Pam Colby said she got goosebumps. Scattered across the New York cafe table where we sat were fragments from the life of her great-great-grandfather – a man she had never heard of. I had found many of the pieces during my research for a book about her ancestor's home, Greene County, Georgia. A newspaper article here, a congressional transcript there. And a pair of biographies that had long told the story of one of Georgia's first Black legislators. The first biography read: "ABRAM COLBY. [Colored member from Greene County.]"
Like the other Black representatives in the 1872 register, Abram Colby's redacted story floated among lengthy glowing accounts of his white legislative assembly peers. Colby's second biography, published in a county history book, described him as an ignorant drunk who insulted a lady and was thrown out of town, never to be seen again. These archival records are all that comprised the entire memory of Colby for generations, save for one other detail preserved by his congressional testimony: the Ku Klux Klan once beat him so severely that a doctor mistakenly declared him dead.
In the different fragments, however, someone else's outline came to the fore: a slave who inherited a plantation and had an audience with the president. A visionary who sought to lead an exodus of freedpeople out of the Deep South. An early Civil Rights leader who lived under the constant threat of white terrorism, yet remained faithful to his cause until his final breath.
Pam Colby, whose daughter is an actress, quoted the musical Hamilton as she looked over the uncovered documents: "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?"
In 1850, when John Colby passed away, the former New Englander had vast lands in Georgia and a mansion called "the Poplars" in his possession. As his white descendants prepared to inherit it all – as recalled in the memoir of his white granddaughter, Henrietta Sprague – they discovered a shocking wrinkle in his will. The Poplars and about 1,000 acres of surrounding land would be preserved for the use of Mary, an enslaved woman, and their children. Mary had given birth to several of John Colby's children, including Abram, when she was a teenager some 30 years prior. And so, while still enslaved, Abram Colby entered adulthood with de facto possession of a plantation in the Deep South.
When the Civil War ended, Colby prepared to extend to others the slice of freedom he had come to know. He saw education as key, though he was illiterate, Colby ensured that his son, William, learned to read and write. With support from Union soldiers, Colby and other freedmen opened the "First Colored School" with a Black Army cook serving as its first teacher.