landholdings. But in 1916, Anthony Crawford, a Black farmer Page 27 →who owned a 427-acre cotton farm in Abbeville, South Carolina, was murdered by a white lynch mob, jealous of his wealth. An historic marker in Abbeville recounts the story of Anthony Crawford, then fifty-six years old, being lynched for cursing a white merchant who demanded to buy Mr. Crawford’s cottonseed for a lower price. Later, threats to the Crawford family, consisting of thirteen children, caused most family members to flee North, thereby abandoning the land their patriarch had acquired.25
Plaintiff class, including Professor Gomillion (right) and my relatives, Anna (Green) and Nick Kollock (left), in the seminal Gomillion v. Lightfoot gerrymandering case. Archives of USC Center for Civil Rights History and Research.
Tom Green married three times because his wives died early. His first wife was Francis Green.26 That union produced seven children.27 His second wife, Janie Fanady (Nov. 12, 1858–February 1, 1888), is my Page 28 →paternal great-grandmother.28 That marriage produced four children, including Ella Florence Green (January 17, 1882–May 5, 1957), my paternal grandmother.29 His third marriage was to Mary Virginia Morrisey (October 24, 1867–October 2, 1903). That union produced ten children.30 One of those children, Anna Green, and her husband, Nicholas Kollock, of Tuskegee, Alabama, were members of the plaintiff class along with Tuskegee Institute’s Professor Charles Gomillion that successfully challenged the use of gerrymandering to disenfranchise most Black citizens of Tuskegee, in the landmark US Supreme Court case Gomillion v. Lightfoot.31
Tom Green and his large family lived in a spacious white two-story frame house. The structure included a living room, several bedrooms, and a large front porch. A one-story attachment housed the kitchen, pantry, and dining area. On Tom Green’s homestead in Tatum, one of his daughters, Mable Green, ran a common school for the children of former slaves around the turn of the century. The county government helped to finance this effort. Tom Green’s children were well-educated. One was a doctor, another was a minister, and many were educators.
Very little is known about my other paternal great-grandparents, whose names are Andrew Backman and Mary Backman. They had a son, Walter Backman Bowers, my grandfather, who was born on December 24, 1857 (and died April 27, 1925) in the vicinity of Greenville, South Carolina. Although he was born during slavery, it is uncertain what his legal status was at birth.
Walter Backman Bowers was a Methodist Episcopal minister. He spent four years studying for the ministry (1895–1899), when he was admitted to the South Carolina Methodist Episcopal Conference at Newberry, South Carolina. He received a stipend of $9 a year from the Methodist Episcopal Conference while studying. He pastored at eight churches across South Carolina during his twenty-six-year ministry.32 Reverend Bowers was a beloved minister and a lasting monument to his pastoral work was the naming of a church Page 29 →in his honor. After ministering to the congregation at Mars Bluff, South Carolina (near Florence), the church, established in 1880, was renamed Bowers Chapel in 1917.
My great-grandfather Thomas Green’s Tatum, South Carolina homestead, ca. 1900. Author’s collection.
Reverend Walter Backman Bowers, age fifty-nine, and Ella Florence Green, age thirty-four, were married at Hopewell Methodist Episcopal Church in Tatum on April 20, 1916. The engraved invitation announcing the wedding attest to the wealth of the Green family in the early twentieth century. She was always smartly dressed and was well educated. The couple produced four children, including Walter Thomas Bowers, my father (August 2, 1917–December 14, 1997).33
Walter Backman Bowers was twenty-five years older than my grandmother Ella Green when they married. When he succumbed to kidney disease in Camden, South Carolina after only nine years of marriage, my father was only eight years old. His brother and sisters were four, five, and one year old respectively. Because Ella Bowers, Page 30 →as a single mother, and her children were left alone in Camden, her half-brother, Reverend Thomas D. Green, arranged to have the family moved to Orangeburg, where he could assist them.
My grandmother, Ella Green Bowers, was both well-dressed and well-educated. Author’s collection.
Grandmama Ella lived in an eclectic house in the shape of a hexagon on Goff Avenue. She heated the house with a coal-fired stove and cooked on a wood stove. Her refrigeration was supplied by an icebox, an insulated cabinet with a compartment at top for the ice. A block of ice, which melted slowly to cool the food stored below, was delivered each week. She washed the family’s clothes outside in a large cast-iron wash pot heated by wood before putting them out to dry on a clothesline. She lived a hard life raising her four children as a single mother during the 1920s and ’30s and ultimately had a stroke in 1952 at age seventy; she died five years later.
We spent every Thanksgiving at Grandmama Ella’s (also called Mother B) house for dinner. Poking about her barn in the backyard, I found a Civil War musket with the letters “US” engraved on it. It Page 31 →was likely used by an enslaved relative who fought in the Civil War on the side of the Union.
My mother, Anne Elizabeth Brown, and father, Walther Thomas Bowers, were married in Orangeburg on November 26, 1942. They produced three sons: Walter Thomas Bowers II, James Edward Bowers, and Andrew Leroy Bowers.
The oral and documented history of my ancestors support the conclusion that several of them became literate during slavery. The ability to read and write likely contributed to their success in amassing significant wealth after emancipation. Their contributions to the community of former slaves after the Civil War were significant, especially in the fields of education, farming, and religion.
The institution of slavery fragmented my life, as it did the lives of most African Americans. In land that became the United States, chattel slavery lasted 246 years, from 1619 to 1865, which by 2026 represent 60 percent of the Black experience in America. Black Americans were systematically excluded from obtaining an education during slavery. African Americans have been emancipated a mere 161 years through the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, which represents 40 percent of the Black experience in America. It is startling to realize that African Americans have enjoyed full citizenship rights, brought about by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, for only sixty-one years, which represents 15 percent of the Black experience.34 In most places in the United States, the caste system that separated Black from white residents was eliminated only sixty-one years ago. It is no wonder that African Americans continue to lag white Americans in education and wealth. Several of my ancestors were fortunate to have gained access to education during slavery, either through white generosity or secrecy, that has given my family an economic and cultural head start that most African Americans did not have.