Race Talk -- The Story of Julia Slayden

It sneaked up on us.

Just when we thought America was “post racial,” Sgt. James Crowley – a white Cambridge police officer – arrested Henry Louis Gates, Jr. – a prominent African-American Harvard professor – at Gates’ own house.

Along with the ensuing media frenzy, President Obama invited both the Cambridge cop and the Harvard professor to the White House for a beer meeting. He wanted both sides to talk and see each other’s racial perspective on the incident.

But a lot of people are tired of race talk. Blogger and author Ta-Nehisi Coates complains that our obsession with dialogue about race is “nauseating.”

But if we Americans quit talking about race, we’ll forget our painful roots. We’ll forget the scars of America’s history that informed Gates’ instinctive (and perhaps incorrect) charge that Crowley’s behavior was race-based.

Here’s where the story of the African-American Slaydens enters the picture.

Julia Slayden – the subject of today’s race talk – was born a slave in Virginia in 1820. Julia was owned by the Slaydens, and she migrated with the family from Virginia to Tennessee.

In 1850, we find Julia among the slaves owned by William Everett Slayden in Dickson County, Tennessee. A few years later, William Everett gave or sold Julia to his son, Tolbert Slayden.

After freedom, Julia and her kin – like many freed slaves – took the Slayden family name.

The 1870 census – the first taken after freedom – shows Julia Slayden in Maury County, just a few miles southeast of Dickson County.

Julia, then 50 years old, lived with Peter Slayden (age 37) and four children – William (age 14), Russell (age 12), James (age 10) and Seymore (age 2). They were relatively prosperous: Peter, a carpenter, had marketable skills and owned personal property worth $225. Julia worked as a housekeeper and owned property valued at $100.

Why did Julia move her family to Maury County? We can only guess, of course. But she most likely settled there so the children could attend school.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau. In Tennessee, the Bureau offered free food, clothing and medical care and tried to protect the newly-won civil rights of the freedmen.

The Freedman’s Bureau also set up free schools for black children. Among these was the School for Freedmen on Green’s Mill Road in Spring Hill, Maury County, Tennessee.

But the Freedmen’s Bureau, particularly the freedmen’s schools, incensed some former slave owners. The infamous Ku Klux Klan, organized in Tennessee in 1866, soon began intimidating and terrorizing African-Americans.

In 1868 Klan violence broke out in Columbia, the capitol of Maury County. A group of African-American school children were marching to a picnic to celebrate the Fourth of July when four to five hundred masked horsemen attacked them on the court house square. The attackers wore red and white robes and carried white flags, some with the letters KKK embroidered in red.

This vicious assault on innocent school children struck close to Julia Slayden, who lived only a few miles from Columbia. William, Russell and James – her three older children – attended school, mostly likely the Freedmen’s Bureau school at nearby Spring Hill.

Julia could well have seen with her own eyes the vicious Klan attack on the children’s Independence Day procession. The Slayden children even may have been among the school kids assaulted by the masked white-robed terrorists.

One of Julia’s children – William Slayden – is of special interest to our story because the boy may be a blood relative of the white Slaydens. The 1870 census identifies Julia as “black” but describes William as “mulatto,” suggesting that his father was white.

William was born in 1856, when Julia lived in the household of William Everett Slayden. In 1856 – the year of William’s birth – William Everett was a widower. Census records show that in 1860, William Everett owned a four-year old boy child. William may well have been named after his father.

So where are the descendents of Julia and William Slayden today? After 1870, they disappeared from the public record, and we don’t know what happened to them after that.

Let’s hope that some day we can find Julia’s descendents, living African-American Slaydens who remember a great-great-great grandma named Julia and her son William.

But even if we never meet Julia’s people, we will remember their story: Julia and her children were born into slavery; after freedom she did her best to support and educate her children; and Julia and her family survived the Ku Klux Klan.

And – hardest for me – we will remember that the white Slaydens held Julia and her children in bondage for almost fifty years.

I don’t know the extent of the responsibility – if any – that the white Slaydens today bear for the wrongs committed to Julia and her family over a century ago. But I do know that if we don’t keep the race talk going, we’ll never heal the painful wounds that opened again last week in Cambridge when a white cop arrested an African-American professor.