Transcript
Into America
Uncounted Millions: Let’s Get Free
Trymaine Lee: Now picture this. It’s the summer of 1864 and 1500 Black people from all around Washington, D.C. are gathered on the White House Lawn for a party. A Fourth of July strawberry festival to raise funds for the city’s Black religious schools.
There had never been an event like this where Black people, with the blessing of the president himself, stood on the grounds of the so-called People’s House. Not as servants or as builders, but as guests.
But on this day, led by a contingent of Black church and community leaders, Black Washington showed up and showed out, wearing their Sunday bests, accompanied by horses draped in ornately festooned saddles.
In the background of this strawberry festival, the Civil War was raging into its fourth bloody year. And yet, here this contingent of Black Washingtonians stood, in their resplendent Blackness, with their finery and fancy horses, with the sweetness of those strawberries on their lips and the sweetness of freedom in their souls.
Just two years earlier, in 1862, President Lincoln had signed a law freeing all enslaved people in the nation’s capital. The Emancipation Proclamation Act would come eight and a half months later in January 1863. But with the country still in the thick of war, freedom for Black men and women down South was more of a loosely penciled promise than a guarantee.
But in Washington, freedom was tangible. Black people owned businesses. They owned property and even hosted fancy fundraisers to help give their children the schooling they deserved.
But it wasn’t all Kumbaya. That strawberry festival was scandalous and sent shockwaves through the media, Washington’s elite political circles and their working class counterparts. News reports from the day described White Washingtonians as “much exercised.”
“The Albany Argus” newspaper decried that up until that day, no body of citizens had been allowed to assemble there for purposes of diversion not even White Sabbath school children. But it was an Ohio soldier writing home to his family who might’ve captured the sentiment of many White observers most plainly: “On the Fourth of July there was a nigger picnic on the White House grounds, while White soldiers stood guard around. Don’t that beat hell?”
As much as the event that day rankled the nerves of White folks, the day was a boon for the church’s Black organizers who raised a whopping $1,200. By our calculations, that might be as much as $130,000 today.
And who did Black Washington turn to help organize the event and to ply President Lincoln for his approval?None other than Gabriel Coakley.
John Flateau: He was considered a prominent Black leader in the community. And he actually was given a meeting with President Abraham Lincoln to get permission.
Adele Flateau: And we have that —
John Flateau: You have that information, right??
Adele Flateau: Oh yeah.
Lee: We met John, Adele and Richard Flateau last episode. They’re Coakley’s great-great-great-grandchildren.
Adele Flateau: He got verbal permission from Lincoln to have the Strawberry Festival, but when he went to the officials, they told him to go back and get a note signed from Abraham Lincoln. So, in fact, he did go back and got a note signed, which we found a copy of. Now mind you, this was in 1864, so the Civil War was still going on. So, that’s how that connection, you know, with the Coakleys and Lincoln was sort of super solidified.
Lee: By this time, Coakley was not only a church leader, he was one of the most prominent men in Washington’s Free Black Community. He owned a successful Oyster business and his wife Mary, whose freedom he purchased years earlier, was a seamstress for First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln.
The money raised at the Strawberry Festival would help build something of a Black Mecca in Washington. A school and chapel that would become St. Augustine. It’s still going strong more than a century and a half later. Still a haven for Black Catholics, the oldest Black Catholic Church in D.C.
Lee: Can you imagine that day, the Civil War is raging. There are all these Black folks on the White House lawn.
Adele Flateau: Crazy, I know.
Lee: Raising money while —
Adele Flateau: I remember getting pictures or old pictures from that time this was happening while the Civil War was still going on was like amazing.
Lee: In any other context, this unprecedented, little known event of Black folks on the White House lawn signed off by the President of the United States might’ve been the most remarkable thing to any man’s name. But for Gabriel Coakley, this is just a footnote.
Because years before, Coakley set out on a mission to take back everything owed to his people and build a legacy that would span generations.
Lena Edwards: I was born of parents who have had many opportunities that the average Black person had not had. My mother’s father was Gabriel Coakley.
Lee: I’m Trymaine Lee, and this is “Into America.”
On Part 2 of “Uncounted Millions” how Gabriel Coakley used the law designed for White men and a loophole in that law to make history and accomplish the extraordinary.
Act One, “The Loophole”
So where we’re at right now, this looks like this would have been 212 in the park, in the yard.
Max Jacobs: Yeah.
Lee: And I believe 2015 where the oyster business would have been, and later that house also would have been across the street because I see a 2013, a building that says 2013 right across the street.
Jacobs: Right. And that’s 2021 with a gap in between.
Lee: So perhaps, right.
I’m in D.C. with my producer Max Jacobs, on what today is the campus of George Washington University. But we’re trying to establish the precise spots for two adjacent properties that we found listed from 1860.
It is amazing to think about, like, right where we’re standing right now, likely would have been the home of Gabriel and Mary Coakley.
When we left off last episode, Gabriel Coakley, a free Black man, defied all the odds stacked against him. Navigating his own tenuous liberty while plotting and planning a way to free his family in the decade before emancipation became law.
The family owned a successful Oyster business, a vocation that would’ve situated the savvy Coakley with the kinds of coarse men who labored in oyster beds or on fishing boats where they dredged a meager living at the will of captains and supervisors.
But Coakley, he had his own and would use his business to build lives for his family that few Black folks back then could have ever imagined.
On the map, this would have been part of a residential community at some point.
Jacobs: Right, a Black community, too.
Lee: A Black community would have once housed newly emancipated people, free Black people.
In freedom, the family became beacons of the Black community, and parlayed their good standing into key positions at the heart of Black political and social life, namely, the church, which served as the nexus for both.
And by the time Abraham Lincoln signed an order freeing the district’s enslaved population in 1862, a whole year before the Emancipation Proclamation, the Coakleys stature continued to grow, but it would be underlined by a reminder that Black people were still thought of as property.
Chris Myers-Asch: Abraham Lincoln was not an abolitionist. He was anti slavery. But he — he favored what he called gradual emancipation. That if we’re going to end slavery and slave owners are going to lose their property, they should be compensated for it.
Lee: This is Professor Chris Myers-Asch again. His book “Chocolate City” touches on the D.C. Compensated Emancipation Act. The Act that gave freedom to D.C.’s enslaved and reparations to their enslavers. The payments would boost the wealth, power and influence of the Capital’s White ruling class and solidified a racial and economic hierarchy that would remain for generations.
People like George Washington Young, whose family was close friends with America’s first president, who gifted land to establish the nation’s capital. Young claimed compensation for 69 enslaved people.
Myers-Asch: He was the largest slave owner in the city, he’s able to come away with about $18,000 in compensation, which is about half a million dollars in today’s money. So, a nice tidy sum for him.
Lee: An advisor to Lincoln, Francis Preston Blair Sr., was paid about $525 for two people. William Thomas Carroll, the son of a wealthy Maryland family who worked as the clerk of the Supreme Court was paid over $1,000 for three people. And the founders of the historic Willard Hotel, across the street from the White House, received almost $2,500 for six enslaved people. That hotel would later provide the so-called “war room” for Trump’s allies who’d try and overturn the 2020 election.
Myers-Asch: One of the tragedies of that era is that at the same time that the Congress chooses not to compensate newly emancipated people, it basically chooses to — to re-empower the very people who created this problem in the first place, they continued to benefit from having enslaved these people for many years before, right? So the power that they gained from slavery even goes on, it projects forward into the future.
Lee: Rather than being held to account, the way southern slaveholders would eventually be in the wake of their defeat in the Civil War, with their entire economic system set to ruins, these D.C. slaveholders were being economically coddled, underwritten by the federal government, given a golden parachute into emancipation, this sweetheart deal was a slap in the face to those who’d been calling on some sort of reparations for the formerly enslaved, something to buoy them in this brave, new, free world.
But some read the letter of The Compensation Law and saw an opportunity.
In his research, Asch stumbled across a gem in a little known book by a volunteer archivist, the late Dorothy S. Provine, published in the 2000s.
Myers-Asch: She compiled a list of the people who were compensated for their property by this three man commission after the Emancipation Act.
Lee: On that long list of names of people petitioning for compensation of power brokers and politicians, Professor Asch came across something that even as a guy who studies this stuff all the time, twisted everything.
Myers-Asch: There is Gabriel Coakley, and he himself is African American, and he himself is on the list as a compensated slave-owner.
Lee: Gabriel Coakley, this man who mysteriously acquired his own freedom, who built up enough wealth to free his family, one by one, had made by stroke of genius or luck, the most clever move he could’ve made. It was either an oversight or a cunning legal play.
Myers-Asch: There were many African Americans in the pre-Civil War era who purchased family members. But of course, purchasing your family member from the owner is one thing. To then file the legal papers to have them established as officially free in the documents is another. That was an expensive and time consuming process.
And so many African Americans who had purchased family members out of slavery didn’t bother with the legal documentation, who cares? Their living is free, they’re living in our household, we’re a free family, we’re going to go on about our lives.
Lee: When Coakley purchased his people’s freedom, they were no longer in physical bondage, but in the eyes of the law with slavery still legal in the District, they were, on paper, still enslaved.
Myers-Asch: And so Gabriel Coakley is entitled as a “slave owner to compensation.”
Lee: Coakley was among a small handful of Black people to apply for compensation. But to be a thousand percent clear, these people were not Black slaveowners. They were men and women who took it upon themselves to try and exploit a loophole in the system. But this was a long shot, they still had to take their case before the commission and an entire system weighted against them.
We got our hands on Dorothy Provine’s book, the one that lists each of the petitions filed for compensation and it’s truly breathtaking.
On May 20, 1862, with petition number 332, Gabriel Coakley took his shot.
“Your Petitioner, Gabriel Coakley of Washington D.C. by this, his petition in writing, represents and states, that he is a person loyal to the United States, who, at the time of the passage of the said Act of Congress, held a claim to service or labor against the following named persons of African descent of the names of Anne M. Coakley, Mary Coakley, Mary Ann Coakley, Sophia Coakley, Veronica Coakley, Genevieve Coakley, Sarah Coakley, and Gertrude Coakley.”
To finally lay eyes on Coakley’s application and see the names of his loved ones listed like this, was both inspiring and surprisingly sad. He was taking the extraordinary step to try and seek redress in this novel way. But to do so meant to play the White supremacist’s dehumanizing legal game, listing the most important people in his life as if they were items you might pick up at a flea market.
Here’s more from his petition.
“Ann M. Coakley is of a brown complexion about five feet two inches high. Mary is a bright mulatto, about five feet four inches high. Mary Ann is of a yellow complexion, is eleven years old. Sophia is of a yellow complexion, is about nine and a half years old. Veronica is of a yellow complexion, is about seven years of age. Genevieve is of a yellow complexion is about five and a half years old. Sarah has also a yellow complexion, is about three years old. Gertrude has a yellow complexion, is about one & a half years old.”
The petition describes the everyday nicks, scrapes, and bruises on their skin.
“Mary Ann has a scar produced by a fall on her chin, also one on the right wrist produced by a cut with a knife. And there are notes on their temperament, fortitude and skills. Ann M. is an excellent nurse and chambermaid. She is a moral, and a well-behaved servant, stout and healthy. Mary does all my cooking, washing, and ironing together with all my house-work. Moral, industrious, and temperate. Mary Ann is a good child’s nurse.”
Coakley produced the receipts. The $350 dollars he paid for his wife Mary. And the $1 purchase of his sister Ann Mahala, that we found in the archives last week. This was a Hail Mary. A Black man, lawyered up, with fastidiously kept records, pulling up a chair to the White man’s table demanding a slice of the pie that was owed him.
And guess what? Coakley got paid.
So, in some kind of weird kind of twist, Gabriel Coakley is one of the first Black folks to get reparations for slavery.
Myers-Asch: In, in a weird twist, yes, because he figured out a way, kind of a kink in the system, he’s able to — to figure out how to make it work for him. And so in a way, he is one of the very, very few African Americans who gets reparation for slavery, but only because of a kink in the system.
Lee: A man who was born into a strict racial cast system who managed to climb his way out was able to bend the law to his advantage using the same mechanisms as the sons of elite families who controlled some of the highest gates of power in America. Yet, even in this moment of sheer triumph over the system, Coakley’s victory was undercut by racism.
Historians say the average petitioner received about $300 dollars per slave. But with 8 people on his petition, the commission paid Gabriel Coakley $1,489.20. An average of just $186 per person. Still, Coakley’s payout today would be valued at upwards of $170,000. And this would’ve been an extraordinary, life-changing amount of money for anyone back then, White or Black. For a day laborer in D.C., in 1860, the average pay was just 80 cents a day. And for a Black man in the United States, this amount would’ve earth-shaking.
In 1860, 90 percent of Black people were still enslaved and as such, had zero wealth to their names. So, $1,500, that really meant something.
Kellie Carter Jackson: Wow. That’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of money now.
Lee: Historian Kellie Carter Jackson.
Carter Jackson: This generational wealth that so many White Americans get to benefit from. Black Americans don’t have that in mass. Think about the compounding violent effects of slavery and segregation, think about there are so many missed opportunities that could have filled the cup a little bit more on Black people’s humanity and Black people’s debt that is owed to them.
So, a Black entrepreneur in the 1860s that had several thousand dollars, the sky’s the limit, like literally the sky’s the limit. You could build a home for yourself. You could have all of your children educated. You could have food. You could travel. You could purchase luxuries that most people could not dream of obtaining. You could be well dressed, you could secure your family for the next generation and so forth and so on.
Lee: What would it have meant to walk into freedom with $1,500 in their pocket?
That’s a lot of money today for folks, right? Imagine 1862. How would this benefit have helped this family?
Myers-Asch: So that’s a nest egg. Maybe you use that to start your own business. Maybe you use it to — to purchase the materials to build your own house or to buy some land. It opens up unlimited possibilities in some ways.
Lee: To put that number in even more context. As recently as 2021, the average wealth of a Black family in the United States was just $27,000, a sixth of the value of Coakley’s payout.
This compensation, these reparations would set the Coakley’s on a trajectory that would not only change their lives, but the lives of generations to come.
We will be right back.
Act Two, “Creating a Legacy.”
Merza Tate: November 13th, 1977. This recording is being made in the home of Dr. Lena F. Edwards in Lakewood, New Jersey, Here she resides in a cozy cottage in the midst of quiet and beautiful lake scenery.
Lee: In just a matter of decades, the family’s fortunes had shifted. From fighting to survive slavery, to thriving. Their names would be sung among the upper echelons of Black society, in D.C. and far beyond it. The seeds that Coakley had planted were bearing fruit.
Tate: Would you like to give the background of your family, beginning anywhere you wish, either with your grandparents or your parents? And explain what influence they may have had on your life.
Lena Edwards: I feel that I was rather fortunate in that I was born at the turn of the century, but of parents who had had many opportunities that the average Black person had not had.
Lee: This is from an amazing old interview from a Black woman’s oral history project at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute. It’s of Dr. Lena Edwards, who in her day was among the nation’s most renowned physicians, one of the first Black women in America to be board certified as an OB-GYN. Her father was a dentist and oral surgeon, and her grandfather —
Edwards: My mother’s father was Gabriel Coakley, who went to Mr. Lincoln after the Civil War and asked to have permission to have a lawn party to raise funds for a Catholic Church for the freedmen. We lived in Washington, D.C. with all the various casts of Black society that were there. And I grew up in what they called the elite.
Tate: What was that? You’re called the —
Edwards: Elite.
Tate: Elite.
Lena Edwards: We grew up in a very good family relationship. Our parents were strict, but lovable. I had a great regard for my mother because she had so much dignity.
Lee: Lena’s mother was Marie Coakley, daughter of Gabriel Coakley. Marie then married dentist Thomas Edwards, who later became a faculty member at Howard University.
Edwards: The reason I’m a doctor is because I told my dad I wanted to be a dentist like him, and he told me I was too restless. So I said, well, a doctor runs around a lot, so I’ll be a doctor then. And I was twelve years old.
Lee: In 1913, when Lena was 12, less than half of all Black children were enrolled in school at all. And college was rare for anyone, but, especially for Black people and women.
Edwards: And it was rather unusual for a woman, and for all Black women, to talk about being a doctor. And I think some people thought that I was kind of a fresh brat. And I was, because I’ve always been very determined. But I made up my mind I was going to be that, and that’s what I wanted to be.
Tate: And that’s what you have become, and a famous one, too.
Edwards: And that’s what I have become.
Lee: And it wasn’t just having access to education that was significant at the time, Lena was in an orbit of Black luminaries.
Edwards: The other thing I remember very well about high school was Carter Woodson. He was one of my teachers. And I grew very fond of him because he was so brilliant and yet so plain. He wasn’t sophisticated like some of the Ivy League graduates.
Lee: Carter G. Woodson, among other things, is foundational in the study of Black history and considered the father of Black History Month.
Lena would become Valedictorian at her high school, but snubbed the Ivy Leagues to go to Howard, opting to stay with her people. After undergrad, came med school, then residency, then for several years, her own private practice before being lured back to HU to teach at the medical school.
Her life was decorated with achievements and awards. This history project interview that we’ve been listening to is over 4 hours long and there’s a whole section devoted to her honors.
Tate: Dr. Edwards, looking at this side of the wall, I see so many plaques.
Lee: But for Lena Edwards, her life wasn’t just about the accolades. Her family instilled in her an unbreakable sense of service and duty. At 60 years old, she left her cushy job at Howard.
Edwards: I went to St. Joseph’s Mission in Herford, Texas to live in a migrant labor camp and give my money and my life to the poorest of the poor in this country, who are the ones that put the bread and the food on our table, and yet are treated worse than their cattle.
Lee: Dr. Edwards would go on to help found a clinic for migrants near the Texas border.
Edwards: And I was the only certified obstetrician gynecologist within 50 miles. And I got full courtesy privileges at that hospital. Me, deep in the heart of Texas, a Black woman doctor.
Lee: Her work would receive national recognition and gain the attention and esteem of presidents.
Edwards: I guess possibly the most outstanding award that I have received was the Freedom Award Medal of the United States. Nominated by President Kennedy. It was given to me in 1964 by President Johnson. It was a very memorable experience.
Tate: And you went to the White House to receive it?
Edwards: Yes, I received it with my family, and I was the only one there with family.
Lee: Dr. Edwards was doing all of this while raising six kids.
Edwards: That’s Marie, and she was born two months after I started my practice. Who is now — she was the first Black to be admitted to Cornell Medical School.
Lee: And they’d shine bright as well.
Edwards: Edward came along. He is now a pediatrician in Jersey City. Number three came along, Genevieve. Number four was Thomas, then the next was John, and he now is a aerospace engineer with NASA in Washington. And the last one was Paul.
Richard Flateau: This is direct descendant of Gabriel Coakley within two or three generations, he had Lena Edwards. That would be his what granddaughter?
John Flateau: Yeah.
Richard Flateau: Who became one of the first Black female physicians and delivered thousands of babies in Jersey City ended up getting the Presidential —
John Flateau: Including our three brothers and sisters.
Richard Flateau: Right.
Lee: This inheritance of excellence paid forward by Coakley’s determination and reparations was passed down the line well beyond Coakley’s kids and grandkids to the next generation of children, and their children’s children.
John Flateau: If you follow our family’s trajectory, our predecessors clearly appreciated that they were given a running start. They bought homes, they went to college. College wasn’t free. The first graduates of Lincoln University were relatives of ours who gave land and buildings to build the first HBCU in America.
Richard Flateau: Getting the funds from that commission, I’m sure had a huge impact in the ability of Coakley and his children and grandchildren to be able to go to school and to get decent jobs.
Lee: Do you consider the compensation he got through the Emancipation Compensation Act to be a form of reparations for what his family had been through?
John Flateau: Absolutely. Absolutely. Unequivocally.
Lee: That’s reparations?
John Flateau: Yes.
Adele Flateau: It’s not like we inherited some huge wealth, you know, but it just was enough to get us through having a good life, decent life, good education, and they’re benefiting from that now, you know, the younger generation.
Lee: We’ll meet that younger generation when we come back.
Act Three, “Back to the Future”
The $1500 from the Compensation Act that allowed Gabriel Coakley to pour into his family puts him into a small group of Black Americans to ever receive anything resembling reparations from the U.S. government. He was the first under the act. But there were five others.
Robert Gunnell, petition 442, claimed compensation for ten people and was paid $2,168.
Betsy Roberson, number 460, purchased her son, a little boy of about 10 for $150 in 1847. She then claimed compensation for him, as a grown man of 26. Her signature, a simple x, got her $613.
Jacob Ross, number 468 claimed compensation for his wife and daughter, but was only paid for his daughter. He was paid $438.
Mary Hasson, petition 545. Hasson had purchased her husband, Henry, for $600 and was given $525.
And James W. McDaniel, petition 834, had purchased his wife and daughter from a slave trader for $900, and was compensated just over $600.
For these men and women, this money would provide a cushion into an uncertain and often shaky era of freedom, perhaps, like Coakley, they were also running businesses or building institutions.
For Coakley, his sum of money enabled him to leave a mark not just on his family, but on the city itself. It was just 2 years after that payment that Coakley would host the Strawberry Festival on the White House lawn for what would become St. Augustine Church. And by the 1870s, he would serve as one of the first commanders of the Knights of St. Augustine, a military-inspired mutual aid group that would care for the poor, and represent the church at official events, dressed in military regalia.
Coakley was a leader and a man of influence. It seems likely that if you were Black in D.C. at this time, it’d be impossible to not at least know of him. Much of this history has been lost, but not if you know where to look.
Lee: I feel like a picture is emerging now.
Jacobs: Yeah.
Lee: Of this time in their lives, but also this time in D.C. And also how much has changed and how things continually evolve, right?
We’re back on the campus of George Washington University, on H Street Northwest, between 20th and 21st streets, using an old map and some info that we got from our friends down at the D.C. Office of Planning. On one side of the street is University Yard, essentially a tree-wrapped quad with benches and spots for students to chill out. The other side of the street has administrative buildings, but some look like converted residential houses, newer versions of the ones that would’ve stood here 150 years ago.
This spot would’ve been the home of Gabriel and Mary Coakley at the time they got compensated. And across the street would’ve been Coakley’s business.
Desmond and Antoine? I recognize you, I was like, is that the brother?
Some of Coakley’s younger descendants came out to join us.
Hey, peace, good brother, Trymaine.
Antoine Flateau: Pleasure, pleasure.
Lee: Antoine?
Antoine Flateau: Antoine.
Lee: Yeah, what’s up? How y’all feeling?
Desmond Flateau-Gooding: Good, good, good, man. Good to be with you guys today.
Lee: Desmond Flateau-Gooding is Adele’s son. Antoine Flateau is Richard’s.
So did y’all grow up together?
Anotine Flateau: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
Lee: And now y’all still, where do y’all live now?
Antoine Flateau: Baltimore.
Desmond Flateau-Gooding: Baltimore.
Lee: So how often do y’all see each other?
Desmond Flateau-Gooding: All the time. All the time.
Lee: The cousins are just a few years apart. Desmond is 39 and Antoine is 36. They each have their own families but they live close to one another in Baltimore, similar to how they grew up back in Brooklyn.
How would you describe growing up in that kind of family, Antoine?
Anotine Flateau: I think overwhelming at times, it was almost like an expectation, but not in a bad way. Like I felt like, all right, this is the norm. So this is what I have to do. Even though like growing up in Brooklyn in the nineties and that wasn’t a norm. You know, outside of my own household and my family, I couldn’t really explain certain things like who am I going to tell to in Bed-Stuy that my dad went to Harvard. You know, my aunt has a PhD in microbiology.
Desmond Flateau-Gooding: I feel like for me, it’s always kind of been like a compass, like an internal compass. Everybody in our family, I feel like has the mindset of just being a public servant.
Lee: Through their parents, they’re slowly discovering their family’s history. And they’re eager to walk in their ancestor’s footsteps to learn more.
This spot, like, right here would have been where Gabriel Coakley first owned his house. Gabriel and Mary Coakley.
Desmond Flateau-Gooding: Yes, sir.
Lee: I want y’all to take a look at this map right here. And you see here we are in University Yard, and you see that those kind of highlighted areas right there?
Desmond Flateau-Gooding: Yes.
Lee: that’s where we are right now and across the street was the oyster business. And here, I don’t know if y’all have seen this before, have y’all seen this before?
Desmond Flateau-Gooding: No.
Antoine Flateau: No. First time.
Lee: In our research, we found a newspaper ad from February 21, 1863, in “The Evening Star” advertising “Cherrystone Oysters” There are two drawings of oyster shells and at the bottom it says “G. Coakley’s. No.214 H. St.”
So it looked like it says cherry stone oysters just received full —
Desmond Flateau-Gooding: Supply of oysters
Lee: Supply of oyster, and that’s and that’s y’all people.
Desmond Flateau-Gooding: Yes, man. Just to know that This is somebody that really changed the course of our history.
Antoine Flateau: Right.
Desmond Flateau-Gooding: Everybody has their up days, their down days, their good and bad days. It’s hard for me to like, have almost a victim mentality when you know you come from somebody who just was able to do so much and accomplish so much in his time.
Lee: At the time of the Compensation Act in 1862, Gabriel Coakley would have been 35 or 36 years old, just about Antoine’s age, a few years younger than Desmond.
I want you to imagine for a second what it would have been like to be a young man like Gabriel Coakley with a young wife starting out free as a family for the first time in this neighborhood.
What could you imagine that must have been and felt like after you purchased your wife’s freedom and purchase your kid’s freedom.
Desmond Flateau-Gooding: I’m sure there was fear of the unknown, but then also excitement, being able to really fully take control of your own destiny and write your own story.
Antoine Flateau: I know I would’ve been angry a little bit. You know what I’m —
Lee: Had to do all this just for —
Antoine Flateau: Right, just for this, right? Like, why should life be this hard, right? You’re in the capital of the U.S., so, you’re seeing all these powerful things happen, that you can’t even fully participate in.
Lee: And well aware that, you know, our people, we have everything it takes.
Antoine Flateau: Right.
Lee: Well aware of the intelligence, well aware of it.
Antoine Flateau: Clearly.
Lee: But I wonder, as you consider this, was that a form of reparations or anything but? How do you consider that — that money that was paid to Gabriel Coakley for his family?
Antoine Flateau: I would be, I don’t know, it would be bad for me to say that’s not a form of reparations because people didn’t get anything right for but like, yeah he got compensated for purchasing them, but they themselves never got compensated for time lost, right? Like, that’s the one thing you can never get back. But the fact that he was able to do all this, that’s remarkable. He started his own business, own his own home, bought his family’s freedom. It’s like, man, I don’t know if I could mark off all those boxes in a lifetime, right?
Lee: But Antoine has checked off a lot of boxes, nonetheless. He works in finance now, and is working on getting an MBA. And harkening back to Coakley, who served in the Knights of St. Augustine, he’s followed his family’s tradition of service by way of the military.
He was in the Navy as a combat medic, then switched to the Army where he deployed to Afghanistan in 2019 earning a Bronze Star. He’s currently a Captain in the Army Reserves.
Both Desmond and Antoine are also homeowners, which is an achievement in and of itself, but certainly at their ages. By young adulthood, millennials are less likely to own homes than previous generations. But that number is significantly lower for Black millennials. And these guys aren’t just homeowners, they are also husbands and fathers to young daughters. Daughters they’re excited to one day share this family history with.
As we left the campus and former home of the Coakleys, I had a question.
Does it feel like some things are starting to make sense now? Like the more you discover about your family’s past, just the way you’ve been raised or moved or lived, does it make a little more sense now?
Desmond Flateau-Gooding: Absolutely. Absolutely, man. It’s almost scary in a way, you know, to know that like things from like 100, 200 years ago can have such a direct influence on, you know.
Antoine Flateau: And development personalities, outlooks, mindset, right?
Desmond Flateau-Gooding: Sometimes it almost felt like being part of like a secret club or like secret society in a way, you know, it’s like, we’ve been blessed to kind of have all of those different stars aligned. And, you know, it’s just —
Lee: It’s a bunch of luck that goes into this.
Desmond Flateau-Gooding: Yeah, it’s a lot of luck, man. It’s a lot of luck. It’s a lot of luck.
Lee: Before letting the guys go for the day, there was one last address we had to check out.
Jacobs: It’s 1606 Corker and Northwest.
Lee: So where we’re headed, would have been, at least that we can find the last place where Gabriel and Mary lived.
We pull up to the house or least what would have been the house.
So this stretch here, where we see this White row house with the blue door, likely would have been similar to these three right here.
Like much of the past, the exact spot has been paved over by history. It’s now a parking lot next to an apartment building. This neighborhood that once bubbled with Black success has now been thoroughly gentrified. Some of the only Black faces seen on the block that day were ours.
There are only a few of the original houses still standing, but if you look closely and imagine just hard enough, a picture begins to emerge.
Desmond Flateau-Gooding: Yes man, it’s just amazing, you know, what he was able to accomplish. And not just once, but just throughout the course of his life. You know?
Antoine Flateau: He could have took that and like went elsewhere, right? Walked away, but he decided to stay and help others.
Desmond Flateau-Gooding: Yes, I think it’s just the perseverance and the dedication to the greater good.
Lee: But that dedication and perseverance can only get you so far. This family, the Coakleys, have given us a look into what Black life in America could have been. But they’re the exception, not the rule.
Black history is littered with stories of people who worked hard, did everything right and still had everything stripped from them whether through sheer bad luck, circumstance or the millions of potholes designed by the system to break your bearings. Sometimes, things fall apart.
John Flateau: You can always screw things up. Some of us fall off the path.
Carter Jackson: There are snakes waiting for you to stumble, to fall, to make a bad investment. All of that wealth that you had could be gone in one fell swoop if you made a wrong decision or if someone had ill intent against you.
Desmond Flateau-Gooding: For him to have this amount of prominence and almost just disappear off the face of the earth.
Adele Flateau: This is what’s scary.
Lee: On the next episode of Uncounted Millions, we explore the other side.
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“Into America” is produced by Max Jacobs. Our associate producer is Janmaris Perez. Catherine Anderson and Bob Mallory are the sound engineers. Bryson Barnes is the head of audio production. Original music is by Hannis Brown. Aisha Turner is the Executive Producer of MSNBC Audio.
Thanks to the Schlesinger Library on “The History of Women in America” at Harvard University for use of “The Lena Edwards Interview.
Special thanks to Duke economics professor, Dr William Darity for his help calculating sums of money from the 1860s in today’s terms. On his recommendation, we used a compound interest rate of 3 percent which is still likely conservative, to calculate the $1500 that Gabriel Coakley received from the government. We’ll speak with Professor Darity later in this series specifically about what is owed to Black people today and how much that would cost.
Thanks also to Todd Jones at the D.C. Office of Planning for help finding the current locations for some of the Coakley properties.
And lastly, a special thanks to Dr. Kenneth J. Winkle at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Civil War Washington Project, which is where you can view the actual petitions from the D.C. Compensated Emancipation Act online.
And I’m Trymaine Lee. See you next Thursday for more of “Uncounted Millions.”