(leaves rustling) - [Narrator] In 1833, a poet named Thomas Mann wrote "Picture of a Factory Village."
By this point, the many abuses endured by the children and families living in these villages and working in these mills throughout the Blackstone valley had become all too familiar.
Leaving no stone unturned, he composed a scathing indictment of the horrid conditions and wealthy manufacturing culture he witnessed firsthand.
So for 97 pages, Thomas Mann did not hold back.
And he used quite a few words to describe it all.
- [Speaker] Disgusting, grim, horror, shriek, tombstone, plunder, sickly, devil, tumultuous, poison, vile, ghastly, prickling thorn, dirty as Diogenes, bladder, ugly, miser, naked, groats, wroth, furies, dismal, horrid, cursed, bloody, jack-ass, deviltry, wretch, baboon, gutter, whining, snake, murder, hell.
- [Narrator] And when it came to its closing, there was no mistaking his position.
- [Narrator] The memory of the founder of cotton factories should be held in contempt by the present generations, and execrated to the remotes ages of posterity.
- [Narrator] Of course we know who he was talking about.
By the end of his life, Samuel Slater had made millions from his new England based cotton mills.
Like the thousands of mill owners who attempted to emulate his success, he too would have sons that would carry on in the family business.
And over decades, their fortunes would multiply.
Many of the later mill owning generations would become absentee landlords who no longer lived among the workforces they employed.
So by June of 1871, when the time came to section off a portion of Smithfield and create a whole new town, one can imagine that the decision to name it Slater did not go over so well.
In fact, people disliked the name so much that it barely lasted two weeks.
That's because a resident named William Seagraves issued a warrant to rename the town as North Smithfield and the amendment was passed unanimously.
And the only reported reason was because people had an emotional attachment to the name Smithfield, and just couldn't let it go.
Right, well, go figure.
What we do know for sure is that by the time this second generation was in retirement, so much wealth had been accumulated that they needed to figure out what they were going to do with it all.
And the decisions made by the sons of John and Ruth Slater were no exception.
- John Slater, the brother of Sam Slater, he has a family and he has two sons that survived.
One is William Smith Slater from Slatersville, and the other one is John Fox Slater.
- [Narrator] While they may have been born in Slatersville, their greatest achievements were seen and remembered well outside of its borders.
- The Slater family in and of itself is a national and international story that ties us directly to the American south.
It ties us overseas back to England, to Australia.
We often focus on the industrial part of the story, but what's so transformative is really the way in which businesses being done.
- [Narrator] While both men were deeply conscious of their actions, their paths were very diverse.
One brother would a massive fortune of tens of millions of dollars and toward the end of his life embark on a philanthropic act so massive that the ripple effects of his actions are still honored today throughout the American south.
After becoming a widower in his thirties, the second would rise as one of Rhode Island's wealthiest businessmen.
In the last decade of his life, he would build a 27 room wedding present for his daughter, but later, he would distribute his wealth among his adult children, only for his decisions to lead to their family's loss of Slatersville.
(dramatic orchestral music) In 1856, an eight year old boy named William Bowen, affectionately known as Willie in the village of Slatersville, was sent to a boarding school.
Having lost his mother Harriet just one year earlier at the young age of 33, his father William Smith Slater brought the young boy to Amherst, Massachusetts to board with Reverend Charles Woodworth so that he may grow to be a scholar in the family.
However, late that fall, Willie took ill with Scarlet fever.
Reverend Woodworth wrote to inform Mr. Slater of Willie's sickness and to keep him abreast of his condition, which never improved.
In the days that followed, a Telegraph was sent to William Slater of Slatersville.
Your son died at Amherst December 4th.
Willie died on his ninth birthday.
- [Speaker] Slatersville, December 9th, 1856, Reverend C Woodworth.
My dear sir, the last solemn rights have been performed, and the remains of my precious boy deposited in the cold grave.
My mind naturally turns to you.
I am anxious to know of your welfare, and you are expecting to hear from me.
On my arrival at Wooster the day I left you, I found our Reverend Mr. Taylor in waiting for me and at Millville, our nearest east coast station, numerous of our friends.
Our Willie was widely known and beloved, and his death had awakened a deep and generous interest.
It was decided that the funeral must take place on Saturday.
Relatives and friends were notified, and at two o'clock, the house was filled.
Mr. Taylor delivered a tender and affecting discourse at four o'clock.
Nothing remained to me on this earth of my dear dear child, but the sacred memory of his gentle and lovely character.
I have no heart to write more, and I can only say to you, my dear sir, in conclusion that my feelings overflow in gratitude to you and Mrs. W for your devoted kindness in this sad event.
You will always be dear to me.
And I trust this I may be permitted in some measure to repay you.
That you will deserve your reward from a higher than earthly source, I doubt not.
Hoping and trusting that you and yours have escaped the fearful disease and are well.
I am with kindness regards to Mrs. W and your children.
Very faithfully and affectionately yours, Mr. William S. Slater.
- [Narrator] In the years that followed, William Smith Slater became one of Rhode Island's most successful businessmen.
As his four other children grew into adulthood, the aging millionaire had to determine what he would leave behind for each of them.
His oldest daughter, Harriet, married the Manhattan native George Watson Hall, only to die in childbirth at the age of 24.
And his daughter, Helen Morris, married Rufus Waterman Jr. who later served as the consult to Ireland under President Theodore Roosevelt.
This left his son, John Whipple, who we'll get back to later, and his daughter, Elizabeth.
(tense orchestral music) - The beating hot of this house clearly is its past.
No one really came into this house.
They only entered into the kitchen of this home.
They were never really allowed into the home.
And in fact, they would tell me stories.
I know for a fact that Nancy, she really liked me, or she loved me.
I would ask the question, well, let me ask you a question about the house itself.
Did you ever get beyond the kitchen?
And they would say, oh no, we would never allow to beyond the kitchen.
So all I could really respond and tell them is, well, I guess maybe you weren't loved as much as you thought.
When I came in, it was quite amazing.
(clock chimes) - My great grandmother, the woman this house was built for, was the granddaughter of John and Ruth Slater.
They had a son, William Smith Slater, and Elizabeth Ives Slater Reed, my great-grandmother was his daughter.
And it has continued to be owned by the oldest daughter in each generation since that time.
It went from Elizabeth Ives Slater to her oldest daughter, Helen Slater Reed, to her only daughter, Anne Crawford Allen, to her only daughter, me, Anne Dietrich Holst.
- And what a lot of people don't realize is that the original deed is written to Elizabeth Ives Slater.
Her husband's name does not even appear on the deed.
- William Smith Slater was an excellent businessman, and he did not have a very high opinion of his son-in-law to be.
So he purchased the land from Alfred Jr. who had been given it by his father, and he gave it to his daughter and built her this house so that when her husband Alfred failed in business, she would have a roof over her head.
- Is this all still original?
- This is all still original.
- Wow.
- This is untouched.
- Untouched, oh my goodness.
- This is the very first room you would've come into.
This is the reception room.
- So how many staff would they employ then?
Would it be servants?
Would it be a wage laborers?
I mean, what was the staffing?
- Yeah, it's a combination.
- For me, it was great to tour the house to see the infinite number of curiosities that they have in the museum.
And for me, it's such a cool piece of Rhode Island history that not that many people know about.
- Even today what I find is that when I get professional textile students in here, some of them with degrees from good colleges, when you talk about the Slaters, they really know very little of any of the history.
They only speak of possibly Samuel Slater, but there's so little known and I'm kind of shocked by that.
But then I think about my upbringing, and I realized that even what I learned was very little and we never visited the village as a child.
As this house was completed after five and a half years in 1877, the total bill was paid by William Smith Slater of $136,284.53.
- [Woman] Oh my goodness.
- And that was the total sum of the cost of the entire construction and the interior design.
27 rooms over 15,000 square feet as a summer home.
This was quite an amazing wedding present.
- This was the summer house for the family.
During the winter, they either lived in the farmhouse and back, or they lived in Providence where there were a number of family homes, including Charles Fields Street, 12th Benevolent Street, all on the east side.
- You have to also understand by 1872, this is a man of great wealth.
We're talking about a man that had some, what we've been told three and a half to $5 million in cash.
The first generation, literally at that time, he's looking for other opportunities in real estate, banking, a mover and a shaker.
This is a man who clearly is putting a tremendous amount of his time in his day into many, many projects.
- [Narrator] His home once stood across the street from Brown University.
They later demolished it to make space for the John Rockefeller Library.
But just down the street, he built the Providence Athenaeum, which is still there.
And then there was the Narragansett Hotel.
- The architect of the house was William R. Walker.
The thing that we think formed the tide between the selection of William Walker and William Smith Slater was the Narragansett Hotel in Providence.
The Narragansett Hotel was designed by General William R. Walker.
William Smith Slater was on the board of that hotel.
At the time that it was built, it was considered to be the third finest hotel in the United States.
- And believe it or not, every artisan in this house played a role in the hotel.
As an example.
This is Charles Dowler's work.
- [Woman] Oh my goodness.
- So most of the finished wood work that you see in furniture in the Narragansett Hotel was all Charles Dowler.
- Oh, wow.
- This is all McPherson of Boston All this beautiful fresco.
Even the architect, William Walker.
So he tied his work even with the hotel into his home right here.
- So I look around the room and I see obviously that it's been kept very well, but I look at the state of the curtains, and then I look up here.
I mean, what's the plan?
Is there a plan for restoration?
- That happens to be a former leak in the roof that came down the side of the house.
Again, as you're seeing, this whole first floor has never been touched.
It's a very expensive undertaking.
And that's some of our problems today, getting funding to keep a home like this.
- [Woman] Do you know what the oldest book is in the house?
- Well, I can say that as far as a Bible, I believe it's the 1500s oldest Bible.
- Probably, yeah.
- 1500s first edition.
- My mother traced our lineage back to the Knight's Templar.
- [Woman] Oh wow.
- Through the Dutch, the Van Brauns.
- So here's where we really make the change.
Anne's mother kind of broke that social mold of remaining in the city home.
Following in the footsteps of the expected young lady, comes out here, gets involved in firefighting.
Anne's mother is the first female fire chief in the world.
(upbeat orchestral music) - [Speaker] To protect her own thousand acres state at Cedar Hill, Rhode Island, Ms. Nancy Allen in 1931, at her own expense, got herself a fire truck.
The next thing she knew of fire had started on a neighbors estate and she put it out.
Well, that seemed to make her the fire chief and her truck the first unit in Cedar Hills Fire Department.
- So my mother had her own interesting life.
She grew up on the east side of Providence and she developed quite an interest in firefighting.
When she was old enough, she was put in charge of supervising what was going on on this property during the winter because this was a summer house.
And rather than her brothers having the responsibility of keeping the furnace going so that the house didn't freeze up, it developed on her.
And she also realized that there was very little fire protection in this area.
So she actually had a fire truck built on a 1928 Dodge Grand chassis.
When she formed her fire department, of course, it was tremendous controversy about a woman, and then when she became the Southern Rhode Island forest fire warden, there was even more controversy because what did she know about fighting fires?
- [Speaker] At her home nearby, Ms. Allen is also on call throughout the entire season of fire hazard, to lead the way even to neighboring towns and villages if reinforcements are needed.
- [Narrator] While William Smith Slater was having this house built, his brother was secretly working on plans of his own, about 40 miles west.
In 1882, a Connecticut mill owner established a fund that would forever change the world.
While his actions are still honored throughout the country, to this day, most of the residents of Slatersville, the village from which he came, have never heard of him.
- When I was in graduate school, I was doing an internship at Slater Mill Historic Site.
While I was there, I was also taking classes and working with scholarship at Brown.
One of whom is a leading scholar at W.E.B.
Du Bois.
So I'm looking at Du Bois' documents, and I'm working at Slater Mill, and I start seeing names in common coming up in both of these places.
And I became very intrigued with what it was that actually assisted Du Bois, who is the grandfather of the civil rights movement, is one of the founders of the NAACP.
And this name Slater kept popping up.
And I'm thinking this can't be a Rhode islands Slater.
This can't be Pawtucket.
John Fox Slater went into business and did exceptionally well.
By the time he was quite a young man, even by 20, he had done brilliantly and he came from Slatersville.
(cheerful music) - [Narrator] This was the home of John and Ruth Slater.
And it is believed that this empty closet once served as their birthing room.
And if that's true, then it's likely that most of their 11 children were born in this space.
The sixth of which was John Fox Slater in 1815.
And he is the only one who is not buried in Slatersville.
- John Fox slate and William got along.
But for some reason, John Fox went to Connecticut.
(tense orchestral music)% - [Man] John Fox Slater died early Wednesday morning, the 7th of May last at his home in Norwich, Connecticut at the age of 69.
He had suffered severely from chronic complaints for several months, and his death was not a surprise to his family or intimate friends.
- The Slaters I think had a real idea of how a business should be organized, how a business should be run, how a business should be administered.
And it didn't take all that much to upset them.
- [Narrator] Nor did it take long for them to try to prevent the spread of illness.
- [Barbara] Here it is.
This is, I've not seen anything like this.
John Slater.
Yep, yep.
- [Man] Yeah, John Slater Sr. - In 1832 in June.
As the cholera is raging to an alarming extent in a neighboring state Canada and perhaps may visit our lands, I recommend to your serious attention that a preventative in some measure to have each and every seller now owned by me at Jewett City thoroughly clean from all decayed vegetable and other substances as are prejudicial to the health of the inhabitants and all other filth around each dwelling house carefully.
We also see that each tenement is thoroughly white washed, windows clean and kept clean and have everything done to examine each tenement immediately.
Respectfully, John Slater, June 27th, 1832.
The whole letter is just about cholera, the whole thing.
And I've never seen anything quite like this.
- [Narrator] In 1832, after too many quarrels with irresponsible managers who had to be fired, John Fox Slater was sent from Slatersville by his father to supervise one of the family owned mills at a very young age.
- The Slaters like to keep control within the family.
Samuel Slater, for example, would place his sons in all these different factories as superintendents.
With Jewett City, it seems as though John Slater has much more involvement than does even Samuel here.
Samuel, I think is a consultant, and they work together really well.
But all I can think of is the old adage of Ben Franklin, to hire a workman is to leave your purse open.
I mean, that's why John Slater was left at Slatersville.
John Fox Slater at 17, I mean, gee, that's old, I guess, for Slater.
- John Fox Slater managed the Slater interests in Connecticut.
The Ponemah Mill at Taftville, which still exists today.
The Jewett City mill part of which is now the Jewett City flea market.
And the Hopeville Mill, which unfortunately is underwater, as that area was taken for a state park.
(birds chirping) - [Narrator] Of the six children John Fox Slater had with his wife Mariana Hubbard, only two lived into adulthood, and only one survived them.
William Albert Slater was born on Christmas day in 1857.
During the 40 odd years that my father leased, owned, and operated the Jewett City Mill, it was always his good fortune to have the goodwill of his employees.
He always studied their welfare, and by doing so, retained them usually long in his employee.
Eight of them acted as the bearers at his funeral.
And I am sure all felt they had lost a friend, as well as an employer.
- He really needed much more than Griswold was willing to supply.
That his idea of a community was different from what was already established.
And you can almost see it in his rules and regulations.
- [Speaker] General regulations to be observed by persons employed in or connected with the manufacturing establishments of John Fox Slater.
- There's a whole list, and that was different, I think, than the surrounding community.
It was much more regimented.
- [Speaker] The overseers of the several departments are to be punctually in their rooms at the starting of the mills and not to be absent during working hours without leave of the superintendent, except in extreme cases or when mill duty renders it positively necessary.
- Slatersville was started from whole cloth.
Jewett City was already a community when the mill was acquired by S and J Slater.
In fact, they had to parcel out their workers into homes that were already existent in the community.
It took them a while to even build company houses in Jewett City.
And so it was an established community, and that caused problems.
Unlike Slatersville, which they could literally do as they wish.
- [Speaker] Tenants are required to become responsible for all damages done to tenements through their instrumentality or neglect, and to occupy them no longer than while in the said Slaters employed.
- In Jewett City when John Fox Slater and the Slaters wanted to set up a Sunday school, local ministers protested.
- [Speaker] It is the wish of the said Slater that all persons pay a proper regard to the observance of the Sabbath and attend public worship.
Also that parents and heads of families send their children to the Sabbath schools and weekday school, so far as is consistent.
- And also, John Fox Slater moved to Norwich.
He did not live in the community where he made his money.
I always associate him much more with Norwich than I do with the community of Jewett City.
I mean, if you look at it, what did he give Jewett City?
He gave Jewett City a library.
What did he give Norwich?
Backas Hospital, Norwich Free Academy, Park Street Congregational Church.
And that's not where he made his money.
His money came from Jewett City.
- [Speaker] These regulations are considered a part of the contract with persons entering into the employee of John Fox Slater.
- [Narrator] To best understand how John Fox Slater accumulated his fortune, one has to look at the economic system of the mid 19th century, in which he was allowed to thrive.
And how this self-proclaimed abolitionist depended on the existence of slavery.
- We have this concept in popular history, and I learned it as I was growing up that you have this dichotomy, the benevolent north, the Union, who was opposed to slavery, and the evil south, who promoted slavery and fought for slavery when it's not that cut and dry.
The wealth of the north was very much tied up in the institution of slavery.
Not to mention that there was slavery here, right?
- Cotton was a lifeblood, not just of the south, it was the lifeblood of the north.
- The north and the south economically don't exist without each other.
And the Slaters represent that story so brilliantly.
- [Narrator] Example, it was back in Slatersville, Rhode Island that in 1843, a second stone mill was built by William Smith Slater, a mill that was not nearly as well constructed as the village's iconic bell tower building.
For it was quickly erected for the sole purpose of producing one very profitable product.
- At that point, they were making something called shoddy.
When we talk of shoddy workmanship.
(soft music) That material was made here and sent to the south for cloth to make clothes for slaves.
- Negro cloth was manufactured and sold to be used in the south for clothing for the slaves.
Unfortunately, a lot of Southern slave owners did not wanna spend a great deal of money on the support of their slaves, so they wanted a very inexpensive material.
- It was kinda rough and hard, and it left for those people who endured slavery and survived, it left a lasting impression that they had been controlled and marked for having to wear this kind of cloth.
And it became a lucrative lucrative market because it enabled mill owners in Rhode Island and other places in the north to have a virtual monopoly in terms of production.
- [Woman] One of the mills in Slatersville was listed identifying it in the back of one of the photographs I have as the Negro Mill where the Negro cloth was manufactured.
- I think in Rhode Island, a lot of this history is cut out.
- Rhode Islanders really don't wanna talk about not just the Slaters mills, but 79% of the mills in Rhode Island dealt in negro cloth.
And I think that's also one of the real problems with trying to whitewash history, trying to tell great white men history, this top down history that has dominated the historiography for decades.
And thinking about the composition of the workforce in the mills here, right?
They're mainly predominantly white, but why and how is that?
Were blacks excluded from that?
- I think a lot of this gets erased and people in this state just kind of think, oh, Rhode island's part of the north, we are the good guys in this time period.
And that's kind of the end of the story.
And then it jumps to like the Gilded Age and Rhode Islanders imagine our history was just these giant Newport mansions.
- So you had a 500 acre farm.
You had 500 slaves to tend the farm, plus whatever else you had.
If you have 500 slaves, you imagine that there was a lot of money tied up in those plantations, a lot of money.
Because the business wasn't throwing off a lot of cash, they had to finance somehow the ownership of the slaves.
Wall Street was the go-to place then as it is today.
But Wall Street had a huge investment.
The collateral of which where the slaves.
- So you can put this all together and understand just how interconnected the system is because these Northern mills are buying up cotton picked and processed buying slave people, making it into cheap cloth, and then selling it back to those same plantations to clothe the enslaved people on those plantations.
So this is a very closely interconnected economy that can't really be divided.
- [Narrator] Although John Fox Slater was a known abolitionist, not all of his family members were on the same page.
On top of that, we have a great repetition of names within the family, which can easily confuse everyone.
So allow me to carefully explain who's who.
John Fox Slater was the son of John Slater who ran Slatersville.
John Slater was of course the brother of Samuel Slater, who also had a son named John Slater the second, who would've been John Fox's cousin.
And it was this cousin who was not on the same page.
- John Slater the second, the son of Samuel Slater, became a prominent pro-slavery or anti abolitionist advocate.
In 1835, These mill owners tried to pass a resolution to actually censor and shut down abolitionist presses and publications within the state.
- Wealthier men are putting the breaks on it.
They don't wanna discuss this because abolitionism would be really bad for their personal wealth.
It would be bad, they think, for the Northeastern economy.
- [Narrator] Back in Connecticut, John Fox Slater moved to Norwich, 15 miles from his Jewett City Mill.
And this was his home built by William Walker and sons in 1843.
Which eventually became the Elks Lodge.
In later years, it was an Asian restaurant and a karaoke company and a dinner theater.
And now it's on the verge of being turned into a boutique hotel.
But John Fox Slater lived here as he continued to build his fortune.
Then over two decades after his arrival in Norwich, he was approached with the idea for a new project.
- The community of Norwich knew that they faced basically a crisis of education, particularly older students were not being educated.
So in 1854, John Putnam Gulliver, a minister in Norwich has a grand idea to establish an academy, an endowed academy, for all students in Norwich.
And he goes to wealthy people to propose this idea.
And it was Russell Hubbard, a very, very wealthy publisher, and Russell Hubbard thought it was a fabulous idea.
Seizes it and goes immediately to John Fox Slater, who is his brother-in-law.
And because they are well acquainted, John Fox Slater gave early and gave generously.
And these men would contribute to a fund to establish the Norwich Free Academy.
- [Narrator] Which was open to students, both male and female, rich and poor, black and white.
And of course, it was free.
- [Vivian] Tuition free and definitely free of government interference.
So it would always be an endowed, an independent institution, which it still is today.
- John Fox Slater was very much involved in the Civil War, and he received a government contract for making the cloth for Union uniforms.
I think all these mills had made so much money in the Civil War.
They had been blooming.
And don't forget, John Fox Slater was the good friend of the governor of Connecticut who probably was letting out some of these contracts.
He was a Republican, and he was involved with the abolitionist movement.
He did interact with black people from Jail Hill.
It was called Jail Hill was the black portion of Norwich, and they would come down and go to the second congregational church.
And so I think it was part and parcel of who he was.
My concern has always been, why didn't he treat his workers better?
When they went to the library, they had to pay for its use.
It wasn't free.
- So midway through the Civil War with the Emancipation Proclamation, right?
This comes out of 4 million enslaved people in the United States claiming their own freedom, right?
People are getting up, they're stopping working, they're running away from the plantations.
Over 200,000 African Americans join the Union army.
- A lot of racial antagonism in the Northeast followed that emancipation.
It's one thing to pay an African American skilled laborer when that money is going into the pocket of his owner.
It's a completely different thing when he's a freed man and you're paying him instead of another white man.
- And so here is this other piece, this piece that isn't about economic growth.
Instead, it's about mill owners and textile mill owners saying what is our responsibility to these newly freed people?
And that's when he starts toying with the creation of what we now know as the Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen.
- [Speaker] Gentlemen, whereas it has pleased God to grant me prosperity in my business and to put it into my power to apply to charitable uses a sum of money so considerable as to require the council of wise men for the administration of it, it is my desire at this time to appropriate to such uses the sum of $1 million.
- By putting a million dollars aside to be used for the education of the newly emancipated slaves of the south.
- And that was a good sizeable portion of his fortune.
- A million dollar gift in the 1880s.
This is a lot of money.
(cash register chimes) - [Speaker] The general object, which I desire to have exclusively pursued is the uplifting of the lately emancipated populations of the Southern states, and their posterity by conferring on them the blessings of Christian education.
I have never traveled to any extent in that section of the country, but my information on the subject is due in great measure to books on the subject and with those who have been there and seen the needs of these people.
- This is a man that's looking at history from another whole perspective.
He's looking at the greater good.
He's looking up of uplifting an entire group of people, not just one.
And using his money, and in his letter, he says so, for the greater good.
- [Speaker] There are large sections in the south where there is no sort of education.
I cannot but feel the compassion that is due in view of their prevailing ignorance, which exists by no fault of their own.
But it is not only for their own sake, but for the safety of our common country.
The money shall not in any possible way be devoted to any other object than the education of the negro.
- It's still not as much money as some of these mega funds that are being developed, but it's significant and it's very meaningful and it's targeted.
- Only about 10% were literate.
So 90% were not.
And as a result of that, you needed a pool of educators and a pool of teachers.
- He is also entrusting his fund to a board of trustees who are making decisions and determinations.
The chairman of that board is President Rutherford B. Hayes.
- Rutherford B. Hayes made a deal with the devil in order to be elected.
He was the one who basically dismantled reconstruction.
(loud bangs) - [Narrator] The Reconstruction Act of 1867 outlined the terms for readmission to representation of the rebel states.
Each state was required to rewrite their constitution to protect the rights of African Americans.
- And he's on the Slater board.
- So at first, some of these Northern elites are supporting pieces of this project for full black citizenship.
- Maybe put him on because he wanted a president on the board, I don't know.
- Eventually by the late 1870s, a lot of this whole project by the Northern elite is sold out right in the kind of ally with Southern plantation owners, and reconstruction is largely squashed.
And the north allows these white supremacists Jim Crow governments to take over again, while the Ku Klux Klan to enact this reign of terror across the south that destroys a lot of reconstruction measures.
- [Woman] And yet he took this position to aid the recently emancipated people of the south.
- Why did he do it?
One can speculate.
Maybe like many new England manufacturers, he felt guilty.
His business rose with cotton, and cotton was worked by slaves.
And that's how he made his money.
- [Speaker] The John F. Slater fund of $1 million for the education of the colored people of the south seems to have excited wrath in the bosom of a molded Massachusetts editor who charges that Mr. Slater accumulated the money as proprietor of cotton factories in Connecticut and Massachusetts, which have been notorious for presenting some of the worst features of long hours, poor pay, and thieving truck stores.
The cotton operatives of Connecticut and Massachusetts have given $1 million to educate the negro, and Mr. Slater gets the credit of it.
It may barely be possible that this is conscience money that Mr. Slater has given.
If so, good enough.
(soft music) - And thinking about sort of the big names in African American sociological thought or science, the John Fox Slater fund, in large part, funded their education, funded their travel.
- [Speaker] Hartford, Connecticut, June 22nd, 1882.
Dear general, I was in Norwich a few days ago.
Mr. Pierce took me to see Mr. Slater who knew about our work at Tuskegee and was very much interested in it.
He kept me at his house about half an hour, explained all about his fund and showed me a few of the hundreds of letters he is receiving from all over the world.
He says that he thinks Tuskegee stands a fair chance for some of his fund, though none of it will be paid out for a year.
Everything is quite encouraging and we feel confident that all the money for the building is now sure, except a few hundred, which we will probably get soon.
Yours faithfully, Booker T. Washington.
- He takes this small school with wooden buildings and decides that he wants to build a school made out of brick buildings.
The only problem he didn't have bricks, and he didn't have a lot of money.
But what he did have were eager students who were willing to learn.
- This Slater fund begins funding Tuskegee in amounts like $800 a year, $1000 dollars a year.
And they began sending consistent amounts of money to help build this university and support Booker T. Washington's efforts.
And in fact, slate backs the building of the horticulture building, and they also hire as the head of that department, a young man named George Washington Carver.
- And then it'll mention GW Carver salary paid out of the Slater fund.
And all of a sudden the uses of peanuts come out and uses of the sweet potato come out.
And for the next 40 years, George Washington Carver is considered the greatest horticulturalist in the United States.
- [Narrator] Then in 1896 years after the death of John Fox Slater, another young man who had attended Harvard University learned of the Slater fund.
He wrote a letter to president Rutherford B. Hayes who was then in charge of the fund.
- [Speaker] Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 4th, 1890.
I am a negro, 23 years of age next February 23rd.
I have so far gained my education by teaching in the south, giving small lectures in the north, working in hotels, laundries, et cetera, and by various scholarships and the charity of friends.
I have no money or property myself, and I'm an orphan.
My particular field in political science is the history of African slavery from the economic and social standpoint.
I hereby respectfully apply to the board for a fellowship, which will enable me to study in Europe one or two years.
Respectfully yours, W.E.B.
Du Bois.
- However, we know that it was a struggle for Du Bois.
In fact, Rutherford B. Hayes dismissed it very curtly, and seemingly without consideration.
But he kept at it and he pushed and he pushed and wrote again and again.
- [Speaker] I think you owe an apology to the negro people.
We are ready to furnish competent men for every European scholarship furnished us off paper, but we can't educate ourselves on nothing.
That you have been looking for men to liberally educate in the past, maybe so, but it is certainly strange so few have heard of it.
- They give him money, 750 bucks to go to Germany.
Just get outta here, go.
- It's entirely possible that Hayes couldn't stomach an African American reaching that far, reaching for a PhD.
And so ultimately, very grudgingly and just sort of needed out very miserly every year, he was awarded funding by the John F. Slater fund and did complete his PhD.
- So that early work of Du Bois where he is really taking on the economic underpinnings of the system of slavery.
This is being, in many ways, underwritten by the Slater fund as well and endorsed by the Slater fund.
- The Slater fund will help Hampton, they helped Tuskegee, and they also helped places like Howard University.
And these institutions become key into educating the masses of black students.
- [Narrator] The John Fox Slater Fund led to the establishment of over 40 historically black institutes, colleges, and universities that have created educators who have transformed the lives of millions of African Americans for well over a century.
(soft music) - By 1884, when his father died, William wanted to make a significant Memorial to his father, and he chose to do it in the form of this magnificent building as a gift to his Alma mater.
The Slater Memorial was originally designed to serve as an Athenaeum.
Its purpose was to uplift mind, body, and spirit.
And the library was to uplift the mind, the auditorium to uplift the spirit, but the space that now is a museum was originally designed to uplift the body.
So it was intended to be a gymnasium.
(birds chirping) - [Speaker] It was with great confidence that we then expressed to him our conviction that his wise and generous gift for the education of the emancipated people of the south and their prosperity was that a time of his life when he might reasonably hope to observe during many years it's beneficent influence.
But in the Providence of God, it has been otherwise ordered.
- There have been some arguments, some propositions that would they have been able to do what they did without this fund?
I think a more interesting question is how many individuals like that missed out?
How many names don't we know because they didn't have that assistance?
- [Narrator] The tragic results of an incomplete reconstruction can still be seen today in the stark racial inequalities that remain throughout the United States.
At the same time, however, we can also see the legacy of the incredible advances won by freed people in education.
- An entire nation gets affected by John Fox Slater's donation.
And history is about the choices you make.
Rosa Parks made a choice.
She stood up.
Martin Luther King made a choice.
He was willing to die for his belief.
- [Mr. King] Free at last, free at last.
Thank God almighty, we are free at last.
- [Announcer] Historians will note this hour at the White House in a rose garden ceremony, a 58 year old great grandson of a slave is nominated by president Johnson to be a Supreme Court Justice.
He is Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall.
- I buried my mother and my aunt and her two sisters.
And the greatest gift for them was to see Barack Obama become president.
And when you see one of your own rise above and take a position in culture, in history, in society to make a difference, there's nothing greater than that.
There's nothing greater than making a difference.
- Good evening.
It is my honor to be here, to stand on the shoulders of those who came before to speak tonight as your Vice President.
(soft music) - [Narrator] That is the Connecticut side of our story, but the Rhode Island side, mainly that of Slatersville, was not so celebrated.
After the completion of his daughter Elizabeth's home back in Warwick, William Smith Slater would live for another five years, but it would be in 1882 that he would make his most critical decision to leave in the hands of his only living son, his entire estate and the future of Slatersville.
(orchestral music) (indistinct singing)