shackled by his owner, Jesse Williams. When he was about 22 years old, George ran in the middle of the night. He said in later years that if he hadn’t been shackled, he may never have run because it was so dangerous, bounty hunters everywhere. He ran across the frozen Missouri River in January 1862, he and several other slaves. They were taken in by abolitionists, he got a job at the docks, and he started hearing about the formation of the First Kansas Colored. His motivation was not necessarily to fight for freedom, though it may have played a part, but to legitimize his freedom. He had no official papers, and there was the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it legal to bring back runaway slaves. So he volunteered. In the fort, there was relative safety, because the bounty hunters weren’t going to raid a fort. But there is a story about a slave owner who, under the pretense of wanting to check out the fort, got to tour the fort. One of the soldiers recognized him as his former master, and told his lieutenant that he probably was looking for him. They confronted him, and the guy admitted that he was the soldier’s master, so the lieutenant had the soldier, to prove who was boss now, march him around for a couple of hours. Then told him to never come back. Those are the kinds of stories I want to weave into a feature version of the film.
NM: So how did George’s story get told?
BH: He told it to his daughter, Mary. Mary was Jimmy Johnson’s grandma. George died in 1931. Jimmy dedicated his life to researching his great grandfather George and the First Kansas Colored. He was one of 5 or 6 people whose contact info was given to me through the State. Incidentally, the great-great-grandson of Lieutenant Gardener, who was the commander of George’s company, actually plays Lieutenant Gardener in the film. Lieutenant Gardener gave the command to form ranks, turn around when they were being chased by 120 Bushwhackers on horseback, a truly pivotal moment in history. The Union found that Black soldiers were able to take commands and fight bravely. Previously, that had been only a theoretical and laughed-at notion. Prejudice was almost as rampant in the North as the South, with subtle differences. One of the officers, Captain Ethan Earle, in his memoir, told of a meeting with another officer, who almost threw him out of his office when he told him he was putting this company together. He was told, if the war is going so badly that you’re putting uniforms on Black people, then it isn’t worth fighting for. After the war, that same officer, who had now fought alongside Black soldiers, told Captain Earle that indeed, he was right. That’s pretty powerful.
NM: It’s amazing that it took until half way through the Second World War to reintegrate the Army.
BH: We’re still trying to integrate. We are where we are because of history. I realized through my research that you can’t look at any race issues that we have today in isolation. We are here because of what happened then. We are not separated from it.
NM: The unrest in Ferguson is a good example of that.