Alive and well

He traveled by train from Northeast Texas to North Carolina, carrying only a small suitcase, not really knowing what he would see or do. But 39-year-old former slave Andrew Jackson Hurdle, who was sold from his family nearly 30 years earlier, was determined to put the pieces of his life back together.

It was 1885, and although he had a wife, many children and a farm back in Texas, he had not come to terms with all that he had lost. Determined to find his family, he walked off the train that stormy night and headed toward the direction where he thought he used to live.

In the pitch black darkness, Hurdle saw a faint light in the distance. He followed the light, which led to a small porch. Soaking wet, he knocked on the door and a woman answered, wanting to know what Hurdle was doing "out on a night like this?"

She provided Hurdle with dry clothes and hot soup, and rekindled the fire that had been burning in the fireplace. As they talked, Hurdle slowly realized he was speaking with the mother he had lost long ago. After three decades of separation, Hurdle had finally found his family. He was home.

Enslaved for more than 20 years, Hurdle died in 1935 at the age of 89, but what remains of his legacy are the detailed stories of his life as he told them to some of his 25 children, three of whom are still alive and active participants in the growing reparations movement. Timothy Hurdle, 84, of San Francisco, the oldest of the living children; Chester, 75, of North Highlands, Calif., near Sacramento, the youngest of Hurdle's sons; and daughter Hannah Hurdle-Toomey, the youngest Hurdle sibling, now a 71-year-old minister in Belleville, Ill., have joined a number of other direct descendants of slaves who are filing lawsuits demanding that corporations repay the profits made from transactions linked to slavery.

For years, reparations opponents have argued that too much time has passed since the abolition of slavery and that no direct descendants are living to give restitution. But this latest fight in the reparations movement shatters that argument as children of slaves come forth.

According to the suits, the plaintiffs are asking for: "a full disclosure of all of the defendants' corporate records that reveal any evidence of slave labor or their profiting from same; the appointment of an independent historic commission to serve as a depository for corporate records related to slavery; and that defendants account to plaintiffs for any profits they derived from slavery."

Barbara Ratliff, a Los Angeles attorney who represents the Hurdle brothers, says the stories direct descendants of slaves have to tell will help educate the world about one of the greatest atrocities in American history. She adds, "Hopefully the lawsuit will have the added benefit of sparking [awareness]" about a particular chapter in history that is not fully known.

A MOVEMENT GAINS MOMENTUM

The fight for reparations is rooted in an effort to gain restitution for more than 200 years of unpaid slave labor and the economic disadvantage that ensued after slavery. Decades of Black codes limited the freedom of many African Americans, who were not allowed to own or rent farmland, vote or hold office. Blacks who did not work faced imprisonment. Afterward, Jim Crow laws continued to deny Blacks basic civil liberties.

It's been a long struggle. Just ask Ray Jenkins, a Detroit activist often called "Reparations Ray." He was fighting for reparations as early as the 1960s and is known as a pioneer in the effort. When the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA) was founded in 1987, the group became a force in the movement.

Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) was the first person of his stature to support the idea. In 1989, he introduced legislation (H.R. 40) to create a commission to study reparations. The NAACP has vigorously supported the bill from the outset. But although Conyers has reintroduced the bill in every session of Congress since, it has never received significant support on Capitol Hill.

Once considered a radical fringe movment, today, the fight for reparations has gained momentum as more prominent African Americans take up the cause.

Randall Robinson's book, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (2000), made a persuasive argument for reparations and some of the nation's most successful litigators have taken on lawsuits against corporations and the government.

Earlier this year, for example, a group of prominent lawyers including Harvard University's Charles Ogletree and civil rights lawyer Johnnie Cochran sued government agencies in Oklahoma for the 1921 Tulsa race riots. The riots left scores of African Americans dead and destroyed one of the most successful Black business and residential districts of its time. The case is the first of several planned lawsuits to be filed by the group against local and state agencies that allowed or sponsored racial hatred.

In addition, a number of "mainstream" entities are addressing the legacy of slavery and the call for reparations. Two years ago, California regulators mandated that insurance companies disclose details of policies they underwrote that covered slaves. In May, the Los Angeles City Council voted to draft a law that requires companies doing business with the city to state whether they profited from slavery. The Chicago City Council passed a similar law in October. The Philadelphia Inquirer has run editorials calling for a national reparations commission, while the Hartford Courant newspaper has expressed contrition, apologizing for running advertisements for the sale and capture of slaves.

A LEGAL STRATEGY EMERGES

The strategy in the fight for reparations took a new turn when Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, a New England School of Law graduate, filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court in New York on March 26,2002, seeking reparations for descendants of slaves after discovering evidence that several U.S. corporations directly profited from the slave trade. For years, Farmer-Paellmann, 37, searched computer databases, government records and private archives to locate firms with financial links to slavery. She hit paydirt when she discovered Aetna Inc., had sold slave holders life insurance policies for their slaves.

Aetna issued an apology in a press release, stating that "for a few years shortly after its founding in 1853, the Aetna Life Insurance Company insured the lives of slaves. There is no conclusive data, however, on the total number of policies written by Aetna Life. We have, and we continue to express, our deepest regret over any participation at all."

But until the Hurdles came along, critics of reparations litigation argued that there were no identifiable plaintiffs since the slaves themselves and their children had died long ago.

Those arguments infuriated Ina Bell Daniels Hurdle-McGee, 69, the great-granddaughter of Andrew Jackson Hurdle. She knew that in her own family alone there were four living adults whose parents were slaves. (In addition to being related to the Hurdle siblings, her husband's aunt - Julia May Wyatt-Kervin, 100 - is the daughter of Texas slaves.) Three years ago, Hurdle-McGee, a retired educator, met Farmer-Paellmann at a reparations convention in Baton Rouge, La., and told her about Wyatt-Kervin and the Hurdles.

"Initially I was not convinced this was true," says Farmer-Paellmann. "I said send me material, and I held on to those documents until I really started thinking about developing a case."

Farmer-Paellmann met the Hurdle siblings and looked through several documents including birth records, letters written by Andrew Hurdle and photographs.

"I invited them into the lawsuits when it became clear that the world needed to hear their story," says Farmer-Paellmann.

"These stories are a lot fresher than anyone else's stories. Who else is in a better position to talk about slavery than people whose parents were slaves?"

The memories the Hurdles have of their father are central to a federal class-action lawsuit against 17 corporations, Aetna Inc., FleetBoston Financial Corp., New York Life Insurance Co., R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., CSX and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., among them. Fifteen attorneys - including Dumisa Ntsebeza, the former commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa - are working on the suit, which was transferred to a Chicago court in April. The lawsuit combines Farmer-Paellmann's case, as well as others filed in federal courts in New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Louisiana and Texas. The plaintiffs include Hannah Hurdle-Toomey; Julia May Wyatt-Kervin; and 119-year-old EddLee Bankhead, the son of a Mississippi slave. Bankhead died last November. Timothy and Chester Hurdle's case, which was filed in federal court in California, has been consolidated with the Chicago suit, for discovery purposes. The judge has given the plaintiffs until mid-June to submit an amended consolidated complaint.

Last year, New York Life released a statement noting, "Our archive records show our predecessor company, Nautilus Insurance Company, wrote policies on the lives of slaves in 1846 and 1847." The trustees of Nautilus voted to end the practice in 1848, New York Life said, adding it abhors the practice of slavery and regrets Nautilus was "associated in any way with it, for even a brief period of time." The statement also noted, however, "Any lawsuits about events 150 years ago face huge legal hurdles, and we fully expect to prevail in court." Last May, New York Life announced the donation of their "original, 155-year-old archival records of insurance policies sold to owners of slaves," to The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.

THE DEBATE

Today, nearly 140 years after slavery ended, African Americans are still feeling its effects. Diane Sammons, a New Jersey attorney working on the class-action lawsuit, believes that most of the discrimination and other unacceptable things that go on today, like racial profiling, are all lingering effects from slavery.

"How can you say racism no longer exists when we know for a fact that the statistics show otherwise?" she asks. "Blacks lag behind Whites in everything from housing to education, health care, ...and so many other areas." Sammons believes racial reconciliation will never happen until we begin to examine the roots and basis of discrimination. She says that part of the goal of the class-action lawsuit is to open up discussion and dialogue on racial issues that have been hidden for so long.

"How are you going to eliminate all the racial issues when you don't look at what caused them?" says Sammons. "You can't do it."

However, reparations opponents, such as conservative commentator Armstrong Williams; Shelby Steele, a fellow at the Hoover Institute; and John McWhorter, author of Losing the Race: Self Sabotage in Black America, who are African American, contend that the reparations movement paints minorities as lost, hopeless victims. Two years ago, author David Horowitz, who is White, submitted an advertisement entitled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea - and Racist Too" to college newspapers. He argues that the movement wants to penalize people who had nothing to do with the institution.

He points to successful people like Oprah Winfrey as evidence that some African American slave descendants are doing well. "The argument has never been made...that slavery or segregation has impacted the present generation," says Horowitz. "If the money is going to children of slaves, and particular to them, then I am for it, but if they are going to use them (direct descendants) to make a case for anyone whose color is Black, then I am against it."

Those against reparations have also argued that too much time has passed since the abolition of slavery in this country. But lawyers fighting for reparations say there is no statute of limitations for suing corporations over actions related to slavery because most of the information implicating modern corporations has not been available until recently. The advances of modern technology have given researchers the tools to trace Black heritage and investigate the monetary gains of those who had a role in the slave trade.

According to the lawsuits, from 1790 to 1860 alone, the U.S. economy reaped the benefits of as much as $40 million in unpaid labor. The plaintiffs estimate the current value of this unpaid labor to be as much as $ 1.4 trillion.

A SLAVE'S LIFE

Andrew Jackson Hurdle was born Christmas Day in North Carolina, about 20 years before the end of slavery. He was only 10 years old when his entire family, including his three sisters and two brothers, were sold on the auction block. His siblings were bought by a man named Bennett Hazel, who lived in Graham, N.C., but young Andrew was taken to Dangerfield, Texas, where he became the playmate for the son of a man named T.H. Turner.

According to the Hurdles, the young White boy had a severe stutter, so Andrew used pebbles somehow to correct his speech. His reward? The Turners allowed him to learn to read and write. Hurdle eventually fell in love with Viney Sanders, a biracial woman whose father was a White man called "Old Master." Carrying a pass that allowed him to travel, he would visit the young lady at a nearby plantation in Texas. This was quite a dangerous endeavor, as White men would sometimes trick slaves and beat them or accuse them of trying to run away.

Hurdle was a house slave, but his somewhat comfortable existence ended when he turned 16 and was confronted by a new overseer at the plantation. "The first thing they did was beat them into submission, but my father didn't go for that. He had to flee, ran through bushes," says Hannah.

The elder Hurdle stole a horse and a blanket, sleeping during the day and traveling by night to elude slave trackers. He ate corn or whatever scraps of food he could find. He ducked in swamps and outsmarted the hounds by hiding in the water and retracing his own footsteps. By then, the Civil War had begun.

One day, he came upon a Union Army camp, where he was given a blue coat and a job caring for horses until the war was over.

"When mama got pregnant, that is the coat she wore as a pregnant smock," recalls Hannah.

After the war, he returned to the same community he ran away from and married Viney Sanders. The couple settled on a 20-acre farm in Texas and had 17 children. Hurdle saved and traded horses, raising enough to purchase the initial plot, which over the years grew to 500 acres. According to a letter written by Hurdle, Viney died in 1904. A second marriage was short-lived and years later, 65-year-old Hurdle married his third wife, 25-year-old Jessie Catherine Bailey. They had eight children, including Timothy, Hannah and Chester.

Each child found a way to learn more about their father's life. Hannah was only 3-years-old when the family rode in a wagon to her father's funeral, but through the years she gathered information from research and talking with family members. Chester, would sit on the porch and listen to "papa" talk to the older siblings. The bearer of many of those stories is Timothy, the oldest of the living siblings, who learned about his father's experiences from Andrew Hurdle himself and from the first set of children Hurdle had years before Timothy was born. Hurdle's eldest son, George, died in 1966. He was more than 60 years older than Hannah, Hurdle's youngest child.

Hurdle supported his large family by working a variety of jobs. he farmed, cobbled shoes, bottled water and managed a sorghum syrup mill. "Part of my father's legacy was [that he taught us] to always treat your fellow man right and to do an honest day's work," remembers Chester.

Timothy remembers him sticking his hand in beehives to "rob the bees of their honey." He was also a minister, but refused to take a salary for that work. Although Hurdle never attended school, he founded Northeast Texas Christian Theological and Industrial College, which opened in 1912 as one of the first Black schools of higher education in Texas. According to the Anderson County Historical Commission in Palestine, Texas, the entire school was mysteriously burned down around 1920.

As Hurdle became a respected preacher in Northeast Texas, his rising stature didn't sit well with everyone. He was once dragged into the woods by a White mob, but Hurdle refused to kneel down, as ordered, and fought the men off him. He was shot at, and the bullet skimmed his head creating a permanent bald patch.

By the time Timothy was a teenager, his father was a feeble, elderly man who spent his time managing the farm. He taught the boys to chop wood, pick cotton and make syrup.

"Work was no object to him," says Timothy. "He didn't care how hard you worked as long as it came out the way you wanted it to. He thought an idle mind was the devil's workshop."

Hannah is still amazed that her father never became vindictive despite being sold and taken away from his family when he was only a boy. She says his strength endures in his children.

But while Hurdle always taught his children to never feel resentment toward others, particularly Whites, the family has dealt with its share of racial problems.

Shortly after spending months in Korea, Chester was traveling from Texas to California with his wife and children when the young family stopped for breakfast at a Texas restaurant in 1951. Chester, who was wearing his military uniform, was lead to the back of the restaurant where the manager expected the family to eat on a meat block.

"I said, 'I don't eat on a meat block. I thank you very much, but we will eat some other place.'" he recalls. "I bought bologna, milk, cheese and crackers, and we found a shady tree. That hurt, but I knew all White people were not like that."

LIVING LEGACIES

Timothy Hurdle lives in a second-floor walkup in San Francisco with his wife, Louise, 88. He bears a striking resemblance to his father, who is pictured in a black-and-white photograph in the couple's parlor. After serving in World War II, Timothy moved to California. He married Louise and the couple still lives in the apartment they purchased in 1952.

Elderly now and slightly stooped, Timothy walks with crutches as he slowly makes it down the stairs of their home. He drives himself and his wife to church every Sunday in their silver 1985 Chrysler New Yorker, maneuvering the steep hills and sharp curves that mark the streets of San Francisco. On this particular Sunday, with a visitor in tow, Timothy doesn't want to miss the fundraising luncheon at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. He has attended the church for more than four decades and still sings in the choir.

"This is the problem we have on Sunday mornings," says Timothy as he finally makes it down the stairs. "We have a hard time getting anywhere."

He is only a few years younger than his own father was when Timothy was a young teenager helping around on the farm in Greenville, Texas. While old age has slowed him down, Timothy's memory of his father is strong and shaip.

"What I remember most about my father was that he was the boss," Timothy recalls as he drives through San Francisco. "He'd stand there and tell us which way to fall the tree. When the tree fell, he'd move over. My father never hurried, but he was never late - just efficient."

Hannah, who became a minister like her father, echoes her older brother's sentiments. "He was self-sufficient. He was never a sharecropper, and that streak carries on to this day," says Hannah. "We have always believed in self-sufficiency."

Andrew Hurdle's children were not rich, but they grew up to live comfortable lives as farmers and educators. The younger children also did well. Timothy Hurdle is a retired garment worker. Chester spent 22 years in the military; plus eight in the Air Force Reserves. Hannah has traveled throughout Africa to Ghana, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Ethiopia and Kenya; in the '70s she worked in Monrovia, Liberia, for the Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs and in the '80s was a missionary in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Hurdles say they are not looking for individual payments from their lawsuits, but want to elicit an apology from all of the corporations that profited from slavery. They want any financial restitution garnered from the lawsuits to be used to create a large fund that will assist children and poor African Americans.

"The three of us have enough to live off until we get to the grave," says Hannah. "We are not sitting waiting on a check in the mail. This is just affirming what our forbearers sacrificed. It's not a monetary thing, it's more about honor and recognition."

Tatsha Robertson is the New York bureau chief of the Boston Globe.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated May/Jun 2003
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