Tunis Campbell was in charge of giving out the 40 acres and a mule to freedmen but he did things his own way. Michael Harriot explains the tactics Campbell used to ensure his people would still have a chance to prosper when wypipo did what they always do. Tunis Campbell kicks off the “Real Gangstas of Black History,” series as theGrio Daily celebrates Black History Month.
“Tunis heard a calling from God to eliminate one of the biggest evils on the planet.”
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It’s Black History Month. So, I’m sure you’re going to hear a lot about some of the heroes in Black history. The people who are revered and loved for their contribution to America and to Black society in general. And that’s why I want to welcome you to theGrio Daily, the only podcast that’ll tell you about the Real Gangstas of Black history.
I’m world famous wypipologist Michael Harriet, and this is theGrio Daily.
If you listen to this podcast regularly, you know, we talk about Black history all the time. So, you know, Black History Month is nothing new here. We talk about how history affects the present. We talk about how history informs us, how the past informs us all of the time. So instead of talking about some of those heroic individuals that you’ll usually hear during this month, we wondered how could we do something different?
And that’s where we came up with the idea to talk about the little known people in Black history who are often forgotten, whether it’s because their legacy was whitewashed and erased. Or whether in our case, it was because, you know, wypipo turned against them and branded them as outlaws, undesirables, deplorables, you know, the guys who history erases because wypipo didn’t agree with them in real time.
And we’re going to talk about some of these little-known outlaws. And the first one is one of my favorites. It’s a man named Tunis Campbell. Now, if you don’t know who Tunis Campbell is. We’ve talked about the group of people who he belonged to that made their biggest mark on Black history. The Original 33, a group of Black elected senators and state representatives in Georgia who were ousted from the state legislature after the Civil War, because of racism, quite frankly. But Tunis Campbell, he’s much bigger than that. Like he was a real G. I mean, and when I say ‘gangsta,’ I’m not talking about it in the, you know, the ephemeral sense. I’m not using the new definition of gangsta.
I’m talking about like, like he had a real gang, a 400-person, gang that really went up against the Ku Klux Klan to protect his turf. Like Tunis Campbell did it, bruh. And he was born in April 1812 and joined the African Methodist Church. He was called the oldest and best-known clergyman in the African Methodist Church.
That’s because Tunis heard a calling from God to eliminate one of the biggest evils on the planet. Tunis was an abolitionist, an anti-slavery activist, and he was really down for the cause too. He was born in New Jersey, one of 10 siblings, and his dad was a blacksmith. And back then blacksmithing was an African art that was brought to America by enslaved Africans.
Like there wasn’t a European form of blacksmithing. until Africans brought it to America. And so he knew how to make money. So his family sent him to this Episcopal boarding school in Babylon, Long Island, New York. He was the only Black student there. And that’s when he dedicated his life to the gospel, but Tunis’s gospel was a little bit different, right?
He began setting up abolitionist groups and began preaching about the evils of colonialism, and even though he was doing it in the North. It really made wypipo mad. He was mobbed several times by just angry groups of wypipo and nearly killed. And during this time as a preacher, right, he was a waiter in this fancy New York hotel.
So he wrote this guide to hospitality in hotels, right? And it’s literally. All the stuff that you think of as, you know, fancy hotel hospitality. Well, that came from this huge, extensive guide, written by Tunis Campbell called the “Hotel Keepers, Head Waiters and Housekeepers Guide.” Now all of the time he was doing this right and selling this guide, he used the proceeds from consulting with hotels, and selling his guide, to establish colored schools. Now, most of these schools were in Brooklyn, especially in Williamsburg, but those schools weren’t really populated by like Brooklynites, Brooklyn residents. They didn’t, you know, it wasn’t a bunch of Black kids in Timberland’s back then, because Tunis, what he was doing was he was secretly funding the Underground Railroad and assisting fugitive slaves to come to New York and get jobs. He had like a whole army of educated Black people that was changing the demographics of Brooklyn. Now, you got to remember what Tunis was doing was illegal, right? There was this thing called the Fugitive Slave Law and so if you hid or gave aid to fugitive slaves, you were breaking the law.
But again, Tunis was a G. He had a whole network, so he wasn’t even worried about it. Well, when the Civil War broke out, the United States government came to him and said, ‘Hey Tunis, you know, we know you got this whole gang of Black people, so we’re going to give you this contract.’ And they gave him a contract to raise 4, 000 United States colored troops from his gang of Black revolutionaries.
And then in March 1865, he was selected to serve as the military governor to the sea islands of Georgia. Well, why is this important? Well, on January 12th of that year, a couple months earlier, General Sherman signed Sherman’s special field order number 15. You probably know it as ’40 acres and a mule.’ And what they did is they confiscated the land owned by slave owners and split it up into 40-acre plots and gave it to the formerly enslaved freedmen. They knew that Tunis had experience in dealing with ex-enslaved people. So they put him in charge of this new program. He established schools. He taught farming. And when the ex-slaves asked Tunis what they should do, you know, to raise some money and to build a better life, Tunis told them, ‘Hey, let me tell you what you need to do. You need to cut down all the trees.’ And it was like, what? It’s like, ‘nah, don’t worry about that farming stuff. Cut down all the trees. I know wypipo. What you want to do is cut down all the trees.’ And they did it. And that’s because Tunis knew they were going to give that land back to the wypipo eventually.
He knew wypipo, but When they gave that land back to all of the former slave owners, the Black ex-slaves had cut down trees, sold the timber, and because the wypipo didn’t have anyone to till the land, the Black people were able to buy that land with the money they had made selling timber from those ex-slave owners, and have their own property to receive and took his own money and bought 1250 acres in McIntosh County, Georgia on one of those islands. And he established his own town. They had their own law enforcement agency. They had their own schools. Courthouses, judges, and they also raised a 300-man militia that guarded them from this new violent terrorist group called the Ku Klux Klan.
And so even though they burned one of his homes, the Klan was basically scared to go into McIntosh County, Georgia. Man, the Klan was so mad, they started killing all of the Black people who were involved with voting in that part of Georgia, especially on the sea islands. They even poisoned one Black registrar.
So Tunis Campbell say, ‘Oh, yo, I’ll do it. Like they ain’t gonna bother me,’ because everywhere Tunis went, he had armed guards from his militia. So, so they knew nobody wasn’t gonna bother Tunis. And in 1868, when the 14th amendment was passed, Tunis and his son were both elected to the Georgia legislature.
Tunis was a state senator. His son was a state representative. But during that time, Tunis helped write Georgia’s new constitution and the wypipo were so mad that they just started committing what they called back then outrageous against Black people, which made Georgia the first state to be kicked out of the union two times for being too racist and they elected all of the Black men who are elected alongside Tunis, all 33, they were known as the Original 33, the first 33 members to serve, Black members, to serve in the Georgia legislature. Now the white legislators originally decided that. Even though, you know, because Tunis had helped write that New Georgia constitution that included the right to vote, the white legislators found a loophole and said, well, just because they have the right to vote, that don’t mean they had the right to hold office.
And they expelled the Original 33. But Tunis didn’t take it laying down. He got all of those Black legislators reinstated. Then Tunis went to Washington, right? And he talked to Senator Charles Sumner and told Charles Sumner, ‘Hey, the only way we’re going to stop this is by changing the constitution.’ And most historians believe that the exact wording of the 15th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, which gave African Americans the right to vote were the words of Tunis Campbell. Now, of course, this made the white folks even matter, especially when he used that constitutional amendment and this other law that he pushed for called the Civil Rights Act of 1870 to charge former slave owners and Ku Klux Klan members with violating the constitutional rights of Black people. So the white members of the Georgia legislature trumped up some charges on Tunis Campbell saying that he was violating the constitutional rights of wypipo and ousted him from the Georgia legislature by what the Washington Post called a “judicial lynching.”
Now he wasn’t just ousted from the Georgia legislature. He was sentenced to hard labor on a Georgia prison chain gang, which was this new phenomenon that came after the Civil War to use free Black labor. So essentially this man who had never been a slave was enslaved. When he was released, he left the state of Georgia for good and died in 1891 at the age of 79 years old, which was really old compared to the life expectancy back then.
But the thing about Tunis Campbell is that he never really died. Tunis Campbell is the reason why Belleville, Georgia and McIntosh County, Georgia were the centers of Black political power in Georgia for years. And it’s also why you have to listen to this podcast. You have to tell a friend about it. You got to download that Grio app and subscribe to this podcast on whatever platform you listen to it.
And that’s why we always leave you with the Black saying, and today’s Black saying is from, of course, Tunis Campbell. In 1832, he said, “I vowed to never leave this country until every slave is free on American soil.” We’ll see you next time on the Grio daily.
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